Where the World's Religions Agree, and Where They Only Sound Like It

How to read the grid

Twelve traditions across the top, fifteen questions down the side, and in each cell a mark for how that tradition stands on that question. Select any cell to read what is behind it, any question to see who else holds it, any tradition to see what it is closest to.

The marks are graded rather than yes-or-no, and that is the whole point of the thing. A grid that recorded belief as present or absent would have to say that Christianity and Islam both hold Jesus at the centre — which is true, and which conceals that one calls him God and the other calls that claim the one unforgivable error. So there are five grades, and one of them exists purely for shared vocabulary hiding different content.

Nothing here adjudicates. The grid records what traditions teach, not which of them is right, and no arrangement of marks can settle that.

Two blocks, and the seam between them

The first thing the grid does is separate itself into two.

Up and to the left: one God, personal, revealing scripture through prophets, raising the dead and judging them. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and the Baháʼí Faith sit almost solidly in it.

Down and to the right: rebirth, karma, and release from the cycle as the goal of the entire exercise. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism hold that block, and almost nothing of the first.

These are not two sets of answers to the same questions. They are two different questions. One asks what happens when you die and are judged. The other asks how to stop being born. A tradition can answer one at length and have no position at all on the other, and most of them do.

Then there is the seam. Sikhism holds one formless God, in the first block's sense — and karma, rebirth, and liberation, in the second's. Not as a compromise or a syncretism, but as a single position worked out in one place over one lifetime. It is the column that belongs to both halves of the grid, and the only one.

The closest pair is the one with the longest quarrel

Run every pair of traditions against all fifteen questions and count where they land on the same grade. The highest score in the set is not a near miss or a curiosity.

Christianity and Islam agree on ten of fifteen. No other pair reaches eight.

They agree that there is one God, that God is personal, that a scripture is revealed, that prophets are a real office, that the dead will be raised in bodies, that there is a final judgment, that heaven and hell are destinations, that Abraham is a patriarch, that rebirth is not a thing that happens, and that karma is not how the world works.

Where they part, they part completely, and the four disagreements are not small ones. But a thousand years of war between two traditions has been conducted between the two closest neighbours on this grid.

The smallest tradition here is upstream of the largest

Zoroastrianism has perhaps two hundred thousand adherents. It is the smallest entry in the set by two orders of magnitude, and it scores seven of fifteen with Christianity and seven with Islam — higher than either scores with anything except each other.

It teaches one God against a hostile principle, a cosmic history running toward a conclusion, a judgment of each person, and at the end the bodily resurrection of the dead into a world made new. It taught all of that, in Persia, before the traditions that now carry those ideas to four billion people existed.

Historians argue about how much moved across and when. The grid cannot settle that and does not try. What it can show is that the pattern of this tiny, ancient tradition is the same pattern the two largest religions on earth are built on.

Where the same word hides a different thing

The grade that earns its place is the one for a belief that is present and means something else.

Jesus is the clearest case. He is central to Christianity as God made flesh. He is central to Islam as a prophet born of a virgin who was not crucified and is emphatically not divine. He is central to the Baháʼí Faith as one Manifestation in a sequence that has no last member. Three traditions, the same figure, three incompatible accounts — and a grid that marked each of them "holds it" would be recording agreement where the sharpest disagreement in the set is.

The same trap is set at judgment. Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism describe a reckoning conducted by someone. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism describe consequences that arrive on their own, with nobody presiding. Both look like justice after death. Only one of them has a judge.

And at rebirth, the grid asks twice on purpose.

Are you born again? Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism all say yes. Is it you who is born again — a self that passes from one life into the next? The first three say yes. Buddhism says no, and says it as doctrine rather than as a quibble: anatta, no permanent self, so what continues is a chain of causes and not a passenger changing vehicles. It is the only tradition on this grid that teaches rebirth and denies reincarnation, and Buddhists have spent two millennia insisting the difference is the whole point.

Two rows that would have been one in any chart built out of yes and no.

The most divided question, and the emptiest agreement

Of the fifteen, the one that splits the set hardest is heaven and hell. Every one of the five grades appears in that row: central for three traditions, held loosely by three, varying by school in two, reframed into something temporary in two, and simply absent in two. Twelve traditions, five different relationships to the same idea.

The questions with the most agreement are the reverse trick. Abraham and Jesus both look settled, at two-thirds consensus. But the agreement is eight traditions having no position at all. A question can look resolved because everyone said yes, or because almost nobody was asked.

What this grid cannot do

Four things, stated plainly, because a chart like this invites more confidence than it has earned.

It flattens internal disagreement. Hinduism is not one system — its schools range from strict monotheism to an impersonal absolute to frank polytheism, and the "varies" mark is doing an enormous amount of work in that column. Every tradition here contains people who would answer differently from the mark.

The questions are a choice, and a choice with a slant. These fifteen were selected by someone raised downstream of the first block, and questions like is there one God and is there a final judgment come out of that tradition's own preoccupations. Asked instead about purity, ancestors, or right relation to a place, Shinto and Confucianism would not look nearly so empty as they do here.

Counting adherents is not a solved problem. The figures come from Pew's 2020 estimates where they exist, and from encyclopedic estimates elsewhere, which vary by source. Most Japanese participate in Shinto rites without counting themselves adherents. Whether Confucianism is a religion at all is a live argument, and it is here because that argument is worth knowing about.

Agreement on a grid is not agreement in life. Two traditions can match on fourteen of fifteen and still be irreconcilable on the fifteenth, if the fifteenth is the one that matters. Christianity and Islam are the demonstration.

Check it

Every position is one selection away from the reasoning behind it, and the file behind the grid is a single readable document. Where a tradition is more varied than one mark can carry, the mark says so rather than picking a side.

If you hold one of these traditions and the grid has you wrong, it is wrong, and that is worth knowing.

Where they actually are

The grid says nothing about geography, and belief is not distributed evenly. The map below colours every country by its largest religious group.

Three things in it are worth pausing on.

The largest group in China, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam is no religion at all. Around 90% of people in China are religiously unaffiliated, and 57% in Japan — which sits alongside the fact that most Japanese still take part in Shinto and Buddhist rites. Affiliation and practice are different measurements, and a map can only show one of them.

Nigeria is Muslim-majority, at roughly 56% against 43% Christian, with the two concentrated in the north and the south. It is often coloured the other way.

And the map flatters every close call. Eritrea is near evenly split. Lebanon has not held a census since 1932, by design. A single colour per country is the compromise that makes a map readable and the thing that makes it wrong; where the margin is narrow, selecting the country will say so.

Together the two graphics answer different halves of the same question. One shows what these traditions teach. The other shows where the people who hold them live — and a large part of that map now belongs to people who hold none of them.