Religious Diversity

Diversity as a social fact

Most modern societies contain many religious traditions at once. Walking through a large city, you might pass a church, a mosque, a synagogue, a Hindu temple, a gurdwara, and a Buddhist center within a few blocks. This coexistence is what scholars call religious diversity, and it is a social fact: a feature of the world to describe, not a verdict about any tradition's truth or value. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy treats the pervasiveness of religious diversity as the starting point of a whole family of scholarly questions, and sociology studies it as a feature of group life.

The global distribution of traditions is uneven. Pew Research Center estimates for 2015 put Christians at about 31 percent of the world's population, the largest group, followed by Muslims at about 24 percent, the religiously unaffiliated at about 16 percent, Hindus at about 15 percent, and Buddhists at about 7 percent; adherents of folk religions, Jews, and members of other traditions make up the remainder. No single tradition is universal, and every region has its own mix.

The United States has been religiously diverse throughout its history. The Pluralism Project at Harvard, founded by Diana Eck in 1991, documents how waves of immigration, especially in the past fifty years, have brought traditions from every continent and reshaped American religious life. Immigrants arrived with their scriptures, rituals, songs, and festivals, and built temples, gurdwaras, and mosques. Even Christianity in the United States has become more internally varied as immigrant churches of many denominations have grown.

No tradition is monolithic

A second kind of diversity runs inside each tradition. Every major religion contains denominations, schools, or movements that differ in belief, practice, and organization. Judaism includes Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements. Islam includes Sunni, Shi'a, and Sufi streams alongside shared elements such as the Five Pillars. Christianity includes Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, and many other churches.

Sociologists have a vocabulary for these differences. An ecclesia is a large, established religious body closely tied to a society's institutions; a denomination is a recognized subgroup, usually accommodated to the wider society; a sect is a newer, smaller group that stands apart from an established tradition; and a new religious movement is a recently formed group that researchers study without the pejorative load of the word "cult." Traditions commonly pass through more than one organizational form over time. The point for students is plain: no tradition is monolithic, so a claim that reduces a tradition to a single feature or a single voice is always suspect.

The religious marketplace

Scholars offer different models for how religious life works in a diverse society. One influential framing comes from rational choice theory in the sociology of religion. Researchers using this lens describe religious life as a marketplace: religious organizations compete for members, and individuals choose among congregations and denominations much as they choose among other goods, weighing costs and rewards. OpenStax's sociology overview presents this as one way social scientists have attempted to explain religious behavior in pluralistic societies, including the puzzle of why religious participation remains strong in some modern countries. It is a scholarly framing and an attributed one: a lens for asking questions about competition and choice, not a law of religious life, and not a claim that any tradition is better or worse for participating in it.

Pluralism versus diversity, and responses to it

The Pluralism Project draws a distinction that is now standard in the field. Diversity is the fact of difference: many traditions present in one society. Pluralism is the positive engagement with that difference — in Diana Eck's words, "the energetic engagement with diversity." On this account, religious diversity is a given, but pluralism is not a given; it is an achievement. Pluralism is not mere tolerance, which requires no knowledge of the other; it is not relativism, which would ask people to set their commitments aside; it is encounter and dialogue.

Diversity also brings documented challenges. The Pluralism Project records stereotypes and prejudice, zoning disputes used to sanction discrimination against new temples, gurdwaras, and mosques, and hate crimes motivated by religious prejudice. Both coexistence and conflict are documented outcomes of religiously diverse societies; the evidence supports neither automatic harmony nor inevitable conflict. Responses include dialogue and interfaith movements — developed in the sibling lesson on interfaith relations — and questions about religious freedom and public life, which connect to the sibling lessons on religion and politics and on secularism.