Religious segregation may take the form of segregation in education, in employment, in class, in housing and in marriage. In public services, political discrimination can cause the apportioning of social benefits according to religion. Segregation results in inequality, religious intolerance, conflict, and sometimes civil war. Religious segregation may be inflicted by force, as with the segregation of the Jews in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe under Nazi occupation during the 2nd World War.
Pope Benedict XIV (1751) issued an encyclical arguing for the ghettoization of Polish Jews because of their numbers and their effects on the Catholic communities.
Religious segregation is universal and particularly marked in multidenominational societies. For some fundamentalist or very traditional sects, segregation is almost complete.