Abstract
Religion is considered as a notable origin of interpersonal relations, as well as an effective and efficient tool to organize a huge number of people towards some challenging targets. At the same time, a believer prefers to make friend with other people of the same faith, and thus people of different faiths tend to form relatively isolated communities. The segregation between different religions is a major factor for many social conflicts. However, quantitative understanding of religious segregation is rare. Here we analyze a directed social network extracted from weibo.com (the largest directed social network in China, similar to twitter.com), which is consisted of 6875 believers in Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Taoism. This religion network is highly segregative. Comparative analysis shows that the extent of segregation for different religions is much higher than that for different races and slightly higher than that for different political parties. Furthermore, we study the few cross-religion links and find 46.7% of them are probably related to charitable issues. Our findings provide quantitative insights into religious segregation and valuable evidence for religious syncretism.
Highlights
Religious belief is a sort of mental cement that connects, blends people of diverse colors, ages and sexes
Through analyzing the mixing pattern of the religion network, we find most of the links are created between the individuals having same belief
Neither clustering coefficient nor modularity is enough to characterize the aggregation of believers in the same religion or the segregation of believers in different religions, since the former only considers local organization and the latter is very sensitive to the community sizes [55]
Summary
Religious belief is a sort of mental cement that connects, blends people of diverse colors, ages and sexes It could facilitate human cooperation [1,2,3,4,5,6], promote civic engagement [7,8,9,10], improve life satisfaction [11,12,13,14,15], intersect with politics [16,17,18,19,20], impact people’s mental and/or physical health [21,22,23,24], influence social morality [25, 26], coexist with science [27,28,29,30] and even boom economic development [31, 32]. Some different religions are even hostile to each other, which would increase prejudice between religions [37,38,39], and lead to regional violence, intergroup conflict and moral prejudice against atheists [40,41,42,43,44,45,46]
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