Minority religion

A religious minority is located. Religious by nature features distinguishing smaller group, which is in contrast to a dominant religious majority

From religious minorities can then start speaking after major religions and established polytheistic and syncretic religious structures are solidified to the extent that integration and assimilation of existing smaller groups is excluded alien religious nature historically.

This can manifest itself on the one hand, that the religious majority does not accept the existence of a religious minority, she refuses, fight and prosecute, on the other hand, that the religious minority in turn refused to adapt to the majority.

General through the revealed religions - especially founders religions - in the early stages usually the phase of a religious minority to a majority, against which they assert themselves or have to say. This may in turn consist of supporters of a natural, national, or even a revealed religion. A religious minority to majority religious can develop through their religious dynamics.

Religious (or religious ) minorities caused by non- alignment of a group to an established majority. They can arise on the one hand by prophetic- messianic, - like the classic enthusiast / Baptist and currently in the charismatic or Pentecostal movement - the other by conservative Orthodox aspirations. This often shows up already in the self or external names that altkonfessioneller churches: Old Lutherans, Altreformierte, Old Catholics, old believers ... In this case both models usually appointed on the retention or re - or rediscovery of each original a religious- constitutive truth. A corresponding movement in Islam, for example, Salafism derived from Arabic Salaf: ancestor, predecessor.

While the prophetic- messianic minority locates its source in general in direct spiritualistic and individual religious experience and established religious structures and systems rather ignored, examines the orthodox conservative minority to restore their own, supposedly maintain conceived in disrepair established religion, to renew. This usually leads to intra- communal tensions. With a resulting from the conflict detachment ( dissidence, condemnation ) of the minority at the same time is accompanied their own individual establishment.

An important role in the history of religious minorities plays the migration. Often religious minorities saw discriminated against and subjected to persecution and went into exile. In exile, they found themselves again as a minority, now as a religious and often at the same time as an ethnic minority, for example, the Jews in the Soviet Union, which, although - as everywhere in states under communist rule - the practice of religion was not permitted, however, were registered as a national minority. Unlike other ethnic minorities came to them an assimilation to the worship of the host country is not in question, which had a number of new problems.

However, religious minorities for the economic development of a country played a crucial role as it is about the work of the Huguenots in Prussia or the Moravian Church in America, which, as it developed into an elite of the country.