What have humans
believed?

At the caves of Qafzeh and Skhul in Israel, graves of modern humans were found sprinkled with red ochre and buried with objects such as deer antlers. Neanderthals buried their dead too. The pollen found at Shanidar Cave in Iraq became famous as a "flower burial," though critics later argued that animals may have carried the flowers in. Burying the dead and placing objects with them suggests a belief that something comes after death.

• Origins of religion ↗

Found in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany, this mammoth-ivory figure has a human body and a lion's head. It is one of the oldest known sculptures of an imaginary being. The archaeologist David Lewis-Williams linked the paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet, often made deep in caves where light barely reaches, to rituals in which shamans made contact with a spirit world in trance.

At Sungir in Russia, two children were buried in clothing decorated with thousands of ivory beads. Each bead is estimated to have taken nearly an hour to make. The community had poured enormous labor into the dead.

In southeastern Turkey, archaeologists found circles of T-shaped stone pillars more than five meters tall, carved with foxes, boars, vultures and snakes. Because it was built by hunter-gatherers before farming took hold, its excavator Klaus Schmidt argued that "first came the temple, then the city." Later excavations found signs of habitation, and it is now interpreted as a settlement with a strong ritual character, but it is still recognized as a center of communal ritual.

• Göbekli Tepe ↗

At Jericho and Çatalhöyük, the skulls of the dead were coated in plaster, given eyes of shell and kept inside houses. It is an early form of ancestor veneration, the belief that dead ancestors live alongside the living, a tradition that runs all the way to ancestral rites in East Asia.

The great bath at Mohenjo-daro appears to have been used for purification rituals. Some scholars see a seal showing a figure seated in a yoga-like posture as a prototype of the later god Shiva, but this is disputed. Because the script has never been deciphered, we know almost nothing about this civilization's religion.

The stones of Stonehenge in England were set in line with the sunrise and sunset at the summer and winter solstices. Rebuilt over centuries, the site is interpreted as a place where rituals for the sun, the seasons and the dead came together.

The Egyptian pharaoh was the son of the gods and the mediator between gods and people, charged with upholding maat, the order of the cosmos and of society. The spells carved on the walls inside the pyramids, among the oldest religious texts in the world, were meant to help the dead king rise to the sky and join the gods.

Each Sumerian city had its patron god, and at the city's center stood a ziggurat, a great stepped temple. The temple was also the economic center, collecting and distributing grain. Humans were made to feed and serve the gods, and for most people the afterlife was a dark, dusty underworld.

• Ziggurat of Ur ↗

When the gods set out to wipe out humanity with a flood, one man builds a boat, survives with animals and sends out birds to see whether the waters have gone down. The story is so similar to Noah's that it caused a sensation when the clay tablets were deciphered in the 19th century. It showed that the Bible was written on a foundation of older Near Eastern myth.

• Epic of Gilgamesh ↗

In Egypt, the heart of the dead was weighed on a scale against the feather of Maat, goddess of truth. If it was heavy with sin, a monster devoured it; if it was light, the soul went on to eternal paradise. It is an early form of the idea that individuals, not just kings, are judged by the deeds of their lives.

Most scholars think the Indo-Aryans brought the Rigveda with them as they moved into northwestern India (the theory is also a matter of political dispute in India). Its hymns are addressed to Indra, god of thunder, and Agni, god of fire, and the Brahmin priests who performed the sacrifices held great power. The sky god Dyaus Pita, "Sky Father," comes from the same word as the Greek Zeus Pater and the Roman Jupiter. The Vedic gods of the East and the Greek gods of the West shared distant ancestors.

• Rigveda ↗

The pharaoh Akhenaten abandoned the many gods, forced the worship of a single god, the sun disk Aten, and even built a new capital. It is counted as the first attempt at a monotheistic reform in history. After his death the reform was quickly abandoned and his name was erased from the records.

• Atenism ↗

Shang kings carved questions on ox bones or turtle shells, applied a heated rod and read the will of their ancestors and the high god Shangdi in the resulting cracks. These oracle-bone inscriptions are the direct ancestors of today's Chinese characters. If Mesopotamian writing grew out of accounting, Chinese writing grew out of divination. Royal sacrifices sometimes included human victims.

• Oracle bone ↗

The name Israel first appears on a victory stele of the pharaoh Merneptah. According to religious tradition, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, escaped under Moses and received the law at Mount Sinai. The mainstream archaeological view is that early Israel emerged from within Canaanite culture, and that Canaanite gods such as El, Baal and the goddess Asherah were worshipped alongside Yahweh.

• Merneptah Stele ↗

The Zhou, who overthrew the Shang, justified their seizure of power with the Mandate of Heaven: Heaven (tian) grants rule to the virtuous and withdraws it from a dynasty that loses its virtue. The will of the divine was linked to the morality of the king. The same logic was used every time a dynasty changed in Chinese history, and ancestral rites and ritual propriety (li) became the center of the social order in East Asia.

• Mandate of Heaven ↗

The Persian prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster) saw the world as a battlefield between the good god Ahura Mazda and the evil spirit Angra Mainyu, and taught that humans must freely choose between good and evil. Here appear the judgment of the dead, a savior at the end of the world, resurrection and a last judgment. Scholars place his life centuries apart.

• Zoroastrianism ↗

A late hymn of the Rigveda sings that from the primordial giant Purusha came the priests (Brahmins) from his mouth, the warriors (Kshatriyas) from his arms, the commoners (Vaishyas) from his thighs and the laborers (Shudras) from his feet. It became the religious basis of the varna system of social classes, and later of caste.

According to tradition, David made Jerusalem his capital and Solomon built the first temple. The size of their united kingdom is debated by scholars. Most think worship began as monolatry, serving Yahweh alone while accepting that other gods existed, and developed gradually into strict monotheism, the belief that no other gods exist at all.

The philosopher Karl Jaspers called the period from 800 to 200 BC the "Axial Age." Israel's prophets demanded justice rather than offerings; India's Upanishads and the Buddha valued awakening over sacrifice; China's Confucius spoke of human duty rather than spirits. One explanation is that similar changes, iron, money, the growth of cities and the collapse of old orders, produced similar shifts.

• Axial Age ↗

The Upanishads, the final part of the Vedas, valued inner wisdom over outward sacrifice. Realize that the source of the universe (Brahman) and the true self (Atman) are one, and you escape the cycle of rebirth driven by the results of your actions (karma) and attain liberation. These three ideas became the shared framework of every later Indian religion.

The Greek gods, centered on Zeus, were jealous, loving and quarrelsome, much like people. Greek religion had no fixed scripture, no doctrine and no separate priestly class. What mattered was not what you believed but performing animal sacrifice correctly. Matters of state were put to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi.

The northern kingdom of Israel fell to Assyria. Prophets such as Amos and Isaiah interpreted the nation's crisis as Yahweh's judgment for serving other gods and oppressing the poor. Their demand for justice rather than offerings was one strand of the Axial Age's ethical religion.

The southern kingdom of Judah fell to Babylon, the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the elite were carried off to Babylon. Having lost land, temple and king, the people made practices that could be kept anywhere, the Sabbath, circumcision and dietary laws, along with written scripture, the center of their identity. Most scholars think much of the Torah was edited around this time, and that strict monotheism was established then too.

• Babylonian captivity ↗

Confucius was sparing in his answers about the afterlife, yet he valued above all reverence for Heaven, ancestral rites and ritual propriety. Confucianism is therefore both an ethical philosophy and a religion. The Chinese emperor was the high priest who offered sacrifices to Heaven, and rites honoring Confucius in his temples became state ritual. It is the classic example of a tradition that does not fit the Western distinction between "religion" and "philosophy."

Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the captive Jews to return home. That is why the Book of Isaiah calls him messiah, "the anointed one." The Jews rebuilt the Temple in 515 BC, and many scholars think that under Persian rule they were influenced by Zoroastrian ideas such as angels and demons, resurrection and the last judgment. The extent of that influence is debated.

Among the wandering ascetics (shramanas) who doubted the Brahmins' sacrifices and social order and went off to the forests, Mahavira systematized Jainism. Its monks pursue non-harm (ahimsa) to the extreme, sweeping the path as they walk so as not to step on insects. Avoiding farming, which can harm creatures in the soil, followers went mostly into trade, and they remain a prosperous merchant community today. Jainism deeply influenced Gandhi's nonviolence.

After his awakening, the Buddha taught for 45 years and founded the sangha, a community of monks. It did not ask about caste, and it admitted women as nuns. The Buddha, his teaching (dharma) and the community (sangha) are Buddhism's Three Jewels. After his death his disciples gathered to compile the teachings, but for centuries they were passed on by memory. Scholars disagree widely about his dates.

The Eleusinian Mysteries, Orphism and the cult of Dionysus promised personal salvation and a better afterlife through secret rites open only to initiates. Because they focused on the individual soul rather than the public sacrifices of the state, they are seen as forerunners of later religions of salvation.

King Ashoka of the Maurya dynasty turned to Buddhism after seeing the horror of his conquest of Kalinga, where 100,000 people died. He carved edicts on pillars and rocks across his empire preaching nonviolence, tolerance and respect for life, and sent envoys to spread Buddhism. Sri Lanka, where his son Mahinda brought it, later became the center of Theravada Buddhism. The scene is strikingly similar to Rome's Constantine six centuries later.

• Ashoka ↗

Part of the epic Mahabharata, it is a dialogue in which the god Krishna teaches Prince Arjuna, who is anguished at having to fight his own kin on the battlefield. It offers the path of action through duty, the path of knowledge and the path of loving devotion to God (bhakti). It became the most beloved scripture of Hinduism.

• Bhagavad Gita ↗

When the Seleucid dynasty forced sacrifices to Greek gods in the Temple in Jerusalem, the Maccabean Revolt broke out. Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Temple after victory. Under persecution, apocalyptic literature (such as the Book of Daniel) appeared, telling of the end of the world, God's intervention and the resurrection of the dead.

Judaism in the Second Temple period divided into several sects: the Sadducees, an aristocracy of Temple priests; the Pharisees, who sought to keep the law strictly in daily life; the Essenes, who lived communally in the wilderness; and the Zealots, who advocated armed revolt. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in caves near the Dead Sea in 1947, are writings of one sect of this era and include the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible.

• Dead Sea Scrolls ↗

Mahayana Buddhism appeared, holding up as its ideal the bodhisattva, who seeks to save all beings rather than attain liberation alone. With faith in Amitabha Buddha's Pure Land and the compassionate bodhisattva Guanyin, Buddhism widened from the practice of monks into a faith for the many. It was this current that traveled the Silk Road to East Asia.

Fearing that famine and war would break the chain of transmission, monks in Sri Lanka wrote down the Buddha's teachings in Pali for the first time. Theravada Buddhism, which follows this canon, later spread to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, becoming the Buddhism of the southern route.

Roman state religion was something like a contract: keeping peace with the gods to secure the prosperity of the state. Rome also welcomed the gods of conquered peoples, and Isis, Mithras and Cybele spread across the empire. From Augustus on, worship of deceased emperors as gods became a sign of loyalty to the empire, and Jews and Christians who refused it became a problem.

In Christian tradition Jesus is the Son of God and the Christ who died and rose again to save humanity. Most historians agree he was a real person: a Jew from Galilee who proclaimed the imminent kingdom of God, was known as a healer and was crucified under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. History cannot judge the resurrection itself, but Christianity began with disciples who believed it and staked their lives on it.

• Historical Jesus ↗

Paul, who had persecuted Christians before his conversion, preached to non-Jews and taught that they could be saved through faith in Jesus without circumcision or dietary laws. Thanks to this decision, Christianity grew from a sect of Judaism into a universal religion. Paul's letters are the oldest documents in the New Testament; most scholars think the Gospels were written later, from Mark (around 70) to John (around 100).

According to tradition, Emperor Ming of the Han dreamed of a golden figure and sent envoys to bring back Buddhism, and the White Horse Temple was built in Luoyang. At first, unfamiliar Indian concepts were translated with Daoist terms, so that the Buddhist idea of emptiness was understood as Daoist nonbeing.

After the Jewish revolt against Rome, the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. After the Bar Kokhba revolt of 135, Jews were expelled from Jerusalem and scattered across the world (the diaspora). The rabbis, heirs of the Pharisees, rebuilt Judaism around Torah study, synagogue worship, prayer and keeping the commandments in place of sacrifice, and around this time Judaism and Christianity went their separate ways.

• Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE) ↗

In China there was a belief that one could become an immortal through self-cultivation, and the alchemy of elixirs later led to the discovery of gunpowder. Zhang Daoling founded the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice (the Celestial Masters), which took five pecks of rice from followers and healed their illnesses. It marked the beginning of Daoism as an organized religion, distinct from the philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi.

• Way of the Celestial Masters ↗

The rebellion launched by the Daoist Way of Great Peace, proclaiming that "the blue sky is already dead," helped bring down the Eastern Han. Religious societies leading rebellions would recur again and again in Chinese history.

The rabbis compiled the Mishnah, which organized the law they had passed down orally, followed by the Talmud (the Babylonian Talmud around 500), a vast collection of debates on it. Texts and debate, rather than temple and state, became what bound Jewish communities together.

The Sasanian Empire of Persia made Zoroastrianism its state religion and organized its scriptures. It declined after the Islamic conquest in the 7th century, and some followers migrated to India, where they became today's Parsi community. Freddie Mercury of Queen came from a Parsi family.

After Nero in 64, sporadic persecutions continued until the Great Persecution under Diocletian. Christianity kept growing anyway. Sociologists point to a community open to all classes and peoples, the participation of women and slaves, and Christians who cared for the sick instead of fleeing during epidemics.

The emperor Constantine is said to have seen a vision of the cross before a battle in 312 and won, and the following year he legalized Christianity. Like Ashoka embracing Buddhism after his war of conquest, union with state power was the decisive step in turning a regional religion into a world religion.

• Edict of Milan ↗

Around the Gupta dynasty, Hinduism took on its present form. Worship of images in temples (puja) replaced Vedic fire sacrifice at the center of practice. Three main currents emerged: devotion to Vishnu, the preserver (Rama and Krishna are his incarnations, or avatars), to Shiva, the destroyer and renewer, and to Devi, the great goddess. The single name "Hinduism" took hold only under British colonial rule in the 19th century.

When the Arian controversy arose over whether Jesus shared the same essence as God or was God's first creation, Constantine called a council that declared the Father and the Son to be of one essence. The doctrine of the Trinity was established afterward, and in 367 Athanasius first listed the 27 books of today's New Testament.

• First Council of Nicaea ↗

The emperor Theodosius declared Christianity the state religion. Within 70 years a persecuted faith had become the religion of the empire, and now it was the one suppressing other religions. In the same era Augustine laid the foundations of Western Christianity with his theology of original sin and grace.

Kumarajiva, a monk from Kucha in Central Asia, came to Chang'an and translated many scriptures, including the Lotus Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. His Chinese translations, which moved beyond the awkward borrowing of Daoist terms, are still read in East Asia. Through centuries of translation, Buddhism became a religion of East Asia.

Churches in Egypt (the Copts), Syria, Armenia and Ethiopia that did not accept the decision that Christ has a full divine and a full human nature broke away. The Church of the East (Nestorians), which had split even earlier, traveled through Persia all the way to China.

Benedict organized the monastic movement, which had begun with hermits in the Egyptian desert, under a rule. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, monasteries became centers of learning and the preservation of texts, and the Pope in Rome became the spiritual, and sometimes political, center of Western Europe.

Buddhism reached Japan by way of the Korean kingdom of Baekje. At first powerful clans clashed over whether to accept the foreign god, but Buddhism became established as a state religion. Shinto and Buddhism then mingled for more than a thousand years (shinbutsu-shūgō), with the native gods (kami) explained as buddhas and bodhisattvas appearing in local form.

Poet-saints in the Tamil region of southern India sang that anyone could become one with God through passionate love and devotion. Spreading across India, the movement turned a Brahmin-centered ritual religion into a popular faith.

According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad, a merchant of Mecca, received his first revelation through the angel Gabriel while meditating in the cave of Hira. At its heart are strict monotheism, faith in the one God (Allah), justice for the poor and orphans, and the last judgment. Islam honors Abraham, Moses and Jesus as great prophets and sees Muhammad as the last of them. It therefore understands itself not as a new religion but as a restoration of Abraham's faith.

• Muhammad ↗

Persecuted by Mecca's elite, who saw a threat to the old beliefs and the pilgrimage economy, Muhammad migrated to Medina with his followers. There he became both prophet and political leader of the community. In 630 he entered Mecca, cleared the idols from the Kaaba and made it a sanctuary of the one God, and by his death in 632 most of the Arabian Peninsula was united under Islam.

Missionaries of the Church of the East (Nestorians), which had split off before Chalcedon, arrived in Chang'an, the Tang capital. In China it was called Jingjiao, the "luminous religion," and its history was carved on the Nestorian Stele erected in 781. Chang'an at that time was home to Buddhism, Daoism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and the Islam of Arab merchants all at once.

• Nestorian Stele ↗

Xuanzang spent 17 years traveling to India, including Nalanda, and brought back and translated a great many scriptures. Chinese Buddhism was by then forming its own schools: Tiantai, Huayan, Pure Land, which promised rebirth in paradise by calling on Amitabha Buddha, and Chan, which stressed seeing directly into the mind over scripture.

According to Islamic tradition, the standard text of the Quran was fixed under the third caliph, Uthman. For Muslims the Quran is the very word of God, so translations are regarded as "interpretations of the meaning of the Quran," and prayer is said in Arabic. The sayings and deeds of Muhammad (hadith) come next in authority, and the five pillars are the profession of faith, prayer five times a day, obligatory almsgiving, fasting in Ramadan and pilgrimage to Mecca.

When Muhammad died without clearly naming a successor, the majority accepted the caliphs chosen by the community (the Sunnis), while a minority held that only his son-in-law Ali and Ali's descendants were rightful leaders (the Shia). Ali's son Husayn was killed with his family by Umayyad troops at Karbala, and Ashura, which mourns him, remains the most important Shia observance. About 85–90% of Muslims today are Sunni.

• Battle of Karbala ↗

Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, stressed sudden awakening to one's own nature over scripture study and step-by-step practice. Chan went on to become the mainstream of Chinese Buddhism and spread to Korea and Japan (as Zen).

Less than a century after Muhammad's death, Islamic rule stretched west to Spain and east to Central Asia and the Indus. Jews and Christians, recognized as "People of the Book," could keep their faith by paying a poll tax (as dhimmi). By the standards of the time it was a tolerant arrangement, though not an equal one.

The Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki (720) recorded the myth that the imperial family descends from the sun goddess Amaterasu. Shinto, Japan's native tradition, worships kami, sacred presences in mountains and rivers, trees and rocks, and ancestors. It values purification rites and has no founder or fixed doctrine.

Tantric (Vajrayana) Buddhism, which emphasizes ritual, mantras and meditative practices, arose in India and took root in Tibet through the Indian master Padmasambhava. Samye, Tibet's first monastery, was founded, and a distinctive system developed of finding the reincarnation of a high lama to succeed him.

Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid caliphate, became a center for gathering Greek, Persian and Indian knowledge. The four Sunni schools of Islamic law (sharia) took shape, theologians debated the relationship between reason and revelation, and Sufism, a mysticism seeking love of and union with God beyond the law, flourished.

Buddhism, with its emphasis on leaving home and celibacy, clashed with Confucian filial piety, and as monasteries amassed land and wealth, Emperor Wuzong of Tang launched a sweeping crackdown. Thousands of monasteries were torn down and hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns returned to lay life. The Church of the East and Zoroastrianism were banned at the same time and effectively disappeared from China.

When the Pope in Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other, the Catholic Church of the West and the Orthodox Church of the East formally split. At issue were the scope of papal authority and a phrase in the Creed: whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Son as well.

• East–West Schism ↗

Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV stood barefoot in the snow for three days begging Pope Gregory VII to lift his excommunication. The struggle over who had the right to appoint clergy symbolizes the peak of papal power.

At Pope Urban II's call, campaigns to retake Jerusalem began and continued for nearly 200 years. Along the way Jewish communities in Europe were massacred, and in 1204 the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, a fellow Christian city, deepening the rift between East and West.

• Crusades ↗

Cambodia's Angkor Wat was built as a Hindu temple to Vishnu and later became a Buddhist temple. It shows how deeply Indian culture spread through Southeast Asia. Mainland Southeast Asia then became Theravada country, where kings patronize the sangha and many men become monks for a time once in their lives.

In Japan's Kamakura period, new Buddhist schools arose offering ordinary people salvation without difficult practices: Hōnen's Pure Land school, which taught that calling on Amida Buddha's name was enough; Shinran's True Pure Land school, which allowed monks to marry; the Nichiren school, centered on the Lotus Sutra; and Zen (Eisai, Dōgen), which deeply influenced the warrior class.

As Hinduism absorbed the Buddha as one of Vishnu's incarnations, Buddhism steadily weakened in India, and when Turkic Muslim invaders destroyed the great Buddhist university of Nalanda, Indian Buddhism had effectively vanished by the 13th century. Buddhism survived not in its homeland but in Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, East Asia and Tibet.

Mendicant orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, which stressed poverty, were founded. In the same period the Church required every believer to confess once a year and soon set up the Inquisition to try heretics. Aquinas built a theology uniting faith and reason.

The Mongols captured Baghdad, ending the Abbasid caliphate. In the same period, followers of the Persian poet Rumi formed a Sufi order known for approaching God through whirling dance, and Sufi mysticism became a main channel for the spread of Islam.

In 13th-century Spain the mystical text the Zohar appeared and Kabbalah flourished. Where Maimonides had united Judaism with Aristotle, Kabbalah explored the inner structure of God and humanity's role through symbols. Jews suffered repeated persecution: expulsion from England (1290) and Spain (1492), and false accusations of poisoning wells during the Black Death.

Islam spread to Southeast Asia not by conquest but through traders crossing the Indian Ocean and Sufi missionaries. Port cities on Sumatra and Java converted one after another, and as a result the country with the most Muslims today is not in the Middle East but Indonesia.

After the papacy's stay in Avignon in France (1309–1377), there followed nearly 40 years of confusion with two, and at one point three, rival popes. As the Church's authority fell, Wycliffe in England and Hus in Bohemia called for reform, and Hus was burned at the stake in 1415.

While Islamic dynasties ruled northern India there was conflict, but also exchange. Sufi saints and Hindu bhakti poets influenced each other in their love of a God beyond outward forms. The poet Kabir criticized the formalism of both sides and sang of one God.

The Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople and turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. The Ottomans, the Safavids of Iran and the Mughals of India became the three great empires of the Islamic world, and the center of Orthodoxy gradually shifted to Russia.

After his awakening, Guru Nanak of the Punjab taught one formless God, rejection of caste, and honest work and sharing in everyday life rather than renunciation. The tradition of the communal kitchen (langar), where people of every caste sit and eat together, continues today. It was the beginning of Sikhism, born from the meeting of Hinduism and Islam.

• Guru Nanak ↗

Iran's Safavid dynasty made Shia Islam the state religion. Competing with the Sunni Ottoman Empire, it made Iran the center of Shia Islam, which is why Iran is a Shia country today.

The German monk Martin Luther criticized the sale of indulgences, which promised release from punishment for sin in exchange for money. He taught that salvation comes not through good works or the Church's sacraments but through faith and grace, and that the authority of faith lies in scripture, not the pope. He championed the priesthood of all believers, who stand directly before God, and translated the Bible into German. The decisive factor was printing: earlier reformers had been easily suppressed, but Luther's writings spread across Germany within weeks.

• Reformation ↗

Henry VIII broke with the pope over his divorce and founded the Church of England. In Switzerland, Zwingli, and in Geneva, Calvin (1536), led reform movements, Calvin teaching predestination, the idea that God has decided in advance who will be saved, and the Anabaptists rejected infant baptism. Protestantism had many branches from the start.

The Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius of Loyola, led the way in education and overseas missions. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) reorganized Catholic doctrine and stood firm against Protestantism. As European colonies expanded, Christianity spread to the Americas, Asia and Africa. Missions built schools and hospitals, but they are also criticized for being entangled with colonial rule.

Francis Xavier of the Jesuits brought Christianity to Japan, and at one point hundreds of thousands became believers. But the shogunate banned Christianity in 1614 and crushed it after the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637. Some believers kept their faith in secret for more than 200 years, disguised as Buddhists.

The Mughal emperor Akbar gathered Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Zoroastrian and Christian scholars for debate and abolished the poll tax on non-Muslims. It was a rare policy of tolerance in an India where an Islamic dynasty ruled a Hindu majority.

Altan Khan of the Mongols gave a Tibetan high lama the title of Dalai Lama. From then on, the Dalai Lamas succeeded one another by reincarnation and became Tibet's religious and political leaders.

The Jesuit Matteo Ricci learned Chinese, dressed as a Confucian scholar and approached the educated elite by introducing Western science and mathematics. He accepted ancestral rites and rites honoring Confucius as social customs rather than religion. This became the seed of the Chinese Rites controversy a century later.

• Matteo Ricci ↗

After the French Wars of Religion, the conflict between Protestants and Catholics engulfed all of Europe in the Thirty Years' War, which killed millions. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 established the principle that each state chooses its own religion, ending Europe's age of religious wars.

• Thirty Years' War ↗

Galileo, who supported the Sun-centered system, was found guilty by the Inquisition and placed under house arrest. Along with Darwin's theory of evolution, the trial became a symbol of the conflict between science and religion. In 1992 the Vatican officially acknowledged that the verdict was wrong.

Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh guru, founded the Khalsa, the community of the initiated, and declared that after him the scripture Guru Granth Sahib, rather than a person, would be the eternal guru. The Sikh appearance of uncut hair and the turban was also established at this time.

After other orders objected to Matteo Ricci's approach, the Vatican banned ancestral rites, and the Qing emperor Kangxi responded by banning Christian missions. It was a head-on clash between a religion centered on what you believe and a tradition centered on what you practice.

After a conversion experience, John Wesley in England led the Methodist movement, and the Great Awakening swept America. Evangelicalism, emphasizing personal conversion and fervent religious experience, went on to become the mainstream of American Protestantism.

In Eastern Europe the Baal Shem Tov launched Hasidism, which stressed joy, mystical experience and heartfelt prayer over the study of law. After the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), Judaism divided into Reform, which sought to adapt to modern society, Orthodox, which kept tradition, and Conservative, between the two.

In Arabia, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab launched a strict reform movement rejecting practices such as the veneration of saints and calling for a return to early Islam, and he allied with the House of Saud. This alliance is the origin of today's Saudi Arabia.

Ram Mohan Roy led a campaign to abolish sati, the custom of widows dying on their husbands' funeral pyres, and the British colonial government banned it. It marked the beginning of reform movements seeking to reconcile Hinduism with modern reason.

In Persia the Báb proclaimed a new revelation, and his successor Baháʼu'lláh taught that all religions are stages of a progressive revelation from one God and that humanity is one. Persecuted in Iran, the Baháʼí Faith spread worldwide and is one of the most widespread religions to have arisen in the modern era. Around the same time, Mormonism (1830) arose in America.

Hong Xiuquan, who came to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus after reading Christian tracts, led a rebellion that became one of the deadliest civil wars in history, with an estimated 20 million or more dead. It shows a Western religion taking an utterly unexpected form in the East.

Darwin's theory of evolution explained that living things could arise without divine design, colliding head-on with the Bible's creation story. At the same time, historical-critical study of the Bible, analyzing it like any other ancient text, took off in Germany.

The Meiji government forcibly separated Shinto from Buddhism, which had been intertwined for a thousand years, and created State Shinto, which worshipped the emperor as divine and fused with militarism. After defeat in 1945 the separation of state and Shinto was ordered, and in 1946 the emperor declared that he was not a god. In this same era Japan translated the English word "religion" as shūkyō, a term that spread across East Asia. Earlier Eastern traditions had no word separating belief, philosophy, ritual and rules for living.

The anthropologist Edward Tylor argued that seeing the dead in dreams gave rise to the belief that people, animals and natural objects have souls. In The Golden Bough (1890), Frazer proposed that humanity progresses from magic to religion to science. Both are now judged too simple and too Western-centered, but the comparative study of religion began here.

Nietzsche declared that modern Europe could no longer ground its values in Christianity. Before him, Feuerbach had said God is the projection of human ideals outward, and Marx that religion is the "opium" of the oppressed; after him, Freud saw religion as an illusion born of a childlike longing for a protector.

At the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago, a speech by the Hindu monk Vivekananda caused a sensation, and Hinduism and yoga were introduced to the West in earnest. Later Japan's D.T. Suzuki introduced Zen Buddhism to the West. The event is counted as a starting point of interfaith dialogue.

• Parliament of the World's Religions ↗

As antisemitism intensified, Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State and launched Zionism, a movement to found a nation for the Jews. It was a political movement that saw the Jews, a religious community, as a nation.

The sociologist Max Weber argued that Calvinists, anxious about whether they were saved, worked diligently and lived frugally and took success as a sign of salvation, giving rise to the spirit of modern capitalism. He saw modernization as "disenchantment," the draining of mystery and magic from the world.

In a small church in Los Angeles, the Pentecostal movement began, emphasizing the gifts of the Holy Spirit such as speaking in tongues and healing. It was notable too for being led by a Black preacher with racially mixed congregations. Today it is the fastest-growing form of Christianity in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

• Azusa Street Revival ↗

Drawing on studies of Aboriginal Australian totems, the sociologist Émile Durkheim saw religion as dividing the world into sacred and profane, a device by which society worships itself as sacred and binds its members together. He explained religion not through God but through its social function.

Atatürk of the new Republic of Turkey abolished the Ottoman caliphate and founded a secular state. Four years later the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt to make Islam the principle of society and politics, and the tension between secularism and political Islam began.

A teacher in Tennessee was put on trial for teaching evolution. It was the defining moment of fundamentalism, which insisted on the literal inerrancy of the Bible against evolution and biblical criticism.

Influenced by Hinduism, Jainism, the Christian Sermon on the Mount and Tolstoy, Gandhi led India's independence movement through nonviolent resistance (satyagraha). The Salt March against Britain's salt monopoly became its symbol.

Nazi Germany systematically murdered the Jews of Europe, about six million in all. It was the product of antisemitism running through Christian society since the Middle Ages, combined with modern racism, and it fundamentally changed the relationship between Christianity and Judaism after the war.

• The Holocaust ↗

With independence, India and Pakistan were partitioned along religious lines, and mass migration and communal violence killed hundreds of thousands, by some estimates up to two million.

• Partition of India ↗

After the Holocaust, the State of Israel was founded in Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lived on the same land lost their homes, and the conflict that followed became one of the hardest modern problems, entangling religion, nationality and land.

B.R. Ambedkar, a politician born an "untouchable" who drafted India's constitution, converted to Buddhism with hundreds of thousands of fellow Dalits. Through this Neo-Buddhist movement against caste, Buddhism, long vanished from its homeland, returned to India.

After a failed uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet, the 14th Dalai Lama fled to India. Tibetan Buddhism then spread around the world, and the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

The council allowed Mass in local languages instead of Latin, emphasized dialogue with other religions and officially rejected the long-standing idea that Jews bore collective guilt for Jesus's death. In Latin America, liberation theology, emphasizing the liberation of the poor, emerged.

• Second Vatican Council ↗

After the Communist government took power in 1949, religion came under state control, and during the Cultural Revolution temples and churches were destroyed and religious activity almost entirely banned. After reform and opening began in 1978, religious activity through state-approved organizations was permitted again, and the numbers of Buddhists, Daoists and Christians grew sharply.

With the counterculture of the 1960s, Eastern meditation and yoga became popular in the West, and the Beatles' trip to Rishikesh in India to study meditation became an iconic image. Meanwhile, in the same period, Christianity was growing rapidly in East Asia and Africa.

The Iranian Revolution established an Islamic republic governed by clerics under Khomeini. The same year in the United States, the evangelical organization the Moral Majority was founded, and religion returned to the center of politics. It was the year secularization theory began to waver.

• Iranian Revolution ↗

Jon Kabat-Zinn stripped Buddhist meditation of its religious elements and turned it into a stress-reduction program. Mindfulness is now widely used in hospitals, schools and companies, a leading example of a religious practice turned secular technique.

Hindu nationalists tore down a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya on a site believed to be the birthplace of the god Rama. As Hindu nationalism, which seeks to place Hindu identity at the center of the nation, grew politically, a debate began over the identity of secular India.

The sociologist Peter Berger, once a leading theorist of secularization, retracted his theory and acknowledged that the world remains religious and that Western Europe is, if anything, the exception. His evidence: the Islamic revival, the growth of Christianity in the Global South, American evangelicalism and Hindu nationalism.

Al-Qaeda, an Islamist extremist group, carried out coordinated terrorist attacks in the United States. Such groups are a tiny minority of the world's Muslims, and many of their victims were Muslims, but from then on religion and violence, and the relationship between Islam and the West, became central themes in world politics.

• September 11 attacks ↗

The gods of small hunter-gatherer societies mostly take little interest in human morality; the hypothesis holds that all-seeing, judging gods emerged as societies grew large enough that strangers had to cooperate. Cognitive science of religion sees belief as rooted in a brain that evolved to over-detect invisible agents. Whether big gods or big societies came first remains debated, with disputes over data analysis continuing.

Francis of Argentina became the first pope from Latin America. In 1900 most Christians lived in Europe and North America; today more live in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Radiocarbon dating showed that fragments of a Quran manuscript held by the University of Birmingham date from the early to mid-7th century. They are among the oldest surviving Quran manuscripts.

China recognizes five official religions, Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism, and formalized a policy of "sinicization," requiring religions to adapt to the socialist system and Chinese culture. China's long tradition of state-managed religion continues.

A temple to the god Rama was consecrated on the site where the mosque was destroyed in 1992. It is a symbolic victory for Hindu nationalism and an event at the heart of the debate over the identity of secular India.

According to a Pew Research Center analysis (as of 2020), Christianity, with about 2.3 billion followers, remains the largest religion but its share has shrunk, while Islam, with about 2 billion, grew fastest. The religiously unaffiliated are the third-largest group, growing mainly as people raised in Christian families left religion. Buddhism was the only major religion whose number of followers fell.

• Pew: How the Global Religious Landscape Changed ↗

After the death of Pope Francis, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, an American who had served for many years in Peru, was elected the 267th pope on May 8, taking the name Leo XIV.

Ahead of his 90th birthday, the 14th Dalai Lama declared that the institution of the Dalai Lama will continue and that the authority to find and recognize his reincarnation rests solely with the Gaden Phodrang Trust he founded. The statement sets him directly against the Chinese government, which intends to control the succession.