More about Christian percentages

  • Anam Cara pointed out some­thing regard­ing that last post that had both­ered me as well. I’m list­ing Adher­ents‘ stats for how many Chris­tians there are world­wide, but Adher­ents counts a lot of the cul­ties as Chris­t­ian: Mor­mons, Chris­t­ian Sci­en­tists, Jehovah’s Wit­nesses, etc. etc. It doesn’t seem right to include them in a world­wide Chris­t­ian tally.

    So, look­ing to get a more accu­rate num­ber than the orig­i­nal 33%, I went to a dif­fer­ent page of Adher­ents that breaks Chris­tians out by denom­i­na­tional fam­ily and did the tal­lies again.

    The answer is …

    … 30.75%. If I take the cults out (which only rep­re­sent .7% of total reli­gious mem­ber­ship), I get 30.75% as the world pop­u­la­tion of Chris­t­ian adher­ents. Since Islam, the next-largest reli­gion, has 21%, that still means that Chris­tian­ity is the largest world reli­gion by a siz­able mar­gin. (If you’re won­der­ing why the com­bined num­ber doesn’t add up to 33%, Adher­ents says that this sec­ond chart of denom­i­na­tions isn’t totally com­plete. Rather than won­der whether the other 2.55% were Chris­tians or cults, I just left them out.)
    If I get nit-picky and only count the largest denom­i­na­tional fam­i­lies — Catholic, Ortho­dox, Con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tant, Lib­eral Protes­tant, Pen­te­costal and Angli­can — I still get a num­ber of 29.8%.

    .

    Fun with numbers

    Here are the three Excel charts that get you there.
    The fig­ures for the first two are taken from the chart called “Major Denom­i­na­tional Fam­i­lies of Chris­tian­ity” on this page. The fig­ures for the third one come from a chart fur­ther down the page called “Sig­nif­i­cant Soci­o­log­i­cally Dis­tinct Branches of Chris­tian­ity”. So …

    blog_christian-membership-stats-1.jpg

    blog_christian-membership-stats-2.jpg

    And by the way, I don’t think all that much of this num­bers game. You end up sound­ing like you’re say­ing “Big­ger is bet­ter,” which is a pretty prim­i­tive slo­gan. I only went through the exer­cise because of Vil­lage of 100′s efforts to try to min­i­mize us. But now that I’ve had a lit­tle work­out with Excel, I’ll go on to some­thing more fun and less mathematical.


    Related posts:

    1. The per­va­sive­ness of the Chris­t­ian idea
    2. Good Chris­t­ian tree-huggers
    3. Fact-checking the Vil­lage of 100
    4. His­tor­i­cal guess­work and the Chris­t­ian spoilsport
    5. A Chris­t­ian in Afghanistan

    January 4th, 2008 | Grace | 1 Comment |

One Response and Counting...

  • Kyra­lessa 01.04.2008

    I don’t think much of the num­bers game myself.

    Of course, maybe I would if I were Roman Catholic instead of Ortho­dox. :)

    On the other hand, since all of those num­bers are likely “peo­ple who were ever ini­ti­ated into our faith” rather than “peo­ple who are cur­rent, faith­ful adher­ents of our faith”, I’m guess­ing there’s a lot of over­lap. Do the Roman Catholics remove from their rolls every­one who con­verts to some Protes­tant group? Do we? And in a Mus­lim coun­try, just try telling them you’ve con­verted to Christianity!

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