Hegemony in the religious spheres is known as a concept that means “Preaching your religion as a Dominant religion, often attempting to convert others to your own, by force or otherwise”. One religion that is known for this is Christianity. It tells its followers to “go out and convert” other people, regardless of their religious backgrounds.
Hegemony, however, creeps its way into other belief systems as well within the religious/spiritual realm. Whenever we see different TV shows deal with different types of religious beliefs (Supernatural, American Gods, among others), they often will state on the show “the different gods feed off their mortals believing in them — if no mortals believed in them, they would be powerless” which is frankly toxic and narcissistic as Hell.
Why? Because these shows often always make the Christain God the “supreme being”, acting like there are not billions of other people following different pantheons. Other popular pantheons include Norse, Egyptian, Hellenism (Greek), Hinduism, among others. Many of these pantheons have very fierce warriors within their respective pantheon (Kali in Hinduism, Odin in Norse, just to give a few examples) but are often reduced to just pesky ants in comparison to strength to the Christain God or related beings (Lucifer for example) within the Christain circle, which again, is extremely offensive to these pantheons.
As of 2015, here are rough estimations of the global populations in regards to different belief systems: Christianity 2.3 billion; Muslim 1.3 billion; “Unaffiliated” 1.2 billion; Hinduism 1.1 billion; Buddhism 0.5 billion; “Folk Religions” 0.4 billion; Jewish 0.1 billion; “Other Religions” 0.1 billion (source: https://tinyurl.com/worldreligion2015).
Many people believe that Southeast Asian belief systems (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.) haven’t become “as popular” in say USA for example because many of these (by the large) do not believe in the concept known as hegemony. These belief systems get “spread around” because people get curious, look up these different beliefs and say “hey, that sounds similar to what I already believe!”. Many people learn about these different belief systems later in life because they realize they had ancestors who practiced these belief systems and want to honor their ancestors by at least learning about them.
These other belief systems have fascinating and beautiful legends and stories attached to them. However, the toxic belief of hegemony often deeply disrespects these beautiful belief systems (often seen in different media depictions of the various other systems). We see this in Pagan circles as well where some Pagans believe that “the power of mortals believing in their deities gives them strength” which is very egotistical. Hegemony isn’t cute and is so incredibly damaging to all the pantheons that exist out there and needs to stop.
