The Cyclical Movement of Religions: From Unity toward … Unity

Abstract

The cyclical character of the formation and development of confessional spaces as affected by competition between religions has been established. As a result of a weakening monopoly and growth of religious competition, a once prevailing religion is gradually ousted either by another religion (the R-cycle of religious competition) or—which has become a distinctive feature of the 19th‒21st centuries—by secular ideologies (in the case of social secularization, the S-cycle; political secularization, the SP-cycle). In addition, considerably long intercyclic stages of religious saturation have been identified. The common property of the three types of cycles is their aperiodicity. Characteristic of R- and SP-cycles are also intermittence, reversibility, and the ability to develop in parallel to one another and to R-cycles. The territorial expansion of the cycles is wavelike but is differentiated within the structure of the confessional space: R-cycles are confined to countries and their administrative territorial units, and SP-cycles, to the world’s macroregions. Note that the S-cycles have no limitations.