Western culture
Western culture has no fixed borders on any map. The term has shifted meaning across centuries, swallowed and expelled whole civilizations, and remains contested by philosophers today. Kwame Anthony Appiah pointed out in 2016 that many of its foundational influences, including Greek philosophy, are also deeply embedded in Islamic thought. And yet the idea persists, shaping alliances, constitutions, and wars. What exactly is the West? Where did it come from? And how did a cluster of ideas rooted in ancient Greece and Rome come to reshape the entire planet? The answers run from a small village in the Peloponnesus called Olympia to a nuclear pile in Chicago, from monasteries copying manuscripts by hand to a print shop in Mainz producing millions of volumes within decades of its founding.
Mesopotamia, the territory of the Tigris and Euphrates river system, is where scholars trace the earliest roots of Western civilization. Ancient Egypt also exerted strong influence, and Phoenician mercantilism together with the spread of the alphabetical script helped spark new civilizations around the Mediterranean, including ancient Carthage, Etruria, and Rome itself.
The Greeks drew a sharp boundary between themselves and their neighbors. Writers like Herodotus and Xenophon highlighted freedom as the distinguishing feature of Greek life, contrasting it with what they saw as the servile conditions of Near Eastern peoples. Aristotle placed the Greeks between the advanced but supposedly soft civilizations to the east and the wild peoples of the north. That sense of being a middle way, neither barbarous nor slavish, became a persistent thread in how the West understood itself.
Alexander the Great's conquests scrambled these boundaries entirely. His campaigns produced the Hellenistic civilization, a blend of Greek and Near Eastern cultures that stretched across the Eastern Mediterranean. The most important center of Hellenistic learning was Ptolemaic Egypt, which drew scholars from Greece, Egypt, Judaea, Persia, Phoenicia, and even India. That cosmopolitan exchange would prove essential: Christianity eventually emerged from the meeting of Hellenic culture, Roman governance, and Second Temple Judaism.
By the 1st century BCE the entire Mediterranean had become, as the source describes it, essentially a Roman inland sea. Hellenistic science, philosophy, architecture, and art were absorbed into a Roman framework that then spread across Europe and North Africa. Yet the empire carried an internal divide from its earliest days: a predominantly Latin-speaking West and a Greek-speaking East, the latter generally wealthier and more advanced.
Christianity began its rise to institutional dominance through two imperial edicts. The Edict of Milan legalized it, and the later Edict of Thessalonica made it the state church. The Catholic Church subsequently became what the source calls the primary source of institutional continuity, legal memory, and administrative expertise for the turbulent post-Roman kingdoms of Western Europe. With Egyptian papyrus increasingly scarce after Rome's fall, parchment replaced it as the dominant writing material. Its vastly higher cost concentrated literacy among the clergy, a shift that reinforced the Church's hold over knowledge.
The permanent split of the Roman Empire in 395 into Western and Eastern halves set the stage for everything that followed. When Charlemagne was crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III in 800, he became the first western Roman emperor since Romulus Augustus was captured and deposed more than three centuries earlier. The friction between Church and temporal monarchs that his coronation inaugurated would remain, as the source puts it, the single most important political fact of European history for the next five hundred years. The Great Schism of 1054 then divided Eastern and Western Christianity into separate spheres that persist to the present day.
The oldest university in continuous operation in the world appeared in the 11th century in Italy, the University of Bologna. Two more followed in the 12th century: the University of Paris and the University of Oxford. Medieval Christianity built this infrastructure deliberately. The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that the medieval Scholastics, who sought to reconcile Catholicism with Greek thought, came closer than any other group to being the founders of scientific economics.
The Greek classical texts that had largely vanished from Western Europe survived in Arabic translation in the medieval Islamic world. Their return, through 12th-century Latin translations from that tradition, sparked what scholars call the Renaissance of the 12th and 13th centuries. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta, whose origins trace to 1099, and the Hospitallers of the Holy Spirit, founded in 1180, helped build the hospital systems of the era. The historian Guenter Risse described medieval hospitals as serving people marginalized by poverty, sickness, and age, vastly improving on the Roman military infirmaries and Greek healing temples they replaced.
Francisco de Vitoria, a disciple of Thomas Aquinas, studied the rights of colonized natives and is recognized by the United Nations as a father of international law. His work also marks him, in the eyes of historians of economics and democracy, as a leading figure for Western traditions of democratic thought and economic development. By the end of the 15th century, a single print shop that had opened in Mainz around 1440 had spread to no fewer than around 270 cities across Europe and had already produced more than 20 million volumes.
Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses appeared in 1517, and the movable type printing press spread them in vernacular languages rather than Latin, giving the Protestant Reformation an audience the Church could not control. As the movement branched into Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism, the upheaval exploded into nearly two centuries of religious wars. In Germany alone, over a third of the population perished from conflict, disease, and famine.
Galileo Galilei's telescopic observations in the early 17th century turned what had been a narrowly technical revision of astronomy by Nicolaus Copernicus into a full challenge to Aristotelian physics and Christian theology together. The scientific method that emerged from this period had roots in the work of the 11th-century Iraqi physicist Ibn al-Haytham and the 13th-century English friar Roger Bacon, but its mature form was decisively shaped by Galileo's approach of systematic observation, measurement, and experiment. The New Science that arrived by the end of the 17th century was more mechanistic, more integrated with mathematics, and, as the source puts it, obsessed with the acquisition and interpretation of new evidence.
The historian C. Warren Hollister argued that by 1500, a century before the Scientific Revolution and two centuries before the Industrial Revolution, Europe's technology and political and economic organization had already given it a decisive edge over all other civilizations. European navigators achieved the first circumnavigation of Earth in the 16th century's opening years, and during the Age of Discovery every continent was visited and largely mapped by Europeans, with Antarctica as the single exception.
The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and covered roughly the period from about 1760 to somewhere between 1820 and 1840. It moved production from human hands to machines, introduced new chemical and iron manufacturing processes, and expanded the use of steam power in ways that spread to Western Europe and North America within a few decades. Economic historians have described the onset of the Industrial Revolution as the most important event in human history since the domestication of animals, plants, and fire.
Samuel Huntington coined the term the Great Divergence to describe the moment when the Western world overcame pre-modern growth constraints and became, in the 19th century, the most powerful and wealthy civilization on Earth, eclipsing Qing China, Mughal India, Tokugawa Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. European states colonized most of the planet; only thirteen present-day independent countries escaped formal colonization altogether.
The Second Industrial Revolution, which evolved out of the first in the transition years between 1840 and 1870, brought steam-powered railways, large-scale machine tool manufacture, and steam-powered factories. Average income and population began growing at rates previously unknown in human history. Some economists hold that the standard of living for ordinary people began rising consistently for the first time during this period, while the Maddison Project's research suggests GDP per capita in Western Europe had already begun diverging from the rest of the world as early as 1400.
Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation to standardize liturgy across the worldwide Church. That system led directly to European classical music and all its descendants. The symphony, concerto, sonata, opera, and oratorio all have their origins in Italy. The post-Reformation Catholic Church actively encouraged the Baroque style in music, art, and architecture as a means of stimulating religious fervor.
In the visual arts, Jan van Eyck made major advances in oil painting, and perspective drawing found its earliest practitioners in Florence. In science, key European discoveries in electromagnetism include Coulomb's law in 1785, the first battery in 1800, and Maxwell's equations in 1871. The first atomic pile was constructed in Chicago in 1942, becoming the basis for nuclear power stations. The first expedition to circumnavigate the Earth was completed in 1522 under Ferdinand Magellan; Roald Amundsen led the first journey to the South Pole in 1911; and NASA made the first Moon landing in 1969.
Sport carries its own deep thread through Western culture. The ancient Olympic Games were held every four years at a small village in the Peloponnesus called Olympia. The modern revival was instigated by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a Frenchman, and the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896. The first written record of golf is James II of Scotland's banning of the game in 1457 as an unwelcome distraction from archery practice. Basketball was invented in 1891 by James Naismith, a Canadian physical education instructor working in Springfield, Massachusetts. Volleyball was created four years later in Holyoke, Massachusetts, the city directly north of Springfield.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, membership in the European Union and NATO became the practical markers of Western identity. For Central European nations, the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 represented what the source describes as a return to Europe, recovering a historical identity rooted in Latin Christendom and Enlightenment values that had been suppressed through 42 years of Cold War.
Christianity remains the dominant religion in the Western world. A Pew Research Center survey from 2011 found that 76% of Europeans identified as Christian, and about 86% of the population of the Americas did the same. At the same time, a Eurobarometer poll in 2012 found that non-believers and agnostics accounted for 16% of the European Union's population, with atheists at 7%. In the Czech Republic, 79% of the population identified as agnostic, atheist, or irreligious.
Globalization has spread Western ideas so widely that, as the source notes, almost all modern cultures are to some extent shaped by them. The Internet, beginning in the 1990s, accelerated that spread by moving media from bundled packages like magazines and television slots to individual unbundled items: articles, audio files, video files. The first digital broadcast satellite system began transmitting in the United States in 1975, and the United States launched Telstar in 1962 to link live media broadcasts between the UK and the US, a direct consequence of the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957.
Continue Browsing
Common questions
What is Western culture and where does it originate?
Western culture refers to the social norms, ethical values, political systems, and traditions rooted primarily in European and Mediterranean history. It traces its origins to ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and their Christian successors, drawing also on influences from ancient Egypt, the Phoenician city-states, and several Near Eastern cultures.
What role did the Catholic Church play in shaping Western culture during the Middle Ages?
The Catholic Church became the primary source of institutional continuity, legal memory, and administrative expertise in post-Roman Western Europe. Medieval Christianity is credited with creating the first modern universities, including the University of Bologna in the 11th century, as well as the modern hospital system and the foundations of scientific economics.
When did the Protestant Reformation begin and what were its consequences for Western culture?
The Protestant Reformation was sparked by Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses in 1517 and spread through the movable type printing press. It triggered nearly two centuries of religious wars and, in Germany, the deaths of over a third of the population from conflict, disease, and famine.
How did the Industrial Revolution transform Western society?
The Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain and covered roughly the period from about 1760 to between 1820 and 1840, shifted production from hand methods to machines and is described by economic historians as the most important event in human history since the domestication of animals and plants. It drove unprecedented sustained growth in average income and population, and spread from Great Britain to Western Europe and North America within a few decades.
Who coined the term the Great Divergence to describe Western economic dominance?
Samuel Huntington coined the term the Great Divergence to describe the period when the Western world overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged in the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy civilization on Earth, surpassing Qing China, Mughal India, Tokugawa Japan, and the Ottoman Empire.
What are the origins of the modern Olympic Games and which ancient Greek site inspired them?
The ancient Olympic Games were held every four years in a small village in the Peloponnesus called Olympia. The modern revival was instigated by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a Frenchman, and the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896.
All sources
160 references cited across the entry
- 1BookThe Myth of Continents: A Critique of MetageographyMartin W. Lewis et al. — University of California Press — 1997
- 2BookCarnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western PowerVictor Davis Hanson — Knopf Doubleday — 2007
- 3BookThe Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western WorldCharles Freeman — Penguin — September 2000
- 4BookThe Greeks: A Portrait of Self and OthersPaul Cartledge — Oxford University Press — 2002
- 5BookWorlds at War: The 2,500 – Year Struggle Between East and WestAnthony Pagden — Oxford University Press — 2008
- 6BookWhy We're All Romans: The Roman Contribution to the Western WorldCarl J. Richard — Rowman & Littlefield — 16 April 2010
- 7BookStudies in Modern Religions, Religious Movements and the Båabåi-Bahåa'åi FaithsMoshe Sharon — Brill — 2004
- 8BookThe Founders of the Western World: A History of Greece and RomeMichael Grant — Scribner — 1991
- 9BookWestern Civilization: Since 1400Marvin Perry et al. — Cengage — 2012
- 10BookThe Cambridge Companion to Archaic GreeceAndrea Nightingale — Cambridge University Press — 2007
- 11The Cambridge Ancient HistoryJohn Boardman — Cambridge University Press — 1982
- 12JournalThe Phoenicians and the Formation of the Western WorldJohn C Scott — Brigham Young University — 2018
- 13BookAlexander The Great and the Hellenistic AgeP. Green — Phoenix — 2008
- 14BookEarly Christianity in its Hellenistic context. Volume 2, Christian origins and Hellenistic Judaism: social and literary contexts for the New TestamentStanley E. Porter — Brill — 2013
- 15BookJudaism and Hellenism: studies in their encounter in Palestine during the early Hellenistic periodMartin Hengel — Wipf & Stock — 2003
- 16BookWestern Civilization: A Brief History, Volume I: To 1715Jackson J. Spielvogel — Cengage Learning — 2016
- 17BookReadings in the History of Western Civilization, Volume 2Thomas Patrick Neill — 1957
- 18BookCatholicism: The Story of Catholic ChristianityGerald O'Collins et al. — Oxford University Press — 2003
- 19BookThe Sixth Century: End or Beginning?Philip Rousseau — Brill — 2017
- 20BookConstantinople and the West : essays on the late Byzantine (Palaeologan) and Italian Renaissances and the Byzantine and Roman churchesDeno John Geanakoplos — University of Wisconsin Press — 1989
- 21BookMending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of HospitalsGuenter B. Risse — Oxford University Press — April 1999
- 22BookHistory of Economic AnalysisJoseph Schumpeter — Allen & Unwin — 1954
- 25BookHistory of Western Civilization: A HandbookWilliam H. McNeill — University of Chicago Press — 2010
- 26BookThe Religious Roots of Contemporary European IdentityLucia Faltin — A&C Black — 2007
- 27NewsThere Is No Such Thing As Western CivilizationKwame Anthony Appiah — 9 November 2016
- 28JournalWhere is the Middle East?Davidson, Roderic H. — 1960
- 29BookWestern civilization in world historyPeter N. Stearns — Routledge — 2003
- 31BookThe Rise of the Roman EmpirePolybius — Oxford University Press — 1980
- 32BookHerons von Alexandria Druckwerke und AutomatentheaterB.G. Teubner — 1899
- 33BookChristian Antisemitism: A History of HateWilliam Nicholls — Jason Aronson — 1995
- 34BookThe origins of anti-semitism : attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian antiquityJohn G. Gager — Oxford University Press — 1983
- 35BookGreek and Roman Historiography in Late Antiquity: Fourth to Sixth Century A.D.Brian Croke — Brill — 2003
- 36ThesisThe Barbarian Past in Early Medieval Historical NarrativeShami Ghosh — University of Toronto — 2009
- 37BookThe Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–600Averil Cameron — Routledge — 1993
- 38JournalFraxinetum: An Islamic Frontier State in Tenth-Century ProvenceMohammad Ballan — 2010
- 39BookThe Penguin Historical Atlas of the VikingsJohn Haywood — Penguin Books — 1995
- 40BookThe Penguin Atlas of Medieval HistoryColin McEvedy — Penguin Books — 1980
- 42BookThe Catholic Church: Journey, Wisdom, and MissionCarl Koch — St. Mary's Press — 1994
- 43BookThe WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly ProsperousJoseph Patrick Henrich — Farrar, Straus and Giroux — 2020
- 44BookWorld History: Cultures, States and Societies to 1500Eugene Berger et al. — University of North Georgia Press — 2016
- 45BookA Handbook of Political GeographySanjay Kumar — K.K. Publications — 2021
- 46BookNew Perspectives on Jewish-Christian RelationsElisheva Carlebach et al. — BRILL — 25 November 2011
- 47BookA History of the University in EuropeJacques Verger — Cambridge University Press — 16 October 2003
- 48BookThe Challenge of BolognaPaul L. Gaston — Stylus — 2010
- 49BookThe Renaissance of the Twelfth CenturyCharles Homer Haskins — Harvard University Press — 1927
- 52BookMending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of HospitalsGuenter B. Risse — Oxford University Press — 15 April 1999
- 53A Philosophical and Historical Analysis of Modern Democracy, Equality, and Freedom Under the Influence of ChristianityFr. Joseph M. de Torre — Catholic Education Resource Center — 1997
- 54BookCrisis in Western EducationChristopher Dawson — CUA Press — 1961
- 55BookThe Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific RevolutionDavid Wootton — Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers — 2015
- 56BookA History of Natural PhilosophyEdward Grant — Cambridge University Press — 2007
- 57BookMedieval Europe: A Short HistoryC. Warren Hollister — McGraw-Hill Higher Education — 2005
- 58Ferdinand MagellanPrinceton University Library — 2010
- 60BookThe History of Cartography, Volume Three: Cartography in the European RenaissanceDavid Woodward — University of Chicago Press — 2007
- 61BookThe Saved and the Damned: A History of the ReformationThomas Kaufmann — Oxford University Press — 2023
- 62JournalCauses and Consequences of the Protestant ReformationSascha O. Becker et al. — 2016
- 63BookWar and Religion after Westphalia, 1648–1713David Onnekink — Ashgate Publishing — 2013
- 64BookThe Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has DeclinedSteven Pinker — Penguin Books — 2011
- 65BookThe Scientific Revolution and the Foundations of Modern ScienceWilbur Applebaum — Greenwood Press — 2005
- 66BookThe Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific RevolutionDavid Wootton — HarperCollins Publishers — 2015
- 67JournalExamination of Scientific Revolution Medicine on the Human Body / Bilimsel Devrim Tıbbını İnsan Bedeni Üzerinden İncelemekElif Aslan Küskü — 2022
- 68JournalNatural Philosophy or Science in Premodern Epistemic Regimes? The Case of the Astrology of Albert the Great and Galileo GalileiScott E. Hendrix — 2011
- 69BookScientific Revolution: A Very Short IntroductionLawrence M. Principe — Oxford University Press — 2011
- 70BookReappraisals of the Scientific RevolutionDavid C. Lindberg — Cambridge University Press — 1990
- 71BookThe Beginnings of Western ScienceDavid C. Lindberg — University of Chicago Press — 2007
- 72BookThe Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyEva Del Soldato — Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University — 2016
- 73BookA History of Natural PhilosophyEdward Grant — Cambridge University Press — 2007
- 74BookThe Origins of Modern ScienceOfer Gal — Cambridge University Press — 2021
- 75BookMaking Modern SciencePeter J. Bowler et al. — University of Chicago Press — 2020
- 76Landes (1969) p. 40Landes — 1969
- 77Landes (1969)Landes — 1969
- 78BookLectures on Economic GrowthRobert E. Jr. Lucas — Harvard University Press — 2002
- 79JournalPessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial RevolutionCharles Feinstein — September 1998
- 80JournalUrbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-Century British CitiesSimon Szreter et al. — February 1998
- 81BookTechnics and CivilizationLewis Mumford — Harcourt, Brace & World — 1963
- 82BookAfricans and the Industrial Revolution in EnglandJoseph E Inikori — Cambridge University Press
- 83JournalRehabilitating the Industrial RevolutionBerg, Maxine — 1992
- 84Rehabilitating the Industrial RevolutionJulie Lorenzen
- 85The Industrial RevolutionRobert Lucas Jr. — Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis — 2003
- 88BookThe Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860George Rogers Taylor — M.E. Sharpe — 1951
- 89English and American Tool BuildersJoseph Wickham Roe — Yale University Press — 1916
- 90Hunter (1985)Hunter — 1985
- 91Western cultureScience Daily
- 92A brief history of Western cultureKhan Academy
- 93NewsWhat place for God in EuropePeter Ford — 22 February 2005
- 94Global ChristianityANALYSIS — Pewforum.org — 19 December 2011
- 95BookPostwar: a history of Europe since 1945Tony Judt — Penguin Press — 2005
- 96BookFrom triumph to crisis: neoliberal economic reform in postcommunist countriesHilary Appel et al. — Cambridge University Press — 2018
- 97BookThe clash of civilizations and the remaking of world orderSamuel P. Huntington — Simon & Schuster — 2003
- 98BookAlternative Market Research Methods: Market SensingDavid Longbottom et al. — Taylor and Francis — 2016
- 99The History of Musical InstrumentsCurt Sachs — Dover Publications — 1940
- 100BookFlamenco: orientalismo, exotismo y la identidad nacional españolaTrinidad Pardo Ballester — Editorial Universidad de Granada — 2017
- 101BookJews on Broadway : an historical survey of performers, playwrights, composers, lyricists and producersStewart F. Lane — McFarland — 2011
- 102BookMaking Americans : Jews and the Broadway musicalAndrea Most — Harvard University Press — 2004
- 103BookOur musicals, ourselves : a social history of the American musical theaterJohn Bush Jones — Brandeis University Press, published by University Press of New England — 2003
- 104Western literature9 May 2023
- 105Western architectureBritannica — 22 March 2022
- 106BookThe Saracen Connection: Arab Cuisine and the Medieval WestAnne Wilson — 2002
- 108Oxford Dictionaries: British and World English2016
- 110NewsThe 'first true scientist'Jim Al-Khalili — 4 January 2009
- 111BookMind, Brain, and Education Science: A Comprehensive Guide to the New Brain-Based TeachingTracey Tokuhama-Espinosa — W.W. Norton & Company — 2010
- 112JournalLeonardo's EyeJames S. Ackerman — 1978
- 113BookEnergy resources: occurrence, production, conversion, useWendell H. Wiser — Birkhäuser — 2000
- 114JournalAnianus JedlikAugustus Heller — 2 April 1896
- 115JournalHistory of A-C Wave Form, Its Determination and StandardizationFrederick Bedell — 1942
- 116BookThe age of Edison : electric light and the invention of modern AmericaErnest Freebert — Penguin Books — 2014
- 118BookThe First ReactorEnrico Fermi — United States Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Technical Information — December 1982
- 119BookThe Telephone and Its Several Inventors: A HistoryLewis Coe — McFarland & Company, Inc. — 1995
- 121Contents
- 124BookThe global positioning system: a shared national asset: recommendations for technical improvements and enhancementsNational Research Council (U.S.). Committee on the Future of the Global Positioning System et al. — National Academies Press — 1995
- 128BookThe Oxford English DictionaryClarendon Press — 2001
- 129BookMathematical thought from ancient to modern times, Vol. 3Morris Kline — Oxford University Press — 1972
- 130BookPrinciples of TopologyFred H Croom — Saunders College Publishing — 1989
- 131Metrication in other countriesUS Metric Association
- 132BookThe International System of UnitsBIPM — 2019
- 133JournalFive Hundred Years of Bookkeeping: A Portrait of Luca PacioliLuc Lauwers et al. — 1994
- 134BookThe Seafarers – The ExplorersRichard Humble — Time-Life Books — 1978
- 135BookApollo by the Numbers: A Statistical ReferenceRichard W. Orloff — NASA History Division, Office of Policy and Plans — September 2004
- 136Mars Exploration Rover – SpiritJon Nelson
- 137Mars Exploration Rover -OpportunityJon Nelson
- 138NewsThe End of an Asteroidal Adventure: NEAR Shoemaker Phones Home for the Last TimeHelen Worth — Applied Physics Lab — 28 February 2001
- 13915-149 NASA's Three-Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto Reaches Historic EncounterDwayne Brown et al. — 14 July 2015
- 140BookFrom Engineering Science to Big ScienceAndrew Butrica
- 141JournalStrassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in EuropeJohannes Weber — 2006
- 142BookWestern Media SystemsJonathan Hardy — Routledge — 25 February 2010
- 143BookThe Internet and the Mass MediaLucy Küng et al. — SAGE — 14 May 2008
- 144BookWestern Civilization: Since 1400Marvin Perry et al. — Cengage Learning — 1 January 2012
- 145BookFundamentalism in American Religion and Law: Obama's Challenge to Patriarchy's Threat to DemocracyDavid A. J. Richards — University of Philadelphia Press — 2010
- 146BookUkraine and Russia: From Civilied Divorce to Uncivil WarPaul D'Anieri — Cambridge University Press — 2019
- 147BookThe Rise of Benedict XVI: The Inside story of How the Pope Was Elected and What it Means for the WorldJohn L. Allen — Penguin UK — 2005
- 148BookEurope: A Cultural HistoryPeter Rietbergen — Routledge — 2014
- 149EuropePewforum.org — 19 December 2011
- 150The Global Religious Landscape - ChristiansPew Forum on Religion & Public Life — 18 December 2012
- 151Global Christianity - A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World' s Christian Population - AmericasPew Forum on Religion & Public Life — 19 December 2011
- 152Discrimination in the EU in 2012European Commission — 2012
- 154BookYearbook of International Religious Demography 2017Gina Zurlo et al. — BRILL — 2019
- 155BookAfrican Perspectives on Culture and World ChristianityJoseph Ogbonnaya — Cambridge Scholars Publishing — 2017
- 156Religiously UnaffiliatedPewforum.org — 18 December 2012
- 157GermanyState.gov — 14 September 2007
- 160International Religious Freedom Report 200714 September 2007
- 161BookReligion and Spirituality in PsychiatryHarold G. Koenig — Cambridge University Press — 2009
- 162BookGod, Justice, and Society: Aspects of Law and Legality in the BibleJonathan Burnside — Oxford University Press — 2011
- 163BookReadings in Western Religious Thought: The ancient worldPatrick V. Reid — Paulist Press — 1987