At the Beliefnet blog Text Messages, Patton Dodd has published an interview with Philip Jenkins, author of The Lost History of Christianity, in which they discuss the life and death of religions. Jenkins says:
Religions really do die. We think of ancient religions like those of the Aztecs or Mayas, which had millions of followers, not to mention copious scriptures. Also, something like the Manichaean faith once stretched from France to China, but that is now extinct. The Zoroastrian religion is not exactly extinct, but it has gone from being a vast world religion to the creed of a few hundred thousand believers.
But also, religions die in particular times and places, in the sense that they once dominated whole countries, but then cease to exist there. The religion is not dead in the sense that it still continues somewhere else, but that is a local kind of death. My book is mainly about Christianity in the Middle East, but I might also look at Islam in Spain, or Buddhism in most of India. Just within our lifetimes, we probably will see the extinction of Christianity in Iraq and probably Palestine.
What interests me about the topic is that so little has ever been done on it. We really don’t know why religions die, and if they do, in what sense they might leave ghosts. One thing that strikes me is how much a dead religion influences its successor—how for instance the old Christianity left its mark on the successor faith of Islam.
Read the full interview here.