The Family Tree of Faith

A family tree works for denominations because denominations really do descend from one another. The Church of the Nazarene came out of the Holiness movement, which came out of Methodism, which came out of Anglicanism. There is an unbroken institutional line, and people who walked out of one door and through another.

That is not true of the top level of this page. Hinduism did not descend from Zoroastrianism. Chinese folk religion did not branch off anything shown here. The six families at the top are drawn side by side because a page has to put them somewhere, not because they share a trunk. Read downward within a family and the descent is real. Read across the top and it is not.

Two placements are worth naming because they are the ones most often drawn wrongly. Buddhism and Jainism are shown as coming out of the śramaṇa movements, not out of Hinduism. They emerged alongside Vedic religion in the same north Indian ferment, argued with it, and shared its vocabulary of karma and rebirth. Descent is the wrong word.

And unbelief is not a branch at all. It has been reached independently many times: by the Cārvāka in India around 600 BC, by Greek atomists at roughly the same moment, and by people in every century since who worked it out for themselves. What the non-religious branch traces is an intellectual lineage in the modern West, not an institutional one. Nobody was born into it and nobody split off from anything to get there. It sits on this page because leaving it off would misrepresent the world more than including it awkwardly does.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are shown as branches of a shared Abrahamic root rather than as descendants of one another.

Rabbinic Judaism and the Christian movement are genuine siblings out of Second Temple Judaism. Both came out of the same first-century crisis.

Islam sits on the shared root instead of under either one. It arose six centuries later, and Muslims understand it not as a branch of anything but as the restoration of Abraham's original monotheism. Any placement is a compromise between the historical account and the tradition's own account. This one tries to be fair to both.

It is charted much further down than the Jewish or Islamic sides. That is scope, not importance. Charting Islamic law schools or Hasidic courts to the same depth would take a page each.

They are formation dates, not birthdays. Most of these bodies grew out of decades of argument before anyone drew a line. The year is the moment a separate identity became formal: a council ruling, a synod, a founding conference, a merger.

Placing a group under a parent describes historical descent, not agreement.

Groups marked non-Nicene reject the Trinitarian definition set at Nicaea and Constantinople. Most other Christian branches do not regard them as sharing the same faith. Several groups here are likewise regarded as outside Islam by most Muslim bodies, and their notes say so. Recording a real boundary is more useful than blurring it.

Membership figures are rounded orders of magnitude drawn from self-reporting, which is generous by nature and inconsistent between bodies. Use them for scale, not for comparison to the decimal.

Real descent is a web. Methodism drew on Moravian piety, Pentecostalism crossed racial and denominational lines from the start, Sufism runs through both Sunni and Shia Islam rather than beside them, and mergers mean some bodies have two or three parents.

Where a group has more than one lineage, it sits under the strongest one and the second is named in its notes.