Latitude.

When I was in India, and young and stupid enough to believe any idea no matter how ridiculous, I was told a theory about religion which has nonetheless stayed with me ever since. The idea was that religions which evolve independently yet on the same line of latitude will often share fundamental similarities beyond the basic stuff common to all religions (do good things, don't do bad things). Now, this friend of mine was referring to similarities between Tibetan Buddhism and Native American religious beliefs at the time, but I think that you could usefully add others to this grouping – including Shintoism in Japan, Paganism in Europe (including Roman and Greek religions) and Hinduism in India. The fundamental similarity shared by these religions, and which I am using to justify lumping them together, is pantheism.

Pantheism can be convincingly argued to have derived directly from the latitude thesis. My thinking is this: there is an inherent plurality of phenomena associated with living in a temperate climate. We are surrounded by fields, woods, rivers, rocks, streams, lakes, animals, plants, berries, fruit. Therefore, the people who live in these environments naturally adopt a perspective which accommodates this plurality; they seek to placate a multitude of forces and conditions in order to sustain their lives. Over time, these forces and phenomena become storied and, ultimately, personified as gods – the god of the harvest, of light, of the trees, of war, of the river, of the household, the moon, the hearth. These practices then gradually harden into a complex system of ritual and belief, a religion. Hence we shape our religions to fit our environment.

But what of religions from adverse climates? What effect does this have? Well, the obvious conclusion is that environmental adversity leads to monotheism. Along those lines of latitude where extreme conditions were the norm, life depended on a series of either/or scenarios, such as whether the harvest took or the locusts came or the war was successful. On one side was life, on the other death. The austerity and fragility of this existence naturally lent itself to the anthropomorphism of a single deity, a deity who sat in judgement over the entire imaginable universe dispensing death or life, blessing or punishment. Life was so hard that an afterlife became the only way to rationalise the adversity, suffering and death of your loved ones. Out of this type of environment, then, stem all the Abrahamic religions – which is an interesting proposition, since it means that Europe’s predominant religious system of the last thousand or so years is effectively a surrogate from a harsher, less forgiving world.

However, one can also introduce to this geographical model other variables. For example, historic social relevance is a determining factor which might account for the endurance of certain religions and the demise of others. The first principle here is that religions live or die by their relevance to the particular society to which they minister; adding time into the equation raises the notion that societies change and therefore that the relevance of this or that religion to a society will vary. This accounts for the obsolescence of the Viking pantheon, for example, which didn’t endure because it was fundamentally a martial religion, i.e. it was shaped by the necessity of ensuring the survival of a fledgling society threatened by other young, warlike societies. By contrast, the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism, etc., all retain relevance because they have a message of compassion and moral guidance which concerns the self and which therefore remains relevant whatever the condition of society. 

Of course, it would be ludicrously easy to shoot this argument down with one or two well-chosen examples. I haven't, for example, considered Confucianism and Taoism because I don't know enough about them. Inuit religion, which hails from one of the most extreme latitudes on earth, is animist and therefore seems to contradict my thesis, as does African shamanism. The Ancient Egyptian religion, which developed within spitting distance of the Holy Land, boasted more gods than nearly all the other religions put together. And yet, for all its flaws (of which there are clearly many), I can't shake off the appeal held by this demarcation between the many gods of the green and diverse lands and the one god sitting in stern judgement among his deserts and white stone. Perhaps it's just the symmetry of the thing, I don't know.