World Religions Introduction

The Pew Research Center, which states they are “a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the world,” published statistics that showed that in 2010 out of 6.9 billion people, 84% of them identified with a religion. The largest group was Christians with nearly 32% of the world’s population following some branch of Christianity, followed by Muslims at 23%, Hindus at 15%, Buddhists at 7%, Jews at 0.2%,  0.8% following other religions such as Sikhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and Wicca, and 6% following folk or native religions. This still leaves 16% of the world’s population not ascribing to any particular religion, although they might believe that a higher power exists.

The American people are a diverse group, however, of those who claim a religion, 78.3% are Christian. According to a recent Gallup poll, 46% of Americans state that religion is very important in their lives the same percentage of Americans who state that they belong to a church or synagogue. It could then be assumed that the American people have a relatively strong grasp of the concepts of Christianity, however, this is far from the truth.

“Americans revere the Bible–but, by and large, they don’t read it. And because they don’t read it, they have become a nation of biblical illiterates.” – George Gallup and Jim Castelli, 1990.

However, it isn’t simply that Americans don’t have a grasp on their own majority religion. They don’t have a basic understanding of any world religion. According to the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey Executive Summary Americans could answer approximately 50% of the survey’s questions correctly, with atheists, agnostics, Mormons, and Jews answering roughly 63% of the questions correctly. So it seems that religious, and by association, cultural knowledge is lacking in the United States. This course will give you the basic knowledge you need to know about the world’s major religions as well as give you a brief overview of the rarer religions that you may come into contact with.