What religions were in the 1700's?

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1149131

2026-08-12 17:10

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Most of the major religions that are around today were already around in the 1700s. Various branches of Christianity existed including Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, and Anglicans. In Western Europe, Calvinism was much more popular and prominent in the 1700s than today. In Eastern Europe, particularly in Greece and Russia, the Eastern Orthodox Church was in place. A small but ancient Druidic order continued to exist in Ireland and parts of England. Christianity, primarily Catholicism, had by then been prosletyzed throughout Europe, North and South America, Australia, and parts of Asia and Africa. However, this was prior to the growth of colonization in the Americas, and North and South American Indians continued to worship various tribal gods, and to believe in an overarching spiritual continuity between them. In Africa, elements of Christianity and Islam were absorbed and incorporated into many localized tribal religions. Judaism existed in Europe, where the Inquisition and similar programs of persecution had driven its numbers down. It also existed in parts of the Middle East, but the major religion of the Middle East was Islam, which was already long divided into Sunni and Shiite groups, along with Sufism. Hinduism and Buddhism were major religions in India, and Sikhism had developed in areas where Hinduism and Islam interacted. Shinto was the predominant religion of Japan. Outside of organized religions, Pantheism, which is a general belief that God is the same as the universe, arose in Europe early in the century. Deism, which is a general belief in God but denying the miraculous accounts of the Bible or other religious texts, already existed and became very popular in the 1700s, guiding many thinkers of both the American and the French Revolutions. Atheism was very rare in this century. Nontheistic concepts which did not yet exist (or at least which had not been formally named and examined) in the 1700s include Panentheism (coined in 1828), Pandeism (coined in 1859), and Agnosticism (coined in 1869). Organized religions that did not exist at all in the 1700s include Mormonism, not founded until the 1830s, Baha'i, founded in the 1840s, Jehovah's Witnesses, which began in the 1870s, the fictional Cult of Cthulhu, written about in the 1920s, and Scientology, which started in the 1950s. Wicca was not developed as a religion until the 1900s, but some people did at least attempt to practice witchcraft.

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