Items of Interest January 30, 2012 Issue

Study notes shifts in world's Christian population

“New Pew Forum study estimates global Christian population at 2.18 billion” www.pewforum.org December 19, 2011.

Reprinted from Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life, © 2011, Pew Research Center. http://pewforum.org/Press-Room/Press-Releases/New-Pew-Forum-Study-Estimates-Global-Christian-Population-at-2-18-Billion.aspx

[In December] the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life published a new comprehensive demographic report on the size and distribution of the world’s Christian population. The study finds that there are 2.18 billion Christians of all ages in more than 200 countries around the world, representing nearly a third of the estimated 6.9 billion 2010 global population. Christians are so geographically widespread that no single continent or region can indisputably claim to be the center of global Christianity.

In 1910, two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe (according to historical data from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts). Today, the Pew study finds, only about a quarter of all Christians (26%) live in Europe. A plurality—more than a third (37%)—now reside in the Americas. About one in every four Christians (24%) lives in sub-Saharan Africa and about one-in-eight (13%) is found in Asia and the Pacific.

In the last 100 years, the number of Christians around the world has more than tripled from historical estimates of approximately 600 million in 1910 to more than two billion today. But the world’s overall population has also 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 in 2010 (32%) as they did a century ago (35%).

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