🕊️ The Geography of World Religions

What you’ll learn

1. Faith Has a MapSee the global distribution of religious adherence as of 2020, and learn the one distinction that explains most of the map: whether a tradition understands itself as being for everyone or for a particular people.Pew Research Center's 2020 estimates put Christians at 28.8% of the world's population, Muslims at 25.6%, the religiously unaffiliated at 24.2%, Hindus at 14.9% and Buddhists at 4.1%. The shape of that map is best explained by a geographer's distinction between universalising traditions, which actively seek adherents everywhere, and ethnic traditions, bound to a particular people and place.
2. HearthsSee that almost every major world religion arose in one of two small regions, and understand why crossroads produce traditions that travel.The faiths of most of humanity trace to two areas: the lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and the plains of the Indus and Ganges. Both were dense, literate crossroads where trade routes converged — which matters less for why ideas arose there than for why ideas *left* there, since a religion born beside a trade route inherits that route's reach.
3. Why Buddhism Travelled and Hinduism StayedUnderstand how two traditions from the same hearth ended up with completely different maps — and why 95% of the world's Hindus live in one country while Buddhism reached across a continent.Buddhism is universalising and monastic: monks travelled the Silk Road and the sea lanes, and rulers who adopted the tradition carried it further, so it spread across East and Southeast Asia. Hinduism, understood by adherents as a way of life bound to community and place, did not seek converts in the same way — and Pew's 2020 estimates find 95% of the world's Hindus in India. Same hearth, same roads, different maps.
4. Christianity: The Empire Road, Then the Sea RoadUnderstand Christianity's two distinct phases of spread — through the Roman world, then across oceans with European empires — and why most Christians today live in the global South.Christianity spread first through the Roman Empire's roads, cities and shared languages, and decisively once it gained imperial backing. Its second phase came with European maritime empires from the 15th century, carrying it to the Americas, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa. The result is that Pew's 2020 estimates find the largest share of Christians — 31% — in sub-Saharan Africa, not Europe.
5. Islam: The Trade RoadUnderstand the two distinct mechanisms by which Islam spread — and why the country with the most Muslims is one no army reached.Islam expanded rapidly across the Middle East, North Africa and into Iberia and Central Asia in its early centuries, and that political expansion explains much of the belt from Morocco eastward. But its spread through the Indian Ocean world came overwhelmingly through merchants, and Pew's 2020 estimates find the largest Muslim population is Indonesia's — 239 million — a place reached by traders rather than armies.
6. Judaism: A Map Made by DispersionUnderstand how a tradition can be globally distributed yet numerically small, and how dispersion rather than expansion drew its map.Judaism is an ethnic tradition of the Levantine hearth, numbering 14.8 million people — about 0.2% of humanity — in Pew's 2020 estimates. Its map was drawn not by outward mission but by dispersion: communities scattered across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East over centuries, later concentrated by migration and by the catastrophe of the Holocaust into two main centres, Israel and the United States.
7. Sacred GeographyUnderstand how traditions anchor themselves to specific physical places — and why that makes a religious map extraordinarily durable.Faiths attach themselves to actual ground: a city to face in prayer, a river to bathe in, a place to walk to. The qibla orients daily prayer toward Mecca; the hajj brings millions there annually; Varanasi and the Ganges draw Hindu pilgrims; Jerusalem is held sacred by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. Once a tradition is anchored to a place, the map acquires a physical permanence that ideas alone never have.
8. Where the Map BlursSee the limits of a map drawn in solid blocks — mixture, shared practice, and the rapid growth of the religiously unaffiliated — and pull the course's argument together.The blocks on a religious map are majorities, not monoliths: borders are blurred, practices are shared, and many people's lives don't fit a single label. Pew's estimates show the religiously unaffiliated rising from 23.3% of the world in 2010 to 24.2% in 2020, while Islam grew fastest of any religion in the same decade. The map is a snapshot of something still in motion.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Pew Research Center — 'How the Global Religious Landscape Changed from 2010 to 2020' (June 2025)
• Pew Research Center — 'Countries with the most Muslims & global Muslim population change, 2010-2020'
• Pew Research Center — Religious Composition by Country, 2010–2020
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Hinduism; Buddhism; Christianity; Islam; Judaism; Sikhism; Jainism
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Silk Road; hajj; Varanasi; Jerusalem

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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