Folk Religions and Indigenous Belief Systems

Folk or traditional religions, a broad category the Pew Research Center's 2012 report The Global Religious Landscape estimates includes several hundred million adherents worldwide, typically combine animism (the belief that spirits inhabit natural features such as rivers, mountains, and trees), ancestor veneration, divination, and localized ritual practice. Unlike Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, they rarely possess a centralized scripture, an organized clergy hierarchy, or a deliberate missionary structure, and they frequently persist not as wholly separate systems but in syncretic combination beneath the surface of a major world religion practiced formally by the same population.