With any POD, have a major world religion with over a billion followers or more originate out of the pantheons and spiritual practices of any of the native peoples of the Americas.
AHC: Have a major world religion develop in the Americas
- Thread starter SunKing105
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Its an AHC, short for Alternate History Challenge. The OP comes up with an alternate history scenario, and it is up to the posters to decide how it could have plausibly occured.
That would be incredibly difficult. The America's OTL have a total population of just barely over 1 billion. I imagine it would have an incredibly limited reach, given how well-established Christianity is, and it would have a difficult time spreading to Afro-Eurasia. At most maybe Andean religion survives, which would mean a large religion with tens of millions of people, but I don't see it expanding to others. The best bet is to have Native Cultures survive. Perhaps Spain fails to conquer the Aztecs and Incas (both conquests consisted of a lot of luck). The Natives would grow accustomed to disease and rebound, and colonization would seem like a less promising prospect. Perhaps the disease would lead to a shift in spiritual views, leading to a new sort of religion based out of old native faiths that would spread across the continents. Then have these native populations grow even more rapidly due to an introduction of European livestock, technology, and agricultural methods, and you can end up with an incredibly high native population to subscribe to this faith.
The other option would be an PoD in 10,000 BCE where the megafauna of the Americas isn't hunted to extinction and the natives are able to domesticate more, leading to higher populations and better immune systems.
The other option would be an PoD in 10,000 BCE where the megafauna of the Americas isn't hunted to extinction and the natives are able to domesticate more, leading to higher populations and better immune systems.
You could have Europe dominated by polytheistic faiths, probably Hellenestic in the south and various Celtic and Germanic ones further north. That might make them more amenable to other religions than in OTL when they were monotheistic. Even so, the influence of a religion from the Americas would probably be by some form of syncreticism rather than straight up conversion.
So you're saying that this world religion could simply be inspired by, or a branch off from, Native American religion? What I'm thinking is that the Roman Empire got taken over by a sect of Judaism, which was not a dominant religion within the empire but exerted some outsized influence due to profile-raising revolts and the people being deported everywhere. So maybe if an imperial entity had a similar troublesome American province which spawned a social/religious movement with broad appeal...
This could work-- a colonization of the Americas by a non-Christian Europe, or at least one without some hegemonic religious organization. OTL the friars were the first administrators and scholars of the Spanish New World, they or any similar org wouldn't let a rival religion emerge from under their noses.
Maybe this new religion becomes a faith of sailors, spread and preserved through the long years and strong fellowships of the Oceanus Sea. And they take it to all kinds of new ports, where it builds local communities that carry things forward
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