# World Religions Timeline The comparative chronological spine for the traditions documented in [[Religions Hub]] - from the first evidence of ritual behavior through the [[Axial Age]] breakthrough, the imperial state religions, the Reformation, the colonial invention of "world religions" as a category, and the religious-political fusions of the present. It is the **time axis** across the substrate layer: where [[Religions Hub]] describes each tradition standing still, this page shows them moving in parallel, and shows how often what looks like an internal theological development turns out to be a political event with a theological name. Two companion pages carry the load this one deliberately does not. [[History of Religion Hub]] is the analytical treatment of organized religion as institutional power, weighted toward the American story. [[Christian Right Timeline]] is the granular chronology of the US Christian Right's institutional buildout from the 1970s forward; the entries here for that period are summary pointers into it. For the political payoff across all traditions, see [[Religions and Right-Wing Politics]]. > [!warning] On dates > Religious chronology is contested to a degree that political chronology rarely is. Founding dates for pre-modern traditions are inferences from texts that were themselves composed and redacted over centuries, often by people with reasons to date them a particular way. Where scholars genuinely disagree, this page gives the range and names the dispute rather than picking a winner. Four popular claims are actively **wrong** and are flagged in place: that the Council of Nicaea fixed the biblical canon, that the "Edict of Milan" was an edict issued at Milan, that a Council of Jamnia closed the Hebrew canon, and that Luther nailed the Ninety-Five Theses to a door. --- ## 0. Before Religion Had a Name (c. 100,000 - 3000 BCE) There is no point at which religion begins. There is only the point at which behavior starts leaving evidence that is hard to explain any other way. - **c. 100,000 BP** - Burials at Qafzeh Cave in the southern Levant include bodies interred with red ochre and ochre-stained tools. Whether this constitutes deliberate grave goods or incidental sediment is disputed; claims of intentional burial among earlier hominins are disputed much more sharply. Treat "the earliest burial" as an argument, not a finding. - **c. 32,000 - 28,500 BCE** - The Sungir burials in Russia are unambiguous: bodies interred with more than 13,000 carved ivory beads, spears, and ochre. Producing those beads represents thousands of hours of labor expended on the dead. Whatever the belief was, the society was willing to pay for it. - **c. 9500 - 8000 BCE** - Construction and use of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia - monumental T-pillared enclosures raised by people without pottery, metal, or (initially) domesticated crops. The popular claim that it proves "the temple came before the farm" has not held up: continued excavation has found domestic structures, large-scale cereal processing, and water cisterns, so ritual and ordinary settlement coexisted. What survives of the original claim is still significant - large-scale coordinated construction preceded the state. - **c. 9000 - 3500 BCE** - The Neolithic transition across the Fertile Crescent, the Yellow River basin, Mesoamerica, and coastal Peru. Agriculture produces surplus; surplus produces stratification; stratification produces a priestly class with an interest in explaining why the arrangement is cosmically correct. See Ancient Civilizations Timeline for the civilizational track running alongside this one. - **Throughout** - The traditions grouped under [[Indigenous Religious Traditions]] are not a stage that the "world religions" grew out of. They are continuous living traditions, many of them still practiced, and the habit of filing them as prehistory is itself an artifact of the 19th-century colonial scholarship discussed in Era VI. --- ## I. The First State Religions (c. 3000 - 1200 BCE) The Bronze Age invention is not belief. It is the **fusion of belief with administration** - temple, treasury, granary, and throne in one institution. - **c. 3500 - 3000 BCE** - Temple economies in Sumer. The ziggurat is simultaneously a shrine, a warehouse, and a tax office. Priest-kings in Uruk, Ur, and Lagash administer surplus in the name of a city god. The template is complete before writing is fully mature - and writing itself first appears as temple accounting. - **c. 3100 BCE** - Unification of Ancient Egypt under a pharaoh understood as divine rather than merely divinely sanctioned. Egyptian *maat* - cosmic order - makes political dissent metaphysically identical to chaos, which is the single most efficient legitimation device any state has ever devised. Later regimes would spend three thousand years trying to reconstruct it. - **c. 2600 - 1900 BCE** - Mature phase of the Indus Valley Civilization. No identifiable temples, no royal tombs, an undeciphered script. Its relationship to later [[Hinduism]] is genuinely unknown and heavily politicized in modern India. - **c. 1750 - 1000 BCE** - The likeliest window for **Zoroaster** (Zarathustra) in Central Asia or eastern Iran. This is one of the most contested dates in the history of religion: the linguistic archaism of the Gathic hymns points to the second millennium BCE, while a Pahlavi tradition places him "258 years before Alexander," i.e. c. 570 BCE. Encyclopaedia Iranica's own summary is that reputable scholars have proposed dates roughly 1,200 years apart. Whichever is right, [[Zoroastrianism]]'s contributions - cosmic dualism of good and evil, individual judgment after death, bodily resurrection, a final battle and renovation of the world - become structural furniture in [[Judaism]], [[Christianity]], and [[Islam]]. - **c. 1500 - 1200 BCE** - Composition of the bulk of the **Rigveda** in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent; the family books (Mandalas 2-7) are oldest. Dating is internal and stylistic, not archaeological, and is a live political question in India, where much earlier dates circulate in Hindu-nationalist writing outside mainstream Indology. - **c. 1353 - 1336 BCE** - **Akhenaten**'s Atenist reform in Ancient Egypt: the elevation of the sun-disc Aten to sole object of worship, a new capital at Akhetaten, and the defacing of rival gods' names. Whether this was true monotheism or royal monolatry is argued; what is not argued is how fast it collapsed. Within a few years of his death the court had returned to Amun and Tutankhaten had renamed himself Tutankhamun. **The first monotheistic experiment on record failed inside a single reign** - a data point worth keeping when anyone claims religious revolutions are irreversible. - **c. 1200 - 1150 BCE** - The Late Bronze Age Collapse destroys the Hittite Empire, ends Mycenaean Greece, and shatters the eastern Mediterranean's temple-palace order. What comes out the other side is different in kind - and the next four centuries produce nearly everything we now call world religion. --- ## II. The Axial Turn (c. 800 - 200 BCE) > [!note] The Axial Age is a framing device, not a period > Karl Jaspers proposed the concept in 1949 to describe an apparently simultaneous flowering of transcendent ethical thought across Eurasia. The clustering is real; the explanation is not established. Diarmaid MacCulloch calls the concept "a baggy monster"; Iain Provan wrote a book-length rejection; the standard objections are that the four civilizations involved had little contact, that no common cause has been demonstrated, and that the boundaries conveniently exclude Akhenaten, Jesus, and Muhammad. Use it as a shelf label. Do not use it as a cause. - **c. 800 - 300 BCE** - Composition of the principal **Upanishads**, oldest among them the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya (7th-6th century BCE, pre-Buddhist). They shift Vedic religion from sacrificial ritual toward inquiry into the self and ultimate reality - *atman*, *brahman*, *karma*, *samsara*, *moksha* - the conceptual vocabulary that all later [[Hinduism]], [[Buddhism]], and [[Jainism]] argue within. - **722 and 586 BCE** - Assyria destroys the northern kingdom of Israel; Babylonia destroys Jerusalem and its temple. See Kingdom of Israel and Judah. - **622 BCE** - **Josiah's reform** in Judah: centralization of worship in Jerusalem, suppression of rival shrines, and the "discovery" of a law book in the temple. The scholarly model is that Iron Age Yahwism was **monolatrous** - worship one god, don't deny the others exist - and that explicit monotheism, the claim that the other gods are not there at all, crystallizes only in and after the Exile, in Deutero-Isaiah. Monotheism is not the starting point of [[Judaism]]. It is an outcome of catastrophe. - **597 - 538 BCE** - The **Babylonian Exile**. Deported elites in Babylon produce, under conditions of statelessness, the innovations that let a religion survive without a temple or a land: portable scripture, sabbath and dietary law as identity markers, synagogue-style assembly, and a theology in which defeat proves the covenant rather than refuting it. **This is the most consequential adaptation in the history of religion** - it is the invention of a faith that does not require a state, and every diaspora tradition since has run some version of it. - **539 BCE** - [[Cyrus the Great]] takes Babylon and permits the exiles to return, an act memorialized in the Hebrew Bible and recycled twenty-five centuries later as the [[Cyrus Prophecy]] - the evangelical argument that God uses unbelieving rulers as instruments, applied to Donald Trump from 2016 onward. Achaemenid Persia also makes [[Zoroastrianism]] an imperial religion and pioneers religious pluralism as an administrative technique. - **c. 599 - 527 BCE (traditional) / possibly a century later** - **Mahavira**, the 24th and last *tirthankara* of [[Jainism]], systematizes a tradition of radical non-violence (*ahimsa*), asceticism, and non-absolutism. Britannica notes the traditional dates may be as much as a century early; his dating moves with the Buddha's. - **c. 480 - 400 BCE (short chronology) / c. 566 - 486 BCE (revised long chronology)** - **Siddhartha Gautama**, the Buddha. There is no consensus. At a 1988 Göttingen symposium a majority of specialists put his death within twenty years either side of **400 BCE**; the textbook dates of 563-483 BCE are now generally considered too early. [[Buddhism]] is the first tradition to propagate deliberately across cultural boundaries without an ethnic or territorial base - the first missionary religion, four centuries before Paul. - **c. 551 - 479 BCE** - **Confucius**. The dates are the least contested on this list; the attributions are not, since the *Analects* is layered material assembled after his death. [[Confucianism]] supplies East Asia with a political theology of hierarchy, reciprocal obligation, and rule legitimated by virtue rather than force - compatible with, and eventually fused to, the Mandate of Heaven. - **c. 5th - 3rd century BCE** - The *Daodejing* accretes into something like final form. **Laozi** as a single 6th-century author is legend, not scholarship; the Guodian bamboo manuscripts (c. 300 BCE) are the earliest hard evidence. [[Daoism]] becomes the counter-tradition to Confucian order, and later - via *wu wei* misread as laissez-faire - a favorite citation in American libertarian writing. - **c. 470 - 322 BCE** - [[Socrates]], [[Plato]], and [[Aristotle]]. Greek philosophy is not a religion, but it supplies the metaphysical apparatus - the immortal soul, the unmoved mover, the forms - that [[Christianity]] and [[Islam]] will later use to make themselves intellectually respectable to elites. See [[Philosophy of Religion]]. - **c. 3rd century BCE** - **Ashoka** converts to [[Buddhism]] after the Kalinga war and sponsors its spread by edict and mission across South Asia and toward the Hellenistic world. State sponsorship makes a regional movement continental - the same mechanism that will make [[Christianity]] European six centuries later and Salafism global in the 1970s. --- ## III. Empire and Universal Religion (c. 200 BCE - 600 CE) The Axial traditions were mostly local. What follows is the discovery that a religion attached to an empire can become a civilization. - **c. 4 BCE - c. 33 CE** - **Jesus of Nazareth**. Scholarly ranges: birth c. 7-2 BCE, crucifixion c. 30-36 CE, bounded by Pilate's prefecture (26-36 CE). Matthew's chronology (Herod, d. 4 BCE) and Luke's (the Quirinius census, 6 CE) are irreconcilable. His baptism and execution are the two points of near-universal scholarly agreement about his life. - **c. 33 - 65 CE** - Paul's mission decouples the movement from Jewish ethnic identity and Torah observance for gentile converts. Without that decision [[Christianity]] is a Jewish sect; with it, it is a universal religion. This is the single most important organizational choice in the tradition's history and it was made within a generation of the founder's death. - **c. 65 - 200 CE** - **[[Buddhism]] reaches China** along the Silk Road; the White Horse Temple legend is legendary, but An Shigao's translations (148-170 CE) are documented. The Kushan empire is the transmission belt. - **70 CE** - Rome destroys the Second Temple. Sacrificial Judaism ends permanently; **rabbinic Judaism** - text, law, and study in place of altar and priest - replaces it. The Exile's innovation becomes the whole structure. - **c. 200 CE** - Redaction of the **Mishnah** under Judah ha-Nasi. The Jerusalem Talmud follows in the late 4th to mid-5th century, the Babylonian Talmud c. 500 CE with final redaction into the 6th and 7th. On the closing of the Hebrew canon there is **no consensus** - proposals range from the Hasmonean period to the 2nd century CE or later. The frequently repeated claim that a "Council of Jamnia" closed the canon around 90 CE is a discredited 1871 hypothesis; it was dismantled decades ago and should not appear on anyone's timeline. - **c. 216 - 274/277 CE** - **Mani** and the rise of Manichaeism, a genuinely universalist synthesis of Zoroastrian, Christian, and Buddhist elements that spread from Rome to China before being crushed everywhere. Its cosmic light-versus-darkness dualism survives as a permanent temptation in Western political rhetoric - the vault treats that pattern as a mental model rather than a living faith. - **c. 270 - 348 CE** - Christian monasticism: Anthony withdraws to the Egyptian desert (c. 270), Pachomius founds the first communal monastery at Tabennisi (318-323). Monasteries become the West's libraries, schools, banks, and agricultural laboratories for a thousand years. - **February 313 CE** - The **so-called "Edict of Milan."** Two corrections: it was a letter from Licinius to eastern provincial governors, issued at Nicomedia, and whether a formal edict was ever promulgated at Milan is not seriously debated among historians - it wasn't. It was also preceded by Galerius's Edict of Serdica (30 April 311). What is real is the policy: toleration, and the beginning of imperial patronage. - **May-August 325 CE** - The **First Council of Nicaea**, convened by Constantine. It condemned Arius, produced the original Nicene Creed, standardized the date of Easter, and issued twenty canons. **It did not decide the biblical canon** - there is no record of the canon being discussed at all, and the story of books miraculously sorting themselves on an altar traces to a source of c. 887. What Nicaea actually established is the precedent that matters: **a Roman emperor convening bishops to settle doctrine**. The state gets legitimacy, the church gets enforcement, and the arrangement runs for the next seventeen centuries. - **27 February 380 CE** - The **Edict of Thessalonica** makes Nicene [[Christianity]] the official religion of the empire and brands the alternatives heresy. Sixty-seven years from persecuted sect to persecuting establishment. - **8 October - 1 November 451 CE** - The **Council of Chalcedon** and the first permanent split in Christianity. The churches that rejected its formula - Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Malankara - constitute [[Oriental Orthodoxy]] and call themselves **Miaphysite**, rejecting "Monophysite" as polemical misdescription. Current scholarship reads the break as substantially terminological and imperial-political rather than a clean doctrinal disagreement. The [[Armenian Genocide]] and the modern position of Egypt's Copts are downstream of a communion that has been a minority under other people's states for fifteen centuries. See also [[Maronite Christians]] and [[Melkite Greek Catholic Church]]. - **c. 500 - 600 CE** - Buddhism reaches Japan in the mid-6th century; the *Nihon Shoki* gives 552 CE, other sources 538, and both are considered unreliable. Its accommodation with indigenous kami worship produces the syncretic arrangement that [[Shinto]] will later be violently separated from. --- ## IV. Islam and the Medieval Order (600 - 1400) - **c. 570 - 632 CE** - **Muhammad**. Born c. 570 (approximate, tied to the legendary Year of the Elephant); first revelation traditionally 610; the **Hijra to Medina in 622 CE** begins the Islamic calendar and is the firmest date in the sequence; death 8 June 632. The Hijra is the pivot: at Mecca Muhammad led a persecuted minority, at Medina he governed a polity. [[Islam]] therefore contains from its origin a fully articulated theory of religious governance, which is why the question of the Islamic state is native to the tradition in a way that Christian political theology had to be retrofitted after Constantine. - **632 - 661 CE** - The succession crisis. Abu Bakr acclaimed at Saqifah; the party of Ali dissents; the First Fitna (656-661) ends with Ali's assassination and Umayyad dynastic rule. - **c. 650 CE** - The **Uthmanic recension** of the Quran. 1970s revisionist arguments for late-7th-century canonization have largely collapsed against manuscript evidence - the Birmingham folios and the Sanaa palimpsest both radiocarbon-date to the 7th century - and Western scholarship has moved back toward broadly accepting the traditional account. - **10 October 680 CE** - **Karbala**. Husayn ibn Ali is killed with his party by Umayyad forces. The event becomes the devotional heart of [[Shia Islam]] - but retrospectively. The formal Sunni-Shia separation is gradual: legal and doctrinal schools crystallize across the 9th and 10th centuries, practice remained intertwined into the 13th and 14th, and hard state-enforced sectarian identity dates from the Safavids after **1501**. The claim that Sunnis and Shia have been fighting for 1,400 years is false, and it has been useful to a great many people - see [[Sunni Islam]], [[Shia Islam]], and [[Sunni vs. Shia]]. - **8th - 12th centuries** - The formation of the four Sunni legal schools; the Ashari-Maturidi theological synthesis; and the emergence of [[Sufism]], legitimized decisively by al-Ghazali (1058-1111). For most of Islamic history Sufism was not a fringe but the ordinary devotional texture of Muslim life from Senegal to Java. - **25 December 800 CE** - Pope Leo III crowns [[Charlemagne]] emperor. Western Christendom's founding template: political authority legitimized by religious blessing, religious authority protected by political force. The Investiture Controversy that follows is the first sustained argument in European history over which side owns the other. - **1054** - The **East-West Schism**: mutual excommunications between Rome and Constantinople. Historians treat the date as symbolic rather than causal - the divergence ran for centuries through the Acacian and Photian schisms, the *filioque*, language, and papal primacy, and the **1204 sack of Constantinople** by the Fourth Crusade is what made the break popularly irreversible. [[Eastern Orthodoxy]] and [[Catholicism]] emerge as distinct civilizational tracks, and Byzantine caesaropapism becomes the model that the [[Russian Orthodox Church]] still runs on - visible today in [[Russkii Mir]]. - **1095 - 1291** - The **Crusades**, conventionally dated from Urban II at Clermont to the fall of Acre. Both the numbering and the endpoint are retrospective constructions: 16th-century writers counted six, 18th-century historians five to nine, and the familiar nine were fixed by Charles Mills in the 19th century. "Pluralist" historians who define a crusade by papal authorization rather than by target extend the phenomenon to the Reconquista, the Baltic, the Albigensian campaign, and into the early modern period. What is not retrospective is the invention: **holy war declared by religious authority, fought for spiritual reward.** [[Crusader Complex]] tracks its afterlife in the contemporary right. - **1478/1480 - 1834** - The **Spanish Inquisition**, established by papal bull under Sixtus IV with the first inquisitors appointed in 1480. Its end is messier than usually stated - abolished 1808-12, again in 1813, restored 1814, abolished 1820-23, restored, finally ended 1834, with the last execution for heresy in 1826. The institution is the enforcement half of the church-state bargain, and it is the historical referent that makes [[Dominionism]] and [[Theonomy]] descriptions of something that existed rather than abstractions. - **1265 - 1274** - Thomas Aquinas writes the *[[Summa Theologica]]*, fusing [[Aristotle]] with Christian doctrine and supplying the natural-law framework that [[Integralism]] and [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]] draw on today. --- ## V. Fracture: Reformation, Wars of Religion, and the Sikh Founding (1400 - 1700) - **1469 - 1539** - **Guru Nanak**, founder of [[Sikhism]], in the Punjab: one God, rejection of caste and of ritual formalism, householder life rather than asceticism. The tradition emerges in a zone of Hindu-Muslim contact and is reducible to neither. The janamsakhi hagiographies are late and unreliable; the dates are firm. - **1501** - Ismail I establishes Safavid rule in Persia and imposes Twelver [[Shia Islam]] by force. The modern sectarian map of the Middle East is roughly five centuries old, not fourteen, and it was made by a state. - **31 October 1517** - **Luther's Ninety-Five Theses.** He sent them to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz that day; whether he nailed them to the Wittenberg church door is genuinely doubted. Luther never claimed it, the story comes from Melanchthon - who was not in Wittenberg in 1517 and did not record it until after Luther's death - and Erwin Iserloh's 1961 formulation still stands: they were not nailed, they were mailed. The date is secure. The hammer is not. - **1517 - 1648** - The Reformation fractures Western Christianity into [[Lutheranism]], [[Reformed Christianity]], [[Anglicanism]], and [[Anabaptism]], with [[Baptist Christianity]], [[Methodism]], and eventually [[Pentecostalism]] following. Three points are usually missed. First, Luther succeeded where Hus and Wycliffe failed largely because **German princes saw a chance to seize church property**. Second, [[Anglicanism]] began as a dynastic divorce, not a theological argument. Third, Calvin's Geneva (1541-1564) demonstrated that the Reformation could produce new theocracies rather than fewer - and [[R.J. Rushdoony]] cited Geneva explicitly as the model for [[Christian Reconstructionism]]. - **25 September 1555** - The **Peace of Augsburg**: *cuius regio, eius religio*. This is not religious freedom. It is **religious nationalism** - the prince picks, the subjects conform or emigrate, and serfs mostly could not emigrate. - **1545 - 1563** - The **Council of Trent** (25 sessions across three periods) defines the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Together with the Jesuits (1540) it produces the global missionary apparatus that carries [[Catholicism]] to the Americas, Asia, and Africa. - **1618 - 1648** - The Thirty Years' War kills perhaps a third of the German-speaking population. The **Peace of Westphalia (1648)** extends recognition to Calvinism, extends emigration rights to serfs, and bars forced conversion. It is routinely overread as the birth of tolerance and of the sovereign nation-state; both claims are heavily qualified in current scholarship. The durable lesson is bleaker: **religious-political movements do not moderate themselves; they are moderated by catastrophe.** - **1620 - 1692** - Puritan New England. John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" is not a state-controlled church but a church-controlled state - the direct ancestor of the providentialist history [[David Barton]] projects back onto the Founding. The [[Salem Witch Trials]] (1692) are its self-liquidating endpoint. - **13 April 1699** - Guru Gobind Singh founds the **Khalsa** at Anandpur Sahib. In 1708 he confers the Guruship on the scripture itself, ending the line of human Gurus - a striking structural solution to the succession problem that has broken so many other traditions. --- ## VI. Empire, Revival, and the Invention of "World Religions" (1700 - 1900) Two things happen at once in this era, and they are connected. Europe conquers most of the planet, and European scholars invent the category "world religions" to sort what they found. - **1730s - 1740s** - The **First Great Awakening** in the American colonies: itinerant preachers, emotional conversion, and the bypassing of established churches. **The label is contested.** Jon Butler argued it should be abandoned outright as an "interpretive fiction" - the revivals were regional, touched perhaps half the colonies, and were substantially inflated by later evangelical historiography. See [[Great Awakenings]]. - **c. 1700 - 1800** - **Hasidism** emerges in Podolia and Volhynia from the circle of the Baal Shem Tov; the Vilna Gaon's Mitnagdim counter-mobilize around rigorous Talmud study at Volozhin (1803). The two streams become the Hasidic and Litvish poles of what is now [[Haredi Judaism]]. - **1744** - The **Diriyah pact**: Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud trade religious legitimacy for political force in central Arabia. [[Wahhabism]] is born as a state project, and the bargain is still running. Structurally it is the same trade Constantine made in 325 and the same one American evangelicals made in 1979. - **1789 - 1815** - The French Revolution's dechristianization campaign, the Cult of Reason, and the Napoleonic settlement. The first serious attempt to build a polity on the explicit *negation* of religion, and the reference point every subsequent Catholic reactionary - through [[Integralism]] and [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]] - has argued against. - **1790s - 1830s** - The **Second Great Awakening**. Its offspring pull hard in opposite directions: the [[Abolition Movement]] and the temperance and women's-suffrage movements on one side, [[Manifest Destiny]] and continental dispossession on the other. **The same revival supplied the moral vocabulary for emancipation and for conquest**, which is the most important single fact about American religious politics and the one most consistently ignored by whichever side is currently claiming the mantle. - **1830 - 1890** - The **Restorationist explosion** in the American religious free market: [[Mormonism (LDS)]] (Book of Mormon, 1830), the Millerites and the Adventist bodies that followed the 1844 Great Disappointment, the Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, and the Stone-Campbell movement. See [[Restorationism]]. No establishment, no gatekeepers, and enormous religious innovation - the American arrangement's actual effect on religion was not secularization but proliferation. - **1810 - 1885** - **[[Reform Judaism]]** develops in the German states (Seesen 1810, Hamburg Temple 1818) and consolidates in America with the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885. [[Conservative Judaism]] emerges in reaction (Frankel's Breslau seminary; the Jewish Theological Seminary, 1886), and [[Modern Orthodox Judaism]] takes shape around Samson Raphael Hirsch's Frankfurt synthesis. **Judaism's denominational structure is a 19th-century response to emancipation** - the question of what a Jew is when the ghetto walls come down. - **1844 - 1892** - The Báb declares his mission in Persia (1844) and is executed for heresy (1850); Bahá'u'lláh declares his own prophetic claim in Baghdad in 1863, founding the [[Bahá'í Faith]] - the youngest of the traditions tracked in [[Religions Hub]], and one persecuted in Iran continuously since. - **1830s - 1909** - **Dispensationalism.** John Nelson Darby develops the pre-tribulation rapture and dispensational periodization of history, presenting it at the Powerscourt conferences (1831-1833); it is transmitted to American fundamentalism and hard-coded into the **Scofield Reference Bible (1909)**, whose study notes made Darby's scheme look like the plain sense of the text to generations of readers. Everything downstream - [[Christian Zionism]], *Left Behind*, [[Christian Eschatology]], [[Millennialism]] - runs through that apparatus. See [[Dispensationalism]] and [[Tim LaHaye]]. - **1868 - 1945** - **State Shinto** in Japan. The Meiji government forcibly separates [[Shinto]] from Buddhism, reorganizes shrines into a state hierarchy, and constructs an emperor-cult that it insists is not a religion but a civic duty. It is the cleanest case in the modern record of a state manufacturing a national religion from existing materials, and the standing comparison case for [[Christian Nationalism]]. - **1870 - 1900** - The First Vatican Council declares papal infallibility (1870) as the Papal States disappear - authority claimed inward as it is lost outward. Meanwhile European scholars build "comparative religion" as a discipline, and the **category of "world religions" is itself a colonial artifact**: what counted as a religion was what looked like Protestantism (a founder, a book, a creed), which is precisely why [[Confucianism]], [[Daoism]], [[Shinto]], and [[Indigenous Religious Traditions]] have been argued about ever since. --- ## VII. The Fundamentalist Century (1900 - 1979) - **1901 - 1906** - **[[Pentecostalism]]** erupts at Topeka and then Azusa Street in Los Angeles. Initially interracial, working-class, and dismissed by every established denomination, it becomes the fastest-growing form of Christianity on earth and now dominates the faith's expansion across the global South. - **1910 - 1915** - *The Fundamentals*, twelve volumes funded by the Stewart oil fortune, define the doctrinal core of [[Christian Fundamentalism]] - above all [[Biblical Inerrancy]]. - **10 - 21 July 1925** - The **[[Scopes Trial]]**. Guilty verdict, hundred-dollar fine, conviction overturned on a technicality in 1927. The popular story of fundamentalist humiliation and retreat comes mostly from *Inherit the Wind* (1955), not from the record. What actually happened is that fundamentalists withdrew from mainline institutions and **built a parallel one** - Bible colleges, radio networks, publishing houses, and eventually television - over fifty years of apparent quietism. That infrastructure is what made 1979 possible. - **1933 - 1945** - The **[[Holocaust]]**. Two-thirds of European Jewry murdered; the Haredi and Hasidic world of Eastern Europe effectively annihilated and later rebuilt from survivors in Brooklyn and Israel. The churches' record runs from complicity through silence to the Confessing Church minority, and the reckoning that follows reshapes Christian theology permanently. - **1947 - 1948** - Partition of India and the founding of [[Israel]]. Two of the modern world's most durable religious-territorial conflicts begin within a year of each other, both as decolonization settlements. - **1949 - 1976** - Religious suppression under Mao in China, culminating in the [[Cultural Revolution]]'s campaign against the "Four Olds." Temples, churches, and mosques closed or destroyed; the [[Falun Gong]] crackdown from 1999 and the current Sinicization program targeting Uyghur mosques and Tibetan monasteries are continuations of the same policy logic, not departures from it. - **1948 - 1957** - **[[Billy Graham]]**'s crusades make evangelicalism nationally respectable, and the Cold War fuses it to American nationalism. "Under God" enters the Pledge (1954) and "In God We Trust" becomes the national motto (1956) - a mid-century corporate-evangelical alliance documented in *[[One Nation Under God]]*. - **11 October 1962 - 8 December 1965** - The **[[Second Vatican Council]]**: vernacular liturgy, religious liberty, and *Nostra Aetate*'s repudiation of the deicide charge against Jews. The traditionalist reaction to Vatican II is the origin point of the entire integralist and traditionalist Catholic right, and the argument has not ended - as the 2026 Latin Mass dispute and the SSPX schism below make clear. - **1962 - 1971** - The Supreme Court bars organized school prayer (*Engel*, 1962) and devotional Bible reading (*Schempp*, 1963), and *Lemon* (1971) supplies the three-part Establishment Clause test that will govern for fifty years. These decisions become the founding grievance of the [[Religious Right]]. - **1970s** - The **new religious movements** moment: [[Unification Church]], [[International Society for Krishna Consciousness]], Children of God, Scientology going mainstream, [[Church Universal and Triumphant]], and the mass deaths at Jonestown (Peoples Temple, 1978). The backlash builds the anti-cult movement and, a decade later, the [[Satanic Panic]]. See [[Cults]]. - **1979** - The hinge year, in three places at once: - **Iran.** The Shah leaves on 16 January; [[Ruhollah Khomeini]] returns on 1 February; the monarchy falls on 11 February. The [[Iranian Revolution]] produces the modern world's only functioning constitutional [[Theocracy]] built by mass uprising, on the doctrine of *velayat-e faqih*. - **Mecca.** On 20 November, Juhayman al-Utaybi's militants seize the Grand Mosque. The Saudi response is not liberalization but capitulation to the clerical right - expanded religious authority at home and a vastly enlarged export program abroad. Global Sunni practice shifts toward Salafi literalism over the next generation not because it won an argument but because it won a funding competition. - **Lynchburg.** [[Jerry Falwell]] founds the [[Moral Majority]]. The conventional story dates the American religious right's mobilization to *[[Roe v. Wade]]* (1973); the documentary record points instead to the IRS revoking tax exemption from segregated Christian schools, culminating in *[[Bob Jones University v. United States]]* (1983). Abortion was adopted afterward as the more presentable cause. See [[Christian Right Timeline]]. These three were causally independent. That they landed in the same twelve months is coincidence - but the coincidence marks the end of the secularization consensus, and nobody who predicted religion's retreat from politics has recovered. --- ## VIII. The Fusion Era (1980 - 2016) - **1980 - 1989** - The [[Moral Majority]] delivers white evangelicals to Reagan; [[James Dobson]]'s [[Focus on the Family]] and the [[Family Research Council]] build the policy apparatus; the [[Council for National Policy]] coordinates it; [[Southern Baptist Convention]] conservatives complete their takeover of the denomination and its seminaries. [[R.J. Rushdoony]]'s *[[The Institutes of Biblical Law]]* (1973) and [[Francis Schaeffer]]'s *[[A Christian Manifesto]]* (1981) supply the theology of [[Theonomy]] and [[Dominionism]]. - **1989 - 1991** - Communism's collapse returns [[Eastern Orthodoxy]] to public life across Eastern Europe. The [[Russian Orthodox Church]] rebuilds fast and then fuses with the state; by the 2010s it supplies the theology of [[Russkii Mir]] and the blessing for Putin's wars - Byzantine caesaropapism running again on schedule. - **1988 - 2001** - [[Pat Robertson]]'s presidential run becomes the [[Christian Coalition]]; the [[Culture War]] is named at the 1992 Republican convention; [[Evangelicals and Catholics Together]] (1994) welds two historically hostile blocs into one voting coalition; the [[Prosperity Gospel]] scales through television with [[Kenneth Copeland]] and, later, [[Paula White]]. - **1990s - 2000s** - [[C. Peter Wagner]] names the [[New Apostolic Reformation]]; [[Lance Wallnau]] popularizes the [[Seven Mountain Mandate]]; the [[Apostolic-Prophetic Movement]] builds a charismatic network with no denominational accountability and enormous mobilizing reach. Meanwhile [[Tim LaHaye]]'s *Left Behind* novels sell in the tens of millions, making [[Dispensationalism]] the folk eschatology of American Christianity. - **11 September 2001** - The [[September 11 Attacks]]. [[Osama bin Laden]]'s jihadi-Salafism is a fringe reading of [[Sunni Islam]]; the American response treats it as Islam's authentic expression. The apparatus documented in [[Islamophobia]] and the [[War on Terror Timeline]] is built over the following decade, and [[Sikhism]] enters American consciousness chiefly through mistaken-identity violence. - **2010 - 2016** - The **legal turn.** [[Leonard Leo]] and the [[Federalist Society]] build the judicial pipeline; *[[Hobby Lobby]]* (2014) extends religious exemption to closely held corporations; *[[Obergefell v. Hodges]]* (2015) triggers the religious-liberty counter-mobilization that [[Alliance Defending Freedom]] and the [[Becket Fund]] litigate. [[Project Blitz]] begins seeding model Christian-nationalist legislation in state capitols. The [[Islamic State]] declares a caliphate (2014) and systematically destroys Sufi and Yazidi and Christian sites across Iraq and Syria. - **2014 - 2016** - Narendra Modi becomes Prime Minister of India (2014), moving Hindutva from movement to governing project; see [[Narendra Modi]]. And white evangelicals vote for Donald Trump at roughly 81 percent - the moment at which the movement's stated criterion for political leadership shifts openly from personal character to protection, formalized through the [[Trump Evangelical Advisory Board]] and the [[Cyrus Prophecy]]. --- ## IX. The Present (2017 - August 2026) - **2018 - 2019** - [[Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting]] in Pittsburgh and the [[Christchurch Mosque Shootings]] (2019). Both shooters cited [[Great Replacement Theory]]; the Pittsburgh gunman targeted a congregation for refugee work. The online conspiracy ecosystem has converged antisemitic and anti-Muslim mobilization onto a single narrative. See [[Antisemitism]]. - **1 June 2020** - The [[Lafayette Square Bible Photo Op]]. Not a policy but a liturgy, and a useful marker of what the fusion had become. - **6 January 2021** - The Capitol attack, saturated with religious symbolism and prayer, much of it supplied by [[New Apostolic Reformation]] networks. [[QAnon Timeline]] tracks the adjacent conspiracy stream. - **24 June 2022** - *[[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]]* overturns *[[Roe v. Wade]]*, delivering the movement's defining goal after forty-nine years. Three days later, *[[Kennedy v. Bremerton]]* (27 June 2022) discards the *Lemon* test for a "history and tradition" standard - **the more consequential decision of the two for church-state law**, because it changed the method rather than one outcome. *[[Carson v. Makin]]* (21 June 2022) had already required Maine to fund religious schools in its tuition program. - **2023 - 2025** - The **Ten Commandments campaign.** Louisiana enacts a classroom-display mandate (19 June 2024), Arkansas follows (14 April 2025), Texas passes SB 10 with a companion school-prayer bill (21 June 2025). Every one is initially enjoined - and the strategy is not to win the injunctions but to manufacture a circuit split that forces the Supreme Court to revisit *[[Stone v. Graham]]* (1980) under the *Kennedy* standard. It is working: on 20 February 2026 the en banc Fifth Circuit vacated the Louisiana injunction 12-6, and on 21 April 2026 the same court upheld Texas SB 10 by 9-8, holding explicitly that *Kennedy* displaced *Stone*. A cert petition is pending as of August 2026. - **2025** - **Rome turns over.** [[Pope Francis]] dies on 21 April 2025; the conclave opens 7 May; Robert Francis Prevost is elected on 8 May as [[Pope Leo XIV]], the first US-born pope. He takes an early and repeated line against the Trump administration's immigration enforcement, aligning with the US bishops' November 2025 special message - which places the Catholic hierarchy and the American Catholic right in open conflict for the first time in decades. See [[Right-Wing Catholic Ecosystem]]. - **22 May and 2 June 2025** - *Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond* deadlocks 4-4 with Barrett recused, blocking the first religious public charter school without setting precedent ([[St. Isidore Catholic Charter Case]]); *Catholic Charities Bureau v. Wisconsin* is decided 9-0 for the religious claimant. The unanimity in the second case matters: the free-exercise expansion is not a 6-3 project. - **1 May 2025 - 1 July 2026** - Executive Order 14291 creates the **Religious Liberty Commission**, chaired by [[Dan Patrick]] with [[Ben Carson]] as vice chair. A multifaith coalition sues in February 2026 over its composition. Its 224-page draft report (26 June 2026, released 1 July) identifies hundreds of allegedly anti-religious statutes and regulations and proposes a federal "Equal Treatment Rule." Read alongside [[Project 2025]] and [[Russell Vought]]'s administrative program, it is the [[Religious Liberty]] frame operating as a governing agenda rather than a defensive one. - **2024 - 2026** - **Religious nationalism as a governing form, globally.** The Ram Mandir consecration at Ayodhya (22 January 2024) with [[Narendra Modi]] presiding on the site of the demolished Babri Masjid; India's Waqf (Amendment) Act (April 2025), partially stayed by the Supreme Court in September 2025; [[Syria]]'s post-Assad Constitutional Declaration (13 March 2025) making Islamic jurisprudence the main source of legislation under [[Ahmed al-Sharaa]], followed by mass killings of Alawites and the Suwayda violence against the [[Druze]]; Ukraine's legal campaign against the Moscow-linked Orthodox church and the EU's June 2026 proposal to sanction Patriarch Kirill. Four traditions, one pattern. - **2025 - 2026** - **Iran.** The June 2025 twelve-day war, then the February 2026 strikes that killed [[Ali Khamenei]], followed by the Assembly of Experts electing his son Mojtaba in March 2026 over his father's stated objection to a family succession. A revolutionary clerical republic producing a dynasty in forty-seven years is worth marking. See [[Iran War 2026 Timeline]]. - **1 - 2 July 2026** - The Society of St. Pius X consecrates four bishops without papal mandate; the Holy See declares the act schismatic. The traditionalist Catholic breach that began with Vatican II reaches formal schism sixty-one years later. - **17 July 2026** - The Knesset dissolves, setting Israeli elections for 27 October 2026. The proximate cause is the Haredi military-conscription dispute - an exemption granted to a few hundred yeshiva students at the state's founding, now covering tens of thousands, which has brought down a government. See [[Haredi Judaism]]. - **Where the numbers stand.** Pew's June 2025 landscape study, measuring 2010-2020: **Christians 2.3 billion (28.8%)**, up 122 million in absolute terms but **down 1.8 points as a share**; **Muslims 1.98 billion (25.6%)**, up 347 million - more than every other religion combined - and up 1.8 points; **religiously unaffiliated 1.9 billion (24.2%)**, up 270 million; **Hindus 1.2 billion (14.9%)**, share flat; **Buddhists 324 million (4.1%)**, the only major group to shrink in absolute numbers, down 19 million; **Jews 14.8 million (0.2%)**. In the US, Pew's February 2025 study found the Christian share had stopped falling (62%, stable since 2019) while Gallup in March 2026 put the unaffiliated at a record 24% and rising, 35% among adults under 30. The two findings use different instruments and are not directly comparable; the honest statement is that **the American decline has decelerated and its floor is unknown**. See [[Secularization]]. --- ## What the timeline shows Five patterns run the length of it. **1. The bargain is always the same shape.** Constantine at Nicaea (325), Charlemagne and Leo III (800), the Diriyah pact (1744), the Meiji shrine reorganization (1868), Falwell and the Republican Party (1979). Political power trades legitimacy for enforcement. The theology varies; the structure does not. Nothing in this pattern is distinctively Christian, Islamic, or Western. **2. Catastrophe is the engine of theological innovation.** The Babylonian Exile produced portable Judaism. The destruction of the Second Temple produced rabbinic Judaism. The Wars of Religion produced Westphalia. The Holocaust produced *Nostra Aetate*. Traditions rarely reform because someone won an argument; they reform because the previous arrangement stopped being survivable. **3. Funding beats doctrine.** Ashoka's missions, the Jesuit apparatus after Trent, 19th-century Protestant mission societies, and the Saudi export program after 1979 all did the same thing: they made a particular reading of a tradition into the default by paying for the infrastructure that transmitted it. The most consequential religious change of the last fifty years - the Salafi reshaping of global Sunni practice - was a budget, not a revelation. **4. Almost every "ancient hatred" is young.** The Sunni-Shia divide became a hard state-enforced boundary with the Safavids after 1501, not at Karbala in 680. The East-West schism is dated to 1054 by convention and to 1204 by effect. The category "world religions" is a 19th-century colonial invention. Claims of primordial religious conflict are nearly always doing present-tense political work, and the work is usually absolution - if the hatred is ancient, no current policy caused it. **5. Secularization was a prediction, not a law.** The mid-20th-century consensus that modernization would privatize religion has not survived 1979, or Modi's India, or the American religious right, or the Pew numbers showing Islam as the fastest-growing tradition on earth. What has actually happened is more specific and stranger: **religious identity is decoupling from religious practice, and the political salience of the identity is rising as the practice falls.** That is the condition [[Christian Nationalism]] operates in - a movement least attached to the churches it claims to defend. --- ## See also - [[Religions Hub]] - the substrate layer: every tradition and denomination as a standing profile - [[Religions and Right-Wing Politics]] - the payoff MOC walking each tradition's political tributaries - [[History of Religion Hub]] - organized religion as institutional power, weighted toward the American story - [[Christian Right Timeline]] - the granular US chronology from the 1970s forward - [[Antiquity in Right-Wing Thought Hub]] - how the ancient world gets deployed in contemporary politics - [[Axial Age]] - the contested framing device used for Era II - [[Theocracy]] - the regime-type page - [[Secularization]] - the theory this timeline repeatedly tests - [[Timelines Hub]] - every chronological reference in the vault