The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map (opens in new tab)

All: please don't post religious flamewar comments to Hacker News. That includes proselytizing in any direction, pro or anti. Such threads are as tedious as they are flamey, and those are the two qualities we can most do without here.

Intellectually curious conversation is an entirely different thing and is of course welcome on this or any topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is not fully correct because St Thomas, who was one of the twelve disciples landed in India and martyred here in India and that's why we have A large autonomous branch, known as the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church (or Indian Orthodox Church), tracing its roots to St. Thomas the Apostle and has its headquarters in Kottayam, Kerala. We in India just call it Syrian Orthodox church. That part is not shown in the video.

I’m sure a book has been written with this thesis, but I often think that a system like Christianity was somewhat inevitable, sociopolitically.

By this I don’t really mean the specifics of the religion; but rather 1) the idea of universalizing the value all human life and not only certain subsets and 2) a synthesis of ideology and politics with the explicit goal of expanding its domain by means of assimilation, not just conquest.

Now of course the reality didn’t actually play out exactly along those lines, but I think a similar sort of movement probably would have occurred across the Roman Empire, had Christianity not specifically grown.

In other words I have a hard time imagining that the world would have continued with Roman values indefinitely. The world was changing and Christianity was as much a consequence as a cause.

Very interesting to consider in any case!

It's even more interesting when you think about Christianity not as a clear category, but as a cloud of practices, beliefs and institutions in a broader family of religious patterns.

Mircea Eliade asks how Christianity reinterpreted sacred history, myth, salvation. What does Christianity do with motifs older than itself, such as paradise, rebirth, sacrifice? In A History of Religious Ideas [0], he treats the emergence and development of Christianity, including Judaism, early Christianity, Gnosticism, late antiquity, medieval religious forms and also how it interacted with other traditions. I think it complements quite nicely the geographical spread of Christianity by also clarifying what kind of transformations of religious symbols make it recognisable as Christianity across such different contexts.

There's also "Darwin's Cathedral" [1] that analyses religion as group-organizing system, with a focus on Calvinism. Didn't go through it, but seems relevant. It was recommended by Robert Sapolsky in his Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology lecture series [2].

[0] A History of Religious Ideas - Mircea Eliade

[1] Darwin's Cathedral - David Sloan Wilson

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA

What blew me away was the proliferation of the Church of the East. I never knew Christianity had that much of a foothold in Asia. I wonder if geographically it appears more significant due to that region’s sparse population?

I have recently noticed (especially over the last year) a lot of mainstream stories portraying Christianity as growing significantly, things like Instagram posts, tweets, etc., with phrases like “Christianity is back”, you get the idea.

I’m not really sure to what extent this is accurate, though, since those platforms are obviously shaped by my own algorithm. For example, Instagram knows I’m Catholic, so it tends to show me Catholic-positive content.

Does anyone know of a reliable source where I can check the actual numbers? I’m especially curious about Gen Z, since it seems to be relatively pro-Christian.

Those interested may find Dominion[0] an excellent read.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Dominion-Christian-Revolution-Remade-...

It would be cool to see this expanded to include other prominent religious systems.. in particular Islam, Budhism, Hindu, etc... as it is, there's no context at all in terms of contraction events.

I wish it was an actual interactive map instead of a video, as it raises so many questions.

Where did Christianity come from in Tibet? If I'm reading it correctly, around 1100AD there seems to be a large number of Christians near Lhasa. And then around 1266 a majority Christian region around (I think) Mongolia suddenly gets wiped out.

Interesting that in the last two years of the video, central Europe seems to turn gray. The decline has been going on for several decades (and the official numbers of Christian people are artificially inflated due to weird exceptions the church has by law).

What is going on with Celtic Christianity? Was it really as distinct from Roman Catholicism (and for as long) as the graphic suggests?

Also, why no Cathars/Albigensians in the south of France during the 12th & 13th centuries?

Thanks for sharing. Funny enough, I was just asking GPT to chart this for me a few days ago. And people say postmillennialism is a pipe dream...

To put it into perspective, a long time ago a friend made this https://williame.github.io/map_of_worlds_religions/

what's up with the red isolated somewhere around Bhutan in 700AD? Is that Prester John[0]? :D

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prester_John

This would be more historically accurate if it included the body counts.

Also how I lose most Sid Meir Civilization[1] games.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)

The low point of Christianity after the council of Nicaea was the "Dark Ages" (early middle ages) and the high point is circa 2000.

The exact opposite of what we tend to think.

"For the Earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea."

During the last few years, I’ve been exploring Svealand, the central part of Sweden that contains Stockholm and some other provinces. The region contains many historical places, but I walk the countryside, away from the main tourist attractions. What has impressed me the most is the amount of ancient piles of ruble with vigilant, almost hostile churches next to them. There are rock paintings from prehistoric times still around, and many, many mounds and graves from the bronze and iron age, the region is literally littered with them. But I’ve never found a single extant statue nor statuette nor depiction of the old Norse gods.