Close behind are the “nons” – those who say they have no religious affiliation or say they do not believe in God – at 1. 1 billion, or 16%. That means about the same number of people, identified as Catholics worldwide, who say they have no religion. “One out of six people does not have a religious identity,” said Conrad Hackett, a primary researcher and demographer, on the study. “But it is also striking that that overwhelming majority of the world does have some type of religious identity. So I think people will be surprised looking at it either way.”
The next largest groups, the report finds, are Hindus (1 billion people, or 15%), Buddhists (500 million people, or 7%) and Jews (14 million people, or 0.2%). More than 400 million people – 6% – practice folk traditions from African, Chinese, Native American or Australian aboriginal cultures. An additional 58 million people – slightly less than 1% of the global population – belong to other religions, such as the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca and Zoroastrianism.
In addition to the numbers of adherents, the study also looks at where they live. Christians are the most evenly distributed, while Jews are fairly evenly divided between North America and the Middle East. The United States has the highest number of Christians of any nation, at more than 243 million, or 78% of the total U.S. population. Meanwhile, the majority of the world’s religiously unaffiliated, 76%, live in the Asia–Pacific region, with 700 million in China alone, where religion was stifled during the Cultural Revolution.
The report found nearly 51 million religiously unaffiliated Americans, or about 16.4% of the U.S. population. That number is smaller than the 19% of Americans, Pew reported earlier. Researchers attribute this discrepancy to the fact that their 2012 report was based on information from adults only, and the newest report includes the religious adherence of children, which tends to be higher than that of adults.
And while the number of the religiously unaffiliated is high, researchers are careful to point out that they are, by no means, homogeneous. Surveys considered in this report show that 7% of unaffiliated Chinese report a belief in God or in some other high power, while that number among the unaffiliated French is 30% and, among Americans, it climbs to 68%. In China, 44% of unaffiliated adults say they have worshiped at a graveside or tomb in the past year.
The report covers 230 countries and is drawn from more than 2,500 censuses, surveys and population records accrued through 2010. It marks the first attempt to pin down a global religious landscape using such records, Hackett said. Other findings include:
About three–quarter (73%) of the world’s people live in countries where their religion is in the majority, mostly Christians and Hindus. The religiously unaffiliated are, in the majority, in six nations: China, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan and North Korea. The unaffiliated, Buddhists and Jews have the highest median age (34, 34 and 36, respectively) while Muslims, Hindus and Christians have the lowest (23, 26 and 30, respectively).
Median age is a predictor of how religious groups will grow – as those with a younger age have more women of child–bearing age.
Ryan Cragun, a religion sociologist at the University of Tampa who studies the nonreligious, says the number of unaffiliated is not surprising. But he cautions that surveys that rely on secondary data, such as censuses, and self–reporting, often overcalculate some groups, such as Christians. “The real question is whether or not the nonreligious are outpacing the religious when it comes to growth,” he adds. That and other issues, such as migration, age range and mortality, will be covered in future reports, Pew researchers said. A more in–depth report on the religiously unaffiliated will be published this year. www.religionnews.com/ Kimberly Winston
