One day, a number of years ago, I decided to try to diagram out all of the schisms and splits I could identify in the Abrahamic religions (which include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism).
Click here for a high resolution version of this image.
As you can see in the diagram, there were well over 60 Abrahamic religious splits, each of which changed one form of religion into another. Since I made the diagram quickly and used Wikipedia as the source for a lot of it, I’m sure it contains plenty of mistakes and typos and still leaves lots of splits and denominations out (my apologies for any egregious errors!)
I learned some things from making the diagram that I think most people don’t realize:
(1) We tend to view the religions of today as a linear progression from religions of old (perhaps with some modification in ideology along the way), but in fact, a more accurate model is that religion has minor schisms over and over and over again but most of those offshoots die out. It’s like a branching tree where most branches have been removed, so what we end up seeing is a tree with only a few branches that each seem to have had a smooth progression from the root. We see a few winners and assume those were the only ones in the race. We do see a bunch of twigs at the end of the branches, though (which represent the newest offshoots – presumably, some of these will die out as most of the offshoots did in the past).
(2) Where one should draw the line at something being an entirely new religion now seems a lot more arbitrary to me than it used to. The most clear-cut cases are when an entirely new religious text is added which gains widespread popularity (e.g., Christianity branching off from Judaism), but with new religious groups offshooting regularly, there are a lot of minor branches that are now separated from each other by so many prior splits that they seem so distinct as to essentially be different religions despite happening to use the same religious text.
It’s also interesting to consider that almost every one of these groups believed or believes its religious doctrines and practices to be more accurate or good than all the other groups. Religious truth has never been something we humans have been able to agree on!
This piece was first written on August 3, 2017, and first appeared on my website on June 16, 2025.
thank you
I have wanted to understand and know the differences in all these religions.
Almost all including Confucism, Hindi, Buddism, and Zorasterism believe primarily in the Golden Rule.
I have seen an argument about religions (or, more broadly, any idea/information) having process similar to evolution. One religion/idea splits into multiple new ones, the most of such ideas “die” with a couple of followers, and only the “fittest” ones “survive” and become popular. That might be why most religions tell you not to turn to other religions, and that might explain many other features of religions. Religions that didn’t do this are just extinct.