Animated Map Charts Christianity's Global Spread from Antiquity to Present

Ollie Bye released an eight-minute animated video mapping the historical propagation of Christianity from its origins in the first-century Middle East to a global presence. The map begins with the region now called the Middle East and zooms out as Christianity expands, eventually covering every continent except Antarctica, which still hosts eight churches. Bye's visualization includes a running legend of major Christian variants—Nicene, Celtic, Chalcedonian, Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist, and many more—highlighting the religion's diversification over time. The video illustrates how Christianity adapted to diverse environments, cultures, and societies, thriving as a clandestine movement, a state religion, and everything in between. It assimilated elements from Greco-Roman philosophy, Celtic festivals, and Korean shamanistic traditions. The spread was driven by non-ethnic universalism, emotional resonance of sin, salvation, and rebirth narratives, and assiduous translation of texts and missionary work. The video is published on Open Culture and embedded from YouTube.