Just out: latest figures on world’s Christian population
July 17, 2012: A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds
that there are 2.18 billion Christians of all ages around the world, representing
nearly a third of the estimated 2010 global population of 6.9 billion. Christians
are also geographically widespread, that no single continent or region can indisputably
claim to be the center of global Christianity.
A century ago, this was not
the case. In 1910, about two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe, where
the bulk of Christians had been for a millennium, according to historical estimates
by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity.2 Today, only about a quarter
of all Christians live in Europe (26%). More than a third of Christians in the world
are now in the Americas (37%). About one in every four Christians lives in sub-Saharan
Africa (24%), and about one-in-eight is found in Asia and the Pacific (13%).
The
number of Christians around the world has nearly quadrupled in the last 100 years,
from about 600 million in 1910 to more than 2 billion in 2010. But the world’s overall
population also has risen rapidly, from an estimated 1.8 billion in 1910 to 6.9 billion
in 2010. As a result, Christians make up about the same portion of the world’s population
today (32%) as they did a century ago (35%).
This apparent stability, however,
masks a momentous shift. Although Europe and the Americas still are home to a majority
of the world’s Christians (63%), that share is much lower than it was in 1910 (93%).
And the proportion of Europeans and Americans who are Christian has dropped from 95%
in 1910 to 76% in 2010 in Europe as a whole, and from 96% to 86% in the Americas as
a whole.
At the same time, Christianity has grown enormously in sub-Saharan
Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, where there were relatively few Christians at
the beginning of the 20th century. The share of the population that is Christian in
sub-Saharan Africa climbed from 9% in 1910 to 63% in 2010, while in the Asia-Pacific
region it rose from 3% to 7%. Christianity today – unlike a century ago – is truly
a global faith.