Answer to Question 1
Answer: A universalizing religion is any religion that attempts to be global, to appeal to all people wherever they may live in the world. Experts recognize three universalizing religions with the largest number of adherents. These are Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, each with a different distribution.
Christianity has over 2 billion adherents, and is the predominant religion in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. Within Europe, Roman Catholicism is the dominant Christian branch in the southwest and east, Protestants dominate in the northwest, and Eastern Orthodoxy is in the east and southeast. In the Western Hemisphere, Roman Catholicism predominates in Latin America and Protestantism in North America.
Islam is a religion with about 1.3 billion people. It is the predominant religion of the Middle East from North Africa to Central Asia. The adherents of the faith are called Muslims. It is estimated that one out of every two muslims live outside the Middle East, mainly in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. The Sunni branch of the religion comprises 83 percent of Muslims and is the largest branch in most Muslim countries. The Shiite branch is clustered in Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq.
Buddhism has nearly 400 million adherents, who live mainly in China and Southeast Asia.
About 56 percent of Buddhists practice Mahayana Buddhism, primarily in China, Japan, and Korea. About 38 percent of Buddhists practice Theraveda Buddhism, especially in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. The remaining 6 percent are Tantrayanists, found primarily in Tibet and Mongolia.
Other minor universalizing religions in terms of size are Sikhism and Baha'i. All but 3 million of the world's 25 million Sikhs are clustered in the Punjab region of India. The 8 million Baha'is are dispersed among many countries, primarily in Africa and Asia.
Answer to Question 2
Answer: An ethnic religion is a religion that appeals primarily to one group of people living in one place. Ethnic religions differ from universalizing religions in their understanding of relationships between human beings and nature. A variety of events in the physical environment are more likely to be incorporated into the principles of an ethnic religion.
Of all the ethnic religions, Hinduism is the largest. Hindus account for more than 80 percent of the population of India and Nepal. All but 3 percent of the world's Hindus are concentrated in India, and most of the remainder in India's neighbor, Nepal.
Judaism is classified as an ethnic, rather than a universalizing, religion in part because its major holidays are based on events in the agricultural calendar of the religion's homeland in present day Israel.
Other well-known ethnic religions include Confucianism, Daoism and Shintoism. Several hundred million people practice ethnic religions in East Asia, especially Confucianism and Daoism in China and Shintoism in Japan. Approximately 100 million Africans 12 percent of the continent's population, follow traditional ethnic religions, sometimes called animism. Judaism has about 6 million adherents in the United States, 5 million in Israel, 2 million in Europe, and 1 million each in Asia and Latin America
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