The World's Religions in Figures

An Introduction to International Religious Demography

Todd M. Johnson, Brian J. Grim

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780470674543
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118323038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Created by two of the field's leading experts, this unique introduction to international religious demography outlines the challenges in interpreting data on religious adherence, and presents a contemporary portrait of global religious belief.

• Offers the first comprehensive overview of the field of international religious demography – detailing what we know about religious adherents around the world, and how we know it
• Examines religious freedom and diversity, including agnostics and atheists, on a global scale, highlighting trends over the past 100 years and projecting estimates for the year 2050
• Outlines the issues and challenges related to definitions, taxonomies, sources, analyses, and other techniques in interpreting data on religious adherence
• Considers data from religious communities, censuses, surveys, and scholarly research, along with several in-depth case studies on the global Muslim population, religion in China, and the religious demography of recently created Sudan and South Sudan
• Argues against the belief that the twentieth-century was a 'secular' period by putting forward new evidence to the contrary
• Provides resources for measuring both qualitatively and quantitatively important data on the world's religious situation in the twenty-first century

Part I

Overview

Chapter 1

Global Religious Populations, 1910–2010

Religion is a fundamental characteristic of humankind. While it is possible to find ­commonalities in different religions across history, peoples, languages, and cultures, it is also true that “religion” encompasses a dizzying array of rituals, practices, doctrines, sacred spaces, and personalities. This diversity is found even within major religions. For the purposes of creating a taxonomy it is possible to refer to seven or eight major ­religions, and to approximately 10,000 total different religions.¹ At the same time, a significant minority of people claim no religion. Even in the past 100 years this “group” has waxed and waned as a percentage of the world’s population. Any serious treatment of religious demography must take both religionists and non-religionists into account.

Viewing the world’s religions on a global scale reveals a striking demographic reality.² Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and even agnostics live side-by-side in many countries, often showing diversity within a province or state.³ These huge blocs represent to some extent cultural realities (for example, Arabs as Muslims, South Asians as Hindus), but each of these religions also has enormous cultural diversity (for example, most Muslims are not Arabs). This clustering gives rise to other seeming contradictions as well. For example, the Muslim world is perceived as stronger at its core than on the periphery (e.g., Muslims constitute a higher percentage of the population in Saudi Arabia than in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population). Yet, at the same time, the majority of Muslims live in Asia, not the Middle East or North Africa.

Chinese folk-religionists are an absolute majority in no country or province, although they make up over 6% of the global population; most live in China (which is majority agnostic). Conversely, Sikhism and Judaism – although less than 0.3% of the global total each – have local majorities in the Indian state of Punjab and in Israel, respectively. India is also notable for having the highest number of different provincial majority religions (five) in a single country.

Table 1.1 World religions by adherents, 1910–2010.

Data source: Todd M. Johnson and Brian J. Grim, eds., World Religion Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, accessed January 2012).

The activities of groups as diverse as missionaries, militaries, and migrants can lead to significant differences in religious demographics over time. As a result, one can see two profound changes when comparing the strengths of religions globally in 1910 with those of 2010. First, sub-Saharan Africa was predominantly ethnoreligionist in 1910; by 2010 ethnoreligionists had been displaced as a majority bloc, with either Christianity introduced from the south or Islam from the north now forming the majority in almost all provinces. Second, Eastern Asia has gone from a majority of Chinese folk-religionists to a majority of agnostics and atheists. The growth of agnostics and atheists globally is shown in table 1.1.

Table 1.1 is a quick-reference for comparing the global strength of each of 18 ­religions as a percentage of the world’s population in 1910 and 2010, as well as a way to compare a religion’s growth rate with those of other religions and of the world’s population as a whole. In addition, one can compare growth rates over the century (1910–2010) or over the past 10 years (2000–10). Four trends for the 100-year period are immediately apparent. First, Christianity, as a percentage of the world’s population, has declined slightly (from 34.8% to 32.8%). Second, Islam has grown from 12.6% to 22.5% of the world’s population, the most significant change in proportion for any of the large religions. Third, Buddhists and Chinese folk-religionists have together shrunk from over 30% of the world’s population to only about 13.5%. Fourth, agnostics and atheists grew from less than 1% of the world’s population to well over 11%.

One-hundred-year growth rates (expressed as average annual growth rate⁴) in table 1.1 put these changes in context. World population grew at an average rate of about 1.38% per year from 1910–2010. Atheists (6.54% p.a.) and agnostics (5.45% p.a.) grew more than four times faster than the world’s population while Confucianists grew at 2.16% p.a., nearly twice as fast as the world’s population. A different situation is described by the 10-year growth rates from 2000–10. During that period, world population grew at an average rate of 1.20% p.a. Among the larger religions, Islam was the fastest growing during this period, at 1.86% p.a.; Christianity lagged somewhat, at 1.31% p.a.⁵ Note that both agnostics (0.32% p.a.) and atheists (0.05% p.a.) are now growing much more slowly than the world’s population. This is due largely to the resurgence of religion in China.

Religiously Affiliated and Unaffiliated

Despite attempts to depict the twentieth century as a “secular” century, most of the people who lived during that period were, in fact, affiliated with a religion. In 1910, well over 99% of the world’s population was religiously affiliated. By 2010 the figure had fallen below 89%, but this 100-year trend hides the fact that the high point for the non-religious was around 1970, when almost 20% of the world’s population was either agnostic or atheist (see table 1.2). The collapse of European Communism in the late twentieth century was accompanied by a resurgence of religion, making the world more religiously affiliated in 2010 than in 1970. While religious affiliation is not a direct indication of how religiously active people are, political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart point out, “The publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving towards more secular orientations during the past fifty years. Nevertheless, the world as a whole now has more people with traditional ­religious views than ever before – and they constitute a growing proportion of the world’s population.”⁶

Table 1.2 Percentage of the world’s population belonging to no religion or religion, 1910–2010.

Data source: Todd M. Johnson and Brian J. Grim, eds., World Religion Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, accessed January 2012).

This resurgence of religious affiliation continues in the present (even though the number of atheists and agnostics continues to rise in the Western world), and the current growth of religions of all kinds in China (where the vast majority of the non-religious live today) indicates that the religious future of the world is indeed one worth studying.

What follows is a statistical summary of religious adherents (ordered largest to smallest in 2010 from table 1.1), including agnostics and atheists as separate categories.

Christians

Christianity – the world’s largest religion – traces its origins to a small group of Jewish disciples in first-century Palestine. Christians believe that Jesus Christ is divine, was crucified in Jerusalem, but rose from the dead. Jesus was seen as the fulfillment of messianic promises recorded in the Jewish scriptures. He is worshipped today in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Overview
• Part II: Data and Methods
• Part III: Case Studies
• Conclusion
• Appendix: World Religions by Country
• Glossary
• Index