Home›Europe›Principal Tradition OfBrowse ByPrincipal Tradition OfThis page groups sacred regions by their formal rank within one specific faith. Wikipedia notes that Jerusalem "is the holiest city in Judaism and Christianity and the third-holiest city in Islam (behind Mecca and Medina in the Arabian Peninsula)." Browsing by principal-tradition-of lets a visitor find every region holding the same rank within its faith.FactsPrincipal Tradition OfSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsDirectoryCategoryWell-attestedRegions 1Principal Tradition OfFilter Results8 entriesAdherents TodayAllIceland's Asatruarfelagid, the tradition's largest formal organization anywhere, reported 6,250 registered members in 2025, up from about 1,000 in 2006 and about a dozen founding members in 1972; no comparable count exists for Norse Paganism or Heathenry worldwide. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report estimates the global Jewish population at about 14.8 million as of 2020, the smallest of the major world religions measured, concentrated primarily in Israel and the United States. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Christian population at 2.3 billion as of 2020, about 28.8 percent of the world's population, up 122 million from 2010 even as its share of world population fell. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Muslim population at 2.0 billion as of 2020, about 26 percent of the world's population, up from 1.7 billion in 2010 and growing about twice as fast as the world's population as a whole over that decade. (1)Adherents Today MaximumAll14,800,000 (1)2,000,000,000 (1)2,300,000,000 (1)Adherents Today MinimumAll14,800,000 (1)2,000,000,000 (1)2,300,000,000 (1)Basis of the Membership FigureAllIndependent Survey (4)National Census (1)Scholarly or Demographic Estimate (3)Current StatusAllNo continuous Etruscan religious community survives, the tradition is known today only through archaeology, inscriptions and later Roman testimony about Etruscan divination. (1)Rodnovery has grown since the 1980s and 1990s primarily in Russia, Ukraine and Poland, organised into numerous small, often mutually independent communities rather than a single unified church. (1)Era of DeclineAllConversion to Christianity across Scandinavia between the tenth and twelfth centuries brought the public practice of Norse paganism to an end. (1)Public pagan sacrifice was banned by the emperor Theodosius I in 391 CE, and traditional Roman religion was gradually suppressed as Christianity became the empire's official religion. (1)The last Etruscan haruspices are recorded in the 4th century CE (1)The Neoplatonic school at Athens is closed in 529 CE (1)Era of Decline End YearAll400 (2)529 (1)1200 (2)Era of Decline Start YearAll100 BCE (1)380 (2)863 (1)1000 (1)Era of Modern RevivalAllThe movement grows after the fall of the Soviet Union (1)Era of Modern Revival End YearAll1990 (1)Era of Modern Revival Start YearAll1930 (1)Establishment StatusAllDeclared Not Established (1)Varies by Province (2)Form of the ConfessionAllThe Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed are the two most widely shared credal statements across the branches of Christianity. (1)The shahada, the declaration that there is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger, is Islam's central creed and the first of the five pillars. (1)FounderAllJesus of Nazareth; the movement was organised by his followers after his death (1)Muslims hold Islam to be the restoration of the primordial religion rather than a new founding (1)None in the historical sense (1)The Prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632) (1)Tradition traces the covenant to Abraham and the Torah to Moses (1)How the Expectation Is EnforcedAllCodified Obligation With Consequences (1)Customary Norm (1)Legal StatusAllIn Russia, Rodnover organizations have registered as religious entities since the early 1990s, the Moscow Slavic Pagan Community first in 1994, but no single national body holds official standing for the movement as a whole, and the Russian Orthodox Church's privileged legal and social position leaves Rodnovery a marginal presence in state religious life. (1)In Ukraine the movement has a clearer institutional footing: four separate Rodnover bodies, including the two organizations descended from Lev Sylenko's Native Ukrainian National Faith, hold official registration as religious organizations, together administering more than a hundred congregations. (1)Marriage Position DetailAllQur'an 4:3 states: "And if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphan girls then marry (other) women of your choice, two or three, or four." Classical and contemporary Sunni and Shia jurisprudence alike reads this as permitting, not requiring, a man to be married to up to four wives at one time, on two conditions: material justice between the wives, in spending, clothing, and time, which Qur'an 4:129 immediately qualifies by noting that perfect justice in feeling, as opposed to material treatment, is not humanly possible and so is not what is required; and the financial capacity to support each wife. Monogamy remains the ordinary practice for most Muslims worldwide; the ruling recognizes polygynous marriage as licit rather than mandating it. (1)Membership Figure As OfAll2005-01-01 (1)2006-01-01 (1)2010-01-01 (2)2011-01-27 (1)2011-12-19 (1)2012-01-01 (1)2013-01-01 (1)2020-01-01 (3)2025-01-01 (1)Membership Over TimeAllBy 2020, the same Pew study found the global Christian population had risen by 122 million to 2.3 billion, even as its share of world population fell from 31 percent to 28.8 percent, as Sub-Saharan Africa overtook Europe as home to the largest share of the world's Christians. (1)By 2020, the same Pew study found the global Muslim population had grown 21 percent to 2.0 billion (26 percent of world population), growing twice as fast as the rest of the world's population over the decade, driven by Muslims having more children and a younger average age than members of any other major religion. (1)By 2025, Asatruarfelagid's registered membership had grown to 6,250, per Statistics Iceland, making it the largest non-Christian religious organization in Iceland. (1)By Pew's 2020 "Jewish Americans in 2020" survey, that share had grown to 2.4 percent of US adults, an estimated 7.5 million people, a national self-identification measure rather than any single body's own membership rolls. (1)Iceland's Asatruarfelagid, founded in 1972 with about a dozen members, had grown to roughly 1,000 registered members by 2006, according to Statistics Iceland. (1)In its December 19, 2011 Global Christianity report, Pew Research Center estimated 2.18 billion Christians worldwide as of 2010, nearly a third of the estimated 6.9 billion global population, compiled from a country-by-country analysis of about 2,400 sources including censuses and nationally representative surveys. (1)In its January 27, 2011 report, Pew Research Center estimated about 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide as of 2010, 23.4 percent of the estimated 6.9 billion global population, compiled from roughly 1,500 sources across 232 countries and territories. (1)In Pew Research Center's 2013 "A Portrait of Jewish Americans" survey, 2.2 percent of US adults, an estimated 6.7 million people, identified as Jewish, according to Pew's 2020 follow-up report summarizing both waves. (1)In Ukraine, scholars disagree by an order of magnitude: Adrian Ivakhiv's 2005 estimate put Rodnover adherents at only 5,000 to 10,000, while other sociologists working the same period estimated more than 90,000, about 0.2 percent of Ukraine's population; the gap itself, rather than either number alone, is the honest measure of how unsettled the count of a decentralized movement with no membership roll remains. (1)Pew's June 2025 update to its global religion modeling revised its own 2010 Christian estimate down slightly to 2.1 billion (31 percent of world population), a mild revision of the 2011 report's 2.18 billion figure for the same year, both recorded here side by side rather than one replacing the other. (1)Pew's June 2025 update to its global religion modeling revised its own 2010 Muslim estimate upward to 1.7 billion (24 percent of world population), a modest revision of the 2011 report's 1.6 billion figure for the same year, both recorded here side by side rather than one replacing the other. (1)The Sreda research service's 2012 Arena (Atlas of Religions and Nationalities) survey, Russia's largest independent survey of religious self-identification, found 1.7 million people identifying as Pagan or followers of a traditional religion, of whom about 750,000 were ethnic Russians specifically following an ancestral Slavic religion; a later (2016) scholarly assessment found no reliable count exists and put active practitioners at only in the tens of thousands, illustrating the gap between broad sympathetic identification and committed practice. (1)Observance NoteAllSacrifice at open air altars, civic festivals such as the Panathenaea at Athens, and the great Panhellenic games at Olympia and Delphi were central to its practice. (1)Origin AccountAllChristianity traces its origin to the life, teaching, crucifixion and, in the faith of its adherents, resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in Roman Judea in the first century. (1)Etruscan religious texts, including the lengthy Liber Linteus preserved by chance as mummy wrappings in Egypt, survive only in fragments, so most reconstruction of Etruscan religious practice depends on Greek and Roman descriptions and on tomb and temple archaeology. (1)Greek religion developed from Bronze Age Mycenaean and, further back, Indo-European antecedents, without a single founder or founding revelation. (1)Islam traces its origin to the revelations received by the prophet Muhammad in Mecca and Medina in the early seventh century, collected as the Quran. (1)Jewish tradition traces its origin to God's covenant with Abraham and, most definitively, to the covenant given to Moses and the people of Israel at Sinai after the exodus from Egypt. (1)Norse paganism has no founder; its mythology and practice developed among Germanic peoples of Scandinavia before Christianisation, and is known today chiefly through medieval Icelandic sources such as the Prose and Poetic Eddas, written down after conversion. (1)Rodnovery is a modern reconstruction of pre Christian Slavic religion, developed from the nineteenth century onward using surviving folklore, chronicle references and comparative Indo European mythology rather than an unbroken living tradition. (1)Roman religion developed from early Latin and Etruscan cult practice and absorbed extensive Greek mythology and ritual through contact with Greek colonies in Italy, without a single founder. (1)Origin PeriodAllJudaism proper takes shape after the Babylonian exile (1)The Panhellenic system is in place by the 8th century BCE (1)The pre-Christian Slavic religion Rodnovery reconstructs is attested from roughly the sixth century until the Christianization of Kievan Rus in 988; the modern movement itself is a nineteenth and twentieth century revival with no unbroken continuity to that period. (1)Origin Period End YearAll700 BCE (2)500 BCE (1)400 BCE (1)50 (1)632 (1)800 (1)988 (1)Origin Period Start YearAll1400 BCE (1)800 BCE (1)750 BCE (1)586 BCE (1)500 BCE (1)30 (1)500 (1)610 (1)Place of OriginAllEtruria, in central Italy (1)Mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the Greek colonies (1)Roman Judaea and Galilee, spreading through the eastern Mediterranean (1)Rome and central Italy (1)Scandinavia and the Norse settlements of the North Atlantic (1)The Hijaz, in western Arabia: Mecca and Medina (1)The Slavic lands of eastern Europe (1)The southern Levant: the highlands of Israel and Judah (1)Point in DisputeAllScholarship on Rodnovery (Kaarina Aitamurto own fieldwork, and the comparative volume Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe: Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses) documents that the movement spans a genuine range from inclusive polytheism to explicitly racialized ethnic mysticism, with porous boundaries between apolitical, left-wing and far-right currents. The most politicized nationalist strands are also the most publicly visible, since they promote their views most actively through media and anti-Christian campaigns, which has at times misrepresented the movement as a whole in outside coverage. (1)Position on MarriageAllMarriage may licitly be polygynous (1)Position on SexualityAllSame-sex orientation or practice is held to bar full membership or participation (1)The body holds no single settled position; the question is actively and openly contested within it (2)Position on UsuryAllInterest is permitted but bound by ethical constraints against exploiting the poor (1)Interest of any kind on a loan is forbidden (1)Practice StatusAllDiscontinued as a state religion (4)Living, and in active revival (1)Living, and practised in varied local forms (1)Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders (2)Restoration ClaimAllAdherents describe Rodnovery as continuing or restoring the ancestral pre-Christian faith of the Slavic peoples; scholars class it as a modern reconstruction built from folklore, chronicle references and comparative mythology, since no institution or lineage carried the pre-Christian religion forward after 988. (1)Sexuality Position DetailAllChristianity is governed by no single worldwide teaching authority, and its major bodies read at every point on this question today. The Roman Catholic Church's Catechism of the Catholic Church holds that homosexual acts are contrary to natural law while insisting that persons with homosexual tendencies must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity, and reserves marriage to a man and a woman. The Russian Orthodox Church's Basis of the Social Concept, adopted at its Jubilee Bishops Council in August 2000, names homosexuality a sinful distortion of human nature and bars anyone who promotes it as a norm from work with children or youth or from military or reformatory positions, reaching beyond ordination. The United Methodist Church, one of the tradition's largest global bodies, ended its forty-year ban on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage at its 2024 General Conference. The Anglican Communion, in its own 2022 Lambeth Conference Call on Human Dignity, states that its forty-two member provinces hold differing convictions and pastoral practices on this question, some blessing same-sex unions and others continuing to hold that marriage is exclusively the lifelong union of a man and a woman. No statement speaks for Christianity as a whole. (1)Classical Islamic jurisprudence treats homosexual acts, generally termed liwat in the legal literature, as unlawful across all four Sunni schools, though the schools differ on the exact legal category and punishment. The Shafi'i, Hanbali and main Maliki position hold the punishment mirrors that for zina under the hadd category, a fixed penalty applied only under strict evidentiary conditions such as four eyewitnesses or a clear confession; the Maliki school's own harshest reading holds both parties subject to execution regardless of marital status; the Hanafi school instead leans toward a discretionary punishment, ta'zir, set by a judge rather than a fixed hadd penalty, on the reasoning that the specific evidentiary threshold hadd requires was not met by the available textual evidence. Across all four schools, the same-sex attraction itself is treated as distinct from the act and is not, on its own, held to be sinful; the legal rulings address conduct. (1)Judaism is governed by no single worldwide teaching authority, and its recognized movements read at every point on this question today. The Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis authorized rabbis to officiate at same-sex ceremonies in 2000 and, in a 2014 responsum, held that a same-sex union may constitute Jewish marriage, kiddushin, in the full sense. The Reconstructionist and Humanistic movements likewise affirm same-sex marriage and ordain LGBTQ clergy. The Conservative movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards issued a combined responsum in 2006 that itself left the question unsettled, approving some liberalizing opinions on ordination and commitment ceremonies alongside others that retained the traditional prohibition, so both readings stand as valid within the movement. Orthodox Judaism, including its Modern Orthodox and Haredi streams, holds that the Torah forbids homosexual acts and sanctions only the marriage of a man and a woman, generally without denying a gay Jew ordinary synagogue membership. No statement speaks for Judaism as a whole. (1)Standard Rate ExpectedAllTen percent. (1)Two and a half percent. (1)Standing Giving ExpectationAllMa'aser kesafim, giving one tenth of income to charitable causes (tzedakah), is a widely practiced Jewish norm modeled on the Torah's agricultural tithes. Most halachic authorities today hold that it is not itself a biblical or rabbinic commandment but a minhag, a custom, though a small number of authorities have argued it carries binding force; the debate itself is long standing and unsettled rather than resolved in either direction. (1)Zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam, obliges a Muslim whose accumulated wealth exceeds a minimum threshold (nisab) to give 2.5 percent of that qualifying wealth annually. The Quran (9:60) names eight categories of recipients. In several Muslim-majority countries zakat is collected by the state itself rather than left to the individual, giving the obligation a legal as well as a religious force there; elsewhere it is a personal duty of conscience understood to be as central to Islamic practice as prayer and fasting. (1)Status TodayAllHistorical; not practised continuously (4)Living tradition, practised today (4)Revived or reconstructed in the modern era (1)Supreme BeingAllAllah, God, held to be one and without partner or equal. (1)Ancient Greek religion recognised no single supreme being; Zeus held authority as king of the gods among the Olympians without being their sole creator or an object of exclusive worship. (1)Reconstructed Slavic religion centres on a pantheon including the thunder god Perun and the god Veles, associated with cattle, the underworld and magic, known chiefly from a small number of medieval chronicle references. (1)The God of Israel, understood as one, without partner or physical form, referred to in the Hebrew Bible by the name written as the tetragrammaton. (1)The triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one being in three persons. (1)TheologyAllMonotheistic: one God (3)Polytheistic: many gods (5)Transgression CategoryAllAkl mal al-yatim: consuming the wealth of an orphan. (1)Al-tawalli yawm al-zahf: fleeing from the battlefield. (1)Avon: iniquity, a sin arising from desire or moral failure, held more culpable than chet. (1)Chet: an unintentional sin, literally a missing of the mark, wrongdoing through error rather than intent. (1)Pesha: transgression, a willful rebellion against God, the most severe of the three, an intentional defiance rather than a lapse. (1)Qadhf: slandering chaste, believing women with unchastity. (1)Qatl al-nafs: killing a soul that Allah has forbidden, except by right. (1)Riba: consuming usury or interest. (1)Shirk: associating partners with Allah, the first and gravest of the Seven Destructive Sins (as-sab al-mubiqat). (1)Sihr: magic or sorcery. (1)Sin, understood as thought, word, deed or omission contrary to the will of God, ranging in Catholic moral theology from venial to mortal sin. (1)Usury Position DetailAllThe heter iska, literally a permit for a joint venture, restructures what would otherwise be an interest bearing loan between Jews into a shared business investment: the party supplying the capital and the party using it become partners sharing profit and loss rather than creditor and debtor, so any return the capital earns is a business profit, not loan interest, and the Torah's prohibition on taking interest from a fellow Jew (Exodus 22:24, Leviticus 25:36-37, Deuteronomy 23:19) is honestly not triggered rather than evaded on paper. The mechanism's formalization is credited to named medieval authorities, Rabbi Baruch ben Isaac's Sefer Ha-Terumah and Rabbi Yisrael Isserlin's Terumat Ha-Deshen among them, developed across the medieval period rather than at a single settled date. It remains in common use today, including for interest bearing accounts at banks under rabbinical supervision. (1)The Quran's treatment of riba came in stages rather than all at once. An early Meccan verse, Surah Al-Rum 30:39, contrasted interest unfavorably with charity as moral guidance, without yet imposing a legal ban. After the migration to Medina the tone sharpened: Surah Al-Nisa 4:161 rebukes an earlier community for taking interest despite being forbidden it, and Surah Al-Imran 3:130, revealed after the Battle of Uhud, specifically condemns compounding interest. The final and complete prohibition, covering interest of any kind, came in Surah Al-Baqarah 2:275-281, revealed near the end of the Prophet's life and describing persistence in the practice as tantamount to war against God and His messenger. This is why contemporary Islamic finance avoids interest bearing loans altogether, structuring transactions instead as profit and loss sharing partnerships or cost-plus sales. (1)BrowseCompareAncient Greek ReligionPrincipal Tradition Of1 entryChristianityPrincipal Tradition Of10 entriesEtruscan ReligionPrincipal Tradition Of1 entryIslamPrincipal Tradition Of3 entriesJudaismPrincipal Tradition Of3 entriesNorse PaganismPrincipal Tradition Of1 entryRoman ReligionPrincipal Tradition Of1 entrySlavic Native Faith (Rodnovery)Principal Tradition Of1 entrySources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category TreeComments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. 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