Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 8, No. 4, August 2007 Religious diversity across the globe: a geographic exploration Barney Warf1 & Peter Vincent2 1 Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA, bwarf@coss.fsu.edu and 2Geography Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YB, UK This paper examines religious diversity at the global scale for 237 countries using data from the World Christian Database. It explores the social forces driving religious diversity, including national histories, demographic trends, and government policies, as well as the relations between religious diversity and religiosity. It summarizes several conceptual approaches to this topic. Empirically, four measures of diversity are employed: the number of religions in each country; proportion of adherents in the largest faith; the Shannon index; and the Simpson index. These are mapped using both conventional choropleths and Dorling cartograms. The diversity measures show that China, India, Russia, Japan, and Indonesia are among the world’s most religiously diverse states, and contrary to received wisdom, are more diverse than the USA, which is often regarded as the most diverse in the world. Key words: geography of religion; diversity. Introduction The geography of religion has a long and enchanting history within the discipline, including the spatial distributions of different religious groups (Levine 1986; Sopher 1981; Valins 2000), the nature of sacred spaces (e.g., Vincent and Warf 2002), and religious landscapes within the USA (Zelinsky 1961, 2001) and, to a lesser extent, Britain. Kong (2001: 211) notes that religion has recently attracted mounting attention within geography. This body of work has delved into variegated topics such as the manner in which religion is intertwined with ethnicity, class and gender relations and its powerful role in the construction of local identities (HervieuLéger 2002; Kong 1990; Tong and Kong 2000; Wilson 1993). The upsurge in religious fundamentalism that has occurred worldwide over the last two decades has made the topic timely and critical for an analysis of global trends (Stump 2000). Indeed, contrary to long-standing expectations of mounting secularization, contemporary globalization has witnessed a desecularization of many societies (Berger 1999). However, despite the growing and obvious role that religion plays in national and international politics, geographers have not turned to the subject in great numbers. ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/07/040597-17 q 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14649360701529857 598 Barney Warf & Peter Vincent This paper addresses the spatiality of religious diversity across the globe. The topic is significant for a variety of reasons. Comparative international studies of religious pluralism invoke the concept in analyses of its role in economic development (Barro and McCleary 2003; Lian and Oneal 1997), its influence on the national structure of legal institutions (Cole and Hammond 1974), the rights of women (Donno and Russett 2004), the diffusion of science (Schofer 2004), and topics such as civil wars, educational systems, and the prospects for successful democratic political governance. Immigration has rendered the religious landscapes of countries such as the USA and the UK increasingly complex, with implications for social cohesion or fragmentation, mobility, and inequality (Smith 2002). For example, in the UK and France the growth of Islam and the common xenophobic backlash directed against it (often linked to support for terrorism) has been a central political concern. In addition to cultural and economic divides that frequently pervade national and local social formations, religious differences are often a barrier to social integration and a common source of strife. Nigeria and Indonesia, for example, both witnessed internecine strife between Christians and Muslims; in India, conflicts between Hindus and Muslims have taken thousands of lives; Northern Ireland has long suffered repeated conflicts between Catholics and Protestants; Sri Lanka has witnessed a prolonged and violent confrontation between Hindus and Buddhists; Thailand and the Philippines both have Muslim insurgencies; and in Iraq, tensions between Sunnis and Shiites threaten to dissolve the fragile state. Africa today is an arena of intense competition between Islam and Christianity (see Steenbrink 1998). The paper opens with an overview of the conceptual dimensions that may be used to understand religious diversity, including national histories, demographic trends, and government policies, as well as the contested impacts of religious diversity on religiosity. Second, it summarizes the data source utilized, four different measures of diversity employed, and introduces Dorling cartograms. The third part elaborates upon the results. The conclusion summarizes the implications of this analysis for further study of the spatiality of religious life. Forces driving religious diversity Religion as a significant category of social life—a set of discourses and situated practices embedded within the power relations of social formations—is obviously overlain upon and intertwined with other sources of identity, including class, gender, and ethnicity (Berger 1967; Park 1994; Stark and Rinke 2000). Often, membership in linguistic and religious groups is conflated: in Canada, for example, French-speaking Quebecois are overwhelmingly Catholic, whereas their Anglophone counterparts are predominantly Protestant. In the former Yugoslavia, Croats and Slovenes are predominantly Catholic, whereas Serbs are typically Orthodox and Bosnians are primarily Muslim. In Southeast Asia, Chinese minorities are typically Buddhist, whereas Malays and Indonesians are mostly Muslim, and Filipinos are Catholic. The causes of religious diversity are numerous. Five are offered here, and others likely exist as well. First, more populous countries sustain larger numbers of religions than do smaller ones, in no small part because their very size allows for many groups to be represented by significantly sizeable groups of people in numerous faiths. Figure 1 indicates that there is a statistically significant Religious diversity across the globe 599 Figure 1 Number of religions regressed against country population. Regression equation is Log number of religions ¼ 0.7251 þ 0.0451 £ Log population (t ¼ 6.748). Source: calculated by the authors from the World Christian Database, ,http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/ . . relationship between the number of religions present in a country and its total population (r ¼ 0.43; t ¼ 6.748). Thus, the world’s three most populous countries, China, India, and the USA, also contain the largest number of faiths (sixteen, thirteen, and seventeen, respectively). This result indicates a deep underlying structural relation between population size and religious diversity that is remarkably consistent across countries. The relationship is implicitly analogous to the species area curve in island biogeography (MacArthur and Wilson 1967), which posits that larger islands have more habitats and hence more species. Without resort to simplistic biological reductionism, it is safe to conclude that larger societies tend to be relatively more multi-faith in nature. This observation may reflect the ‘market-based’ view of religious competition, about which more later. Second, countries with sustained histories of immigration tend to exhibit relatively high degrees of religious diversity when immigrant streams carry their religions with them. Religion may play a significant role in the degree of social mobility that immigrants face, and in some societies may serve to isolate them socially if not spatially (e.g., Filipino Catholic workers in Saudi Arabia). Muslim immigrants in Europe are typically detached from their dominant national cultures by virtue of their religion as well as their language and other markers of ethnicity. Such trends tend to undermine claims of national unity predicated on religious unity. Much received wisdom maintains the USA is the most religiously diverse country in the world (Eck 2001), given its long history of relatively open immigration, national policies that differentiate church and state, and tolerance of cultural diversity. It is true that 600 Barney Warf & Peter Vincent from its origins, the USA has hosted a wide array of faiths: Fischer (1989: 811) notes that ‘British America’s voluntary migration encouraged religious diversity rather than uniformity.’ In addition to these streams, the country produced its own, indigenous faiths, including what is perhaps the most well-known example, the Mormons (Church of Latter Day Saints). However, as this paper will demonstrate, there are serious grounds for questioning the notion that the USA is the world’s most religiously diverse society, a claim that rests largely on the recognition of denominational differences within its Christian majority and one that ignores what are perhaps even more meaningful variations to be found among, rather than within, broad faiths elsewhere. Most studies of religious diversity are qualitative in nature; by utilizing a statistical analysis, this paper is positioned to cast down on received wisdom. Third, the history of colonialism has been particularly important for the map of religious diversity. Among other things, European colonialism was often a religious project, as witnessed by the global spread of Christianity via missionary efforts, which led to higher levels of religious diversity in Africa and parts of Asia (e.g., Vietnam). Of course, this process greatly preceded capitalism: the Crusades, for example, led to substantial Christian minorities in Lebanon. Similarly, Indian merchants carried Hinduism to Southeast Asia starting in 500 B.C., where it remains dominant today in Bali. Colonially-based religions may also induce syncretism and the birth of new religions, such as the emergence of Sikhism in the aftermath of the Muslim invasion of South Asia. Religious conversions and the weight that different faiths place on attracting new followers are significant: some religions, such as Islam, place a great emphasis on proselytization; others, e.g., Judaism and Buddhism, do not. Similarly, evangelical Protestants have recently converted significant numbers of followers in Brazil and Guatemala. Fourth, government policies in many states exhibit vast variations in their degree of tolerance or support for different faiths, ranging from virtual theocracies (e.g., Iran) to the sustained attempts of Communist regimes to minimize religion in the former Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and North Korea. Societies confronted with mounting cultural and religious diversity must typically find policy mechanisms for coping with the strains that this tendency can generate, ranging from democratic acceptance to officially sanctioned discrimination. In France, for example, the wearing of head scarves by Muslim schoolgirls led to a ban on all religious apparel in schools. Religious diversity thus speaks directly to the question of statesponsored assimilation or tolerance of religious minorities often viewed in xenophobic terms. Finally, in many countries, differential natural growth rates among different faiths contribute to diversity. Different religions exhibit wide variations in their attitudes toward fertility and intermarriage with others of other faiths. For example, Judaism has long suffered from low rates of natural increase and high rates of intermarriage to gentiles, resulting in a significant long-term decline (Fishman 2000; Lipset 1990). In the USA, Catholics frequently exhibit higher fertility levels than do other religions. In countries such as Russia or France, the relatively high natural growth rates of Muslims have become a matter of some concern among government officials. In some contexts, significant differences in natural growth rates can reduce religious diversity, as in Lebanon, where the proportion of Christians has been declining steadily. Religious diversity across the globe Theorizing diversity Different disciplines have offered varying conceptions about the significance of religious diversity. Religious pluralism is critical in culturally diverse societies in which different faiths reside shoulder to shoulder; contrasts among different religions may strain social bonds or lead members to examine other options. In sociology, denominations have often been likened to ‘firms’ competing for believers in a religious market (Finke and Stark 1988; Roof 1999). To ensure the survival and/or growth of their faith, advocates of different faiths must seek to attract believers, generally from other faiths, or promote natural growth (cf. Bruce 2002 and Stark and Finke 2000 for more on religious economies). Montgomery (1996, 2003) extended this line of thought into rational-choice and gametheoretic approaches, in which adherents are represented as choosing a given faith subject to constraints of time and energy, much as if they were shopping for commodities. There are several problems with this view, however. Religions are not firms or profitmaximizing institutions and should not necessarily be expected to behave in the same way, particularly in societies in which markets the norms of competition are relatively poorly developed. Adherents belong to a given faith for reasons that have largely to do with cultural socialization, not simply the ‘price’ involved in terms of time; the deeply psychological and emotional roles that religion plays is overlooked in this perspective. Neoclassical economic and rational choice views of religion are thus severely undersocialized, and are silent regarding the historical context, power relations, and cultural discourses that inevitably accompany and swirl around the domain of religion. Social ecologists have also studied religious diversity (McPherson 1983), emphasizing the 601 organizational dynamics and leadership structures of faiths, their relative ideological appeal to different demographic segments, and the manner in which different faiths construct and maintain boundaries to perpetuate their religious identity. Such a view often compares religion to ethnicity, i.e., an externally defined category into which someone is born. As Chaves and Giesel put it, ‘In the economic approach, the basic image is one of organizations as firms trying to sell products to individuals who are customers. In the ecological approach, the basic image is one of organizations as organisms trying to maintain themselves by using individuals as resources’ (2000: 4). Sociologists of religion have long engaged in a heated debate about how religous diversity might affect participation in religious activities, i.e., the degree to which diversity shapes religiosity. While much of this discussion has centered on the specific context of the USA, its implications are significant for the analysis of religious diversity internationally. Inspired by Weberian approaches, the ‘secularization thesis’ holds that religious pluralism decreases religious participation as exposure to multiple religions erodes the credibility of any particular faith (Berger 1967). However, the counterargument (Finke and Stark 1988, 1998) maintains that religious pluralism stimulates competition among faiths, offering individuals a wider range of choices and thus leading to greater participation in religious activities. These conclusions were vigorously challenged by Breault (1989a, 1989b), Olson (1998), Chaves and Gorski (2001), and Voas, Olson and Crockett (2002). For example, Olson and Hadaway (1999: 491) hold that ‘religious pluralism lowers religious involvement by reducing the number of close social ties— especially personal family and friendship connections—that people maintain with others who share a common religious identity.’ 602 Barney Warf & Peter Vincent Clearly, no consensus about this debate has been achieved in the literature. The present analysis does not seek to enter this dispute, particularly as it makes no attempt to assess religiosity. Rather, from a geographical perspective, the paper seeks to shed light on how the degree of religious pluralism varies widely among countries, noting parenthetically that there are also great variations within them. Indeed, the use of the nation-state as a unit of analysis obscures the great social and spatial variations that occur internally. However, whatever the causes and effects of religious diversity may be, they are bound to be geographically specific, and the distribution of pluralism is inevitably bound up with social and political relations among and within countries around the globe. Data and methodology Reliable data on membership in different religious faiths are notoriously difficult to come by. Many governments simply do not collect information on the topic; in the USA, for example, the census lacks any questions pertaining to religious faith. Fortunately, other sources are available. This analysis used data on self-identified followers of religions in 2005 from the World Christian Database,1 arguably the most accurate, reliable, and widely used source in existence. As the only dataset with consistent information on 237 countries, it has been extensively deployed and subjected to widespread scrutiny. It forms the primary source of data concerning the sizes and distributions of religions internationally for newspapers and encyclopedias (see Hsu, Reynolds, Hackett and Gibbon 2005 for a comprehensive discussion of its strengths, weaknesses, and examples of applications). While the World Christian Database offers reasonably accurate estimates of the numbers of believers of different faiths in various countries, it suffers significantly from its deployment of broad definitional categories. For example, the source lumps together all Christian denominations, overlooking the considerable differences among Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians; similarly, Sunni and Shiite Muslims are grouped under the same label of Muslims. In the same vein, there also many types of Jews (e.g., Orthodox, Reform, Liberal) and Buddhists (Mahayana, Theravada, Lamaist), distinctions that are annihilated by the World Christian Database’s broad categorizations. Thus, the analysis faces the formidable empirical problem of the appropriate degree of ‘splitting’ or ‘lumping’ of different faiths, an issue resolved here entirely on pragmatic grounds, i.e., the most detailed categorization afforded by the dataset. Thus, the understanding of religious diversity is inevitably confounded by the empirical categories used to make sense of them. Ideally, the data would allow for a more detailed and refined taxonomy that did justice to the diversity and complexity to be found in each faith; unfortunately that option is not available. Moreover, some religions do not adhere to Aristotelian notions of mutually exclusive categories: Shintoists, for example, can also be Buddhists, and Confucianists are often also Taoists. Despite these limitations, these data offer some degree of insight into the question as to how and to what degree religious diversity varies spatially across the globe. The World Christian Database lists eighteen different religions, including well-known ones such as Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jews, Bahais, Confucianists, Jains, Shintoists, Taoists, and Zoroastrians. Other categories require clarification. Religious diversity across the globe The Encyclopedia Britannica2 defines ‘Chinese Universists,’ of which there are 400 million worldwide, as ‘Followers of a unique complex of beliefs and practices that may include: universism (yin/yang cosmology with dualities earth/heaven, evil/good, darkness/ light), ancestor cult, Confucian ethics, divination, festivals, folk religion, goddess worship, household gods, local deities, mediums, metaphysics, monasteries, neo-Confucianism, popular religion, sacrifices, shamans, spirit writing, and Taoist and Buddhist elements.’ ‘Ethnoreligionists’ include an enormous and highly heterogeneous variety of tribal, shamanistic and animistic beliefs, typically found in small ethnic groups located in rural and economically undeveloped countries (although Native American faiths in North America also fall under this label). ‘Neoreligionists’ are ‘Followers of Asian 20th-century neoreligions, neoreligious movements, radical new crisis religions, and non-Christian syncretistic mass religions.’3 Finally, 13 million ‘Spiritists’ form an independent branch of metaphysics that arose in France 150 years ago that exhibits strong parallels to Christianity but incorporates aspects of reincarnation.4 The relative sizes of these faiths are indicated in Table 1. Various forms of Christianity comprise one-third of the planet’s 6.4 billion people, while Islam accounts for another 20 percent. Significant shares are accounted for by Hindus (13 percent), the nonreligious (11.9 percent), Chinese Universists (6.2 percent), Buddhists (5.9 percent), and Ethnoreligionists (4.0 percent). Smaller faiths, such as Sikhs, Jews, Bahais, Confucianists, Jains, Shintoists, Taoists, and Zoroastrians, account for less than 25 million followers and 1 percent of the world’s people, respectively. Atheists and ‘nonbelievers’ (i.e., agnostics or uninterested) together comprise over 14 603 Table 1 Estimated membership of major world religions, 2005 Religion Christians Muslims Hindus Nonreligious Chinese Universists Buddhists Ethnoreligionists Atheists Neoreligionists Sikhs Jews Spiritists Bahais Confucianists Jains Shintoists Taoists Zoroastrians Total Membership (millions) % 2,135.78 1,313.29 857.78 768.60 404.13 377.64 256.33 151.55 108.13 25.37 15.15 13.03 7.61 6.47 4.59 2.79 2.73 2.65 6,453.62 33.1 20.3 13.3 11.9 6.3 5.9 4.0 2.3 1.7 0.4 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 100.0 Source: World Christian Database, , http://www. worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/. . percent of the world’s people. The distribution of this population varies widely across the globe (Figure 2), with a heavy representation in former (or nominally) Communist countries such as Russia and particularly China, where 150 million people describe themselves in these terms. North Korea, Germany, Sweden, Kazakhstan, Cuba, New Zealand, and, curiously, Uruguay, also have significant proportions. In contrast, the choice to reject or ignore religion has comparatively little appeal in South Asia, the Muslim world, most of Africa, and much of the Americas. The present study employed four empirical measures of religious diversity drawn from different disciplines: 1 The number of religions present in each country, n. In biology, this measure is called species richness. As the simplest measure, it summarizes the suite of options available 604 Barney Warf & Peter Vincent Figure 2 Choropleth map and Dorling cartogram of atheists and nonbelievers as a percentage of total population. Circle sizes are proportionate to population in 2005. Source: calculated by the authors from the World Christian Database, ,http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/. . to individuals in given areas without regard to their differing sizes. However, the precise definition of a religion’s ‘presence’ is problematic, i.e., subject to arbitrary lower bounds: what is the minimal number of adherents who comprise a religion’s ‘presence’ in a country? (In a personal communication, World Christian Database representatives could not justify their lower bound). 2 The proportion of total adherents who belong to the country’s largest faith, i.e., nmax/N, where nmax ¼ largest religion and N ¼ total population. This is a measure of the degree to which one faith may dominate a society (as, e.g., in Afghanistan, where Muslims comprise 97.9 percent of the population). 3 The Shannon index (H), derived from entropy maximization and commonly used Religious diversity across the globe to measure species diversity in biology, quantifies the diversity of religions based on two components: the number of religions and their proportional distribution, commonly termed richness and evenness, respectively. The Shannon index is calculated by adding for each religion the proportion of adherents multiplied by the natural logarithm of that proportion, that is, X H ¼ 2 pi £ Inpi ð1Þ in which p is the proportion of a country’s adherents found in religion i (Magurran 2004). The maximum value of the Shannon index is reached when all religions have the same spatial distribution. 4 The Simpson index (D), invented by Simpson (1949), is based on probability theory, specifically, the likelihood of two individuals drawn at random from a country will be in the same religion. It is defined as D¼ X p2i ð2Þ in which p is the proportion of a country’s adherents found in religion i. It ranges from zero to one. Of note is the fact that the Simpson index and the well-known Index of Dissimilarity and Gini coefficient are all mathematically related. To the extent that these measures reflect different facets of religious diversity, they will vary from one another; conversely, to the extent that religious pluralism is robust and constant across different representations of it, they will be similar to one another. These indices are illustrated using two types of maps. The first, standard choropleth maps based on nation-states, offers a conventional perspective of the world’s religious diversity. However, choropleth maps suffer from several well-known disadvantages, i.e., the data within each country may appear to be evenly dispersed 605 internally. Unfortunately, there is little that one can do about this problem given the spatial resolution of the available data. Second, choropleth maps give undue influence to large areal units as compared with small ones. For the purposes of the present analysis, it is not the physical size of countries that is of interest but total population, which is far more relevant to the issue of religious diversity. To circumvent these problems, conventional maps were supplemented by a cartogram devised by Dorling (1995). Cartograms differ from choropleth maps in that the areal size of the mapping units (here, countries) is proportional to the magnitude being mapped. As with choropleth maps, boundary contiguity is preserved. Conventional cartograms distort the shape of mapping units (sometimes seriously) by simultaneously attempting to maintain boundary contiguity and striving to make map unit sizes proportionate to the value of a given variable. The result can be distracting. Dorling (1995) circumvented this problem by making all mapping units into simple circles whose areas are proportional to the value of a variable being mapped; circle contiguity is preserved. Discussion The four measures of religious diversity employed here offer different yet complementary perspectives on the degree to which people throughout the world face varying degrees of choice about their faith. When measured by the total number of religions present in each country (Figure 3), for example, the options range from five to seventeen. Three countries— China, the USA, and Australia—stand out in this regard; the first two have large populations (1.3 billion and 300 million, respectively), and the USA and Australia are both characterized by steady streams of 606 Barney Warf & Peter Vincent immigrants, who often carry their faiths with them. The Dorling cartogram contrasts two highly diverse countries, China and Australia, but also emphasizes the enormous discrepancy in their populations. Compared to China, India, while similarly populous, is not quite as diverse. A second tier of diversity is found in South and East Asia, northwestern Europe, and Brazil, all populous centers (the latter two also substantial destination areas of immigrants). In contrast, Russia, Eastern Europe, the large swath of Muslim countries stretching from central Asia across North Africa, central and western Africa, and central America and the Caribbean exhibit distinctly lower levels of religious diversity. Most such states are relatively small to medium-sized, as indicated in the Dorling cartogram. Figure 3 Choropleth map and Dorling cartogram of total number of religions present in each country. Circle sizes are proportionate to population in 2005. Source: calculated by the authors from the World Christian Database, , http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/ . . Religious diversity across the globe More meaningful than the simple number of religions present is the distribution of populations among religions, as indicated by the proportion adhering to the largest faith in each country (Figure 4). (Note darker shades here indicate lower degrees of diversity.) In this light, the relatively high diversity in China and, to a lesser extent, India, is notable: in China, the largest ‘faith’—no faith—accounts for 40 percent of the population, or 525 million people; there are another 104 million 607 self-declared atheists. The World Christian Database also lists almost equal numbers of Buddhists (111.3 million) and Christians (110.9 million) in China. In India, 798 million Hindus comprise 72.8 percent of the population. In Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous state, Muslims comprise 54 percent of the population. All of these countries exhibit more diversity than does the USA, where Christians constitute 84 percent of the total. In contrast, the hegemony Figure 4 Choropleth map and Dorling cartogram of percentage of population adhering to largest religion in each country. Circle sizes are proportionate to population in 2005. Source: calculated by the authors from the World Christian Database, , http://www. worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/ . . 608 Barney Warf & Peter Vincent of Islam in central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa is evident (particularly Pakistan, which exceeds Russia in population, as indicated by the Dorling map). The dominance of Catholicism in Latin America, France, Spain, and Italy is clearly evident and reflected in the low degrees of diversity found in those states; in these regions, the dominant faith typically accounts for more than 90 percent of the population. Uruguay, again, remains anomalous in South America by virtue of its large proportion of nonbelievers. The Shannon index, which measures not only the concentration of people in one faith or another but also their distribution among multiple faiths, yields a similar portrait (Figure 5). In this approach, the components of diversity—i.e., the number of religions present—are weighted by their relative sizes. Among the most religiously diverse societies (with indices exceeding unity) are China, India, Russia, Indonesia, and Malaysia as well as several West African countries (e.g., Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, Togo, Liberia). Figure 5 Choropleth map and Dorling cartogram of the Shannon index of religious diversity. Circle sizes are proportionate to population in 2005. Source: calculated by the authors from the World Christian Database, , http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/ . . Religious diversity across the globe Such countries tend to be large in population (China, India, Indonesia) and/or have occupied niches in the world-system in which they have been exposed to a variety of outside forces, including colonialism and immigration. Japan, widely assumed to be culturally homogenous, in fact demonstrates a remarkably high degree of religious diversity, which reflects the number of Buddhists (54 percent), Neoreligionists (25.8 percent), atheists and nonreligious people (13 percent), Christians (3.4 percent), and Shintoists (2.1 percent). In contrast, relatively low diversity is encountered in much of the Muslim world and particularly Latin America (indices less than 0.47). Such a result points to the fact that commonly acknowledged stereotypes often mask the heterogeneity revealed by this analysis. Similarly, the Simpson index also points to the diversity of faiths found in China, which dominates the Dorling cartogram by virtue of its large population (Figure 6). High diversity is also found in some other parts of East Asia, and to a considerably lower degree, India. Africa emerges as a complex hodgepodge of different faiths, testimony to its long history of colonialism and rich heritage of indigenous belief systems. In contrast, the Americas, particularly Latin America, exhibit much lower degrees of diversity. Unlike the choropleths, the Dorling cartograms in Figures 5 and 6 emphasize the enormous numbers of people who live in religiously diverse societies in Eastern and Southern Asia, in contrast to the less populous, and less diverse, Western hemisphere, including the USA. Concluding thoughts Popular understandings of religion often point to the numerous differences to be 609 found among different forms of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. To be sure, real social and spatial variations exist within each of these faiths. Yet when contrasted with other major world religions and with those who choose no faith, the geographic portrait of diversity takes on new dimensions. For example, despite the diversity of Christian denominations in the USA, which has long prided itself on its tolerance and multiplicity of faiths, that state exhibits an unexpectedly low degree of religious diversity due to the predominance of Christianity. The four measures of religious diversity deployed here exhibit significant agreement with one another, indicating that while it is difficult to measure diversity, the concept is sufficiently robust to exhibit common patterns assessed with different indices. However, it should be cautioned that to no small extent, the observations offered here are products of the particular categorization found in the World Christian Database; differing categorizations, were they available, may generate somewhat different outcomes. This paper calls into question the popular claim that the USA is the most religiously diverse country in the world (e.g., Eck 2001), a claim that rests primarily upon the recognition of the considerable differences to be found among its Christian denominations. In contrast, East Asia emerges as a remarkably diverse set of societies, an observation often missing from Eurocentric accounts that fail to do justice to the region’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. China, in particular, is highly diverse despite a half-century of Communist rule, with large numbers of atheists and nonbelievers (48 percent), Chinese Universists (29 percent), and Buddhists and Christians (8.5 percent each); in this light, China exhibits considerably more diversity than does the USA. 610 Barney Warf & Peter Vincent Figure 6 Choropleth map and Dorling cartogram of the Simpson index of religious diversity. Circle sizes are proportionate to population in 2005. Source: calculated by the authors from the World Christian Database, , http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/ . . Notably, diversity does not equate with religious freedom, as indicated by the need by many Chinese Christians to worship in secret. The least diverse places in the world, from the perspective of options of faith, are those dominated by Catholicism or Islam, i.e., Latin America and the Muslim belt across North Africa into Central Asia. Europe, a predominantly Christian but increasingly secular continent infused by strands of Islam, Hinduism, and other faiths, emerges somewhere between these two poles. More broadly, these comments serve as a reminder that the cultural complexity of many non-Western societies is often invisible to observers in the West, a notion with origins in Orientalist discourses and one replicated in simplistic accounts of the ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1993), which exaggerate the cultural differences between societies at the expense of the heterogeneity within them. In the wave of global desecularization and religious fundamentalism that has erupted Religious diversity across the globe since the end of the cold war, religious diversity assumes increasing significance. It may be no surprise, for example, that the most militant advocates of their respective religions originate from states with relatively low degrees of diversity, e.g., the Muslim world. In contrast, Europe, which evinces a series of moderately sized societies and a diversity of faiths, has turned toward increasing secularism. Such observations indicate that in an era of intense globalization accompanied by widespread ethnic conflict, there remains much to appreciate about religious diversity. Acknowledgements The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Notes 1 2 3 4 See ,http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/ . . See,http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9399686 . . See,http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9399686 . . See ,http://www.spiritismonline.net . and ,http:// www.theseekerbooks.com/articles/spiritists.htm . . References Barro, R. and McCleary, R. (2003) Religion and economic growth across nations, American Sociological Review 68: 760 –781. Berger, P. (1967) The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday. Berger, P. 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Abstract translations La diversité religieuse à travers le globe: une exploration géographique Cet article se penche sur la diversité religieuse dans 237 pays à l’échelle du globe à partir de données issues de la World Christian Database. Il explore les forces sociales qui soutiennent la diversité religieuse, y compris les histoires nationales, les tendances démographiques, les politiques gouvernementales, en plus des relations entre la diversité religieuse et la religiosité. Il propose une synthèse des différences approches conceptuelles sur ce sujet. Au plan empirique, quatre mesures de la diversité sont utilisées: le nombre de religions par pays; la proportion d’adeptes de la religion la plus répandue; l’indice Shannon; et l’indice Simpson. Celles-ci sont cartographiées en utilisant des cartes choroplèthes conventionnelles et des cartogrammes Dorling. Les mesures de la diversité montrent que la Chine, l’Inde, la Russie, le Japon et l’Indonésie comptent parmi les états du monde les plus diversifiés sur le plan de la religion et, contrairement à l’opinion courante, ils présentent une plus grande diversité qu’aux États-Unis, lesquels sont reconnus Religious diversity across the globe par plusieurs comme étant le pays le plus diversifié du monde. Mots-clefs: géographie de la religion, diversité. Diversidad religiosa a través del planeta: una exploración geográfica Este papel examina la diversidad religiosa a nivel mundial para 237 paı́ses, usando datos de la Base de Datos del Mundo Cristiano. Explora las esfuerzas sociales que conducen la diversidad, incluyendo la historia nacional, tendencias demográficas y polı́ticas gubernamentales ası́ como las relaciones entre la diversidad religiosa y la religiosidad. Describe 613 resumidamente varios enfoques conceptuales para este tema. Empı́ricamente, emplea cuatro indicadores de diversidad; el número de religiones en cada paı́s; la proporción de partidarios de la religión más popular; el ı́ndice Shannon y el ı́ndice Simpson. Estos son mapeados usando tanto mapas ‘choropleth’ como cartogramas Dorling. Las medidas de diversidad indican que la China, la India, Rusia, Japón e Indonesia cuentan entre los estados más diversos del mundo en términos religiosos, y son más diversos que los Estados Unidos, muchas veces considerado el paı́s más diverso del mundo. Palabras claves: geografı́a de religión, diversidad.
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