Abstract
Religious adherence can be considered as a degree of freedom, in a statistical physics sense, for a human agent belonging to a population. The distribution, performance and life time of religions can thus be studied having in mind heterogeneous interacting agent modeling. We present a comprehensive analysis of 58 so-called religions (to be better defined in the main text) as measured through their number of adherents evolutions, between 1900 and 2000, – data taken from the World Christian Trends (Barrett and Johnson, “World Christian Trends AD 30 – AD 2200: Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus”, William Carey Library, 2001): 40 are considered to be “presently growing” cases, including 11 turn overs in the twentieth century; 18 are “presently decaying”, among which 12 are found to have had a recent maximum, in the nineteenth or the twentieth century. The Avrami–Kolmogorov differential equation which usually describes solid state transformations, like crystal growth, is used in each case in order to obtain the preferential attachment parameter introduced previously (Europhys Lett 77:38002, 2007). It is not often found close to unity, though often corresponding to a smooth evolution. However large values suggest the occurrence of extreme cases which we conjecture are controlled by so-called external fields. A few cases indicate the likeliness of a detachment process. We discuss a few growing and decaying religions, and illustrate various fits. Some cases seem to indicate the lack of reliability of the data, but others some marked departure from Avrami law. Whence the Avrami evolution equation might be surely improved, in particular, and somewhat obviously, for the decaying religion cases. We point out two major difficulties in such an analysis: (1) the “precise” original time of apparition of a religion, (2) the time at which there is a maximum number of adherents, both information being necessary for integrating reliably any evolution equation.
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However one can recall the case of “Brugse Metten”, May 18, 1302, when flemish “klauwaerts” killed the french “leliaerts”, recognized as such, because they could not pronounce correctly “schild en vriend”. Another case is that of the red khmers, in Cambodia, killing Vietnam educated intellectuals. Finally remember that Gileadites killed Ephraimites, selected because they could not pronounce Shibboleth, at a Jordanford (Judges 12:5–6).
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It is sometimes hard to know or to be sure whether an adherent, a disciple, …is truly a member of a religious denomination or church. However this caveat pertains to usual problems encountered in sociological investigations.
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…Admitting indifference, atheism, agnosticism, …as a sort of religion, from our point of view.
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Data Source Information: The sources used in the WCT database were so numerous and diverse that we only mention here few of them, for a more exhaustive discussion the readers are referred to the WCE. The major physical collections of data built up may be summarized here: around 5,000 statistical questionnaires returned by churches and national collaborators over the period 1982–2006; field surveys and interviews on the spot in over 200 countries conducted by the authors, who over the years 1965–2006 visited virtually every country in the world; the collection of 600 directories of denominations, Christian councils, confessions and topics; a collection of 4,500 printed contemporary descriptions of the churches, describing denominations, movements, countries and confessions; officially published reports of 500 government-organized national censuses of population each including the question on religion, in over 120 countries, covering most decades over the period 1900–2005; bibliographical listings from searches (including computerized enquiries on key-words) in a number of major libraries including those of the British Library (London), Library of Congress (Washington), Propaganda (Rome), Missionary Research Library (New York), and a score of universities.
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Acknowledgements
The work by FP has been supported by European Commission Project E2C2 FP6-2003-NEST-Path-012975 Extreme Events: Causes and Consequences. Critical comments by A. Scharnhorst have to be mentioned. Moreover this paper would not have its form nor content without comments and constructive criticisms by J.J. Schneider and D. Stauffer whom we gladly thank. Beside COST Action MP0801, MA thanks FNRS FC 4458 - 1.5.276.07 project having allowed some stay at CREA and U. Tuscia.
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Ausloos, M., Petroni, F. (2010). On World Religion Adherence Distribution Evolution. In: Takayasu, M., Watanabe, T., Takayasu, H. (eds) Econophysics Approaches to Large-Scale Business Data and Financial Crisis. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-53853-0_15
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