WITH 2.18 billion followers, Christianity has become a truly global religion over the last 100 years as rapid growth in developing nations offset declines in Christianity’s traditional strongholds, according to a report released recently.
According to a Pew Research study, the number of Christians around the world has more than tripled in the last 100 years, from about 600 million in 1910 to more than 2 billion in 2010. However, 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%).
The key findings of the study titled ‘Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian Population’, says the 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 study also reveals some interesting things:
• Although Christianity traces its beginnings to the Middle East and North Africa, only 4% of residents in these regions claim the Christian faith today.
• Meanwhile, the faith has grown exponentially in sub-Saharan Africa, from just 9% of the population in 1910 to 63% today. Nigeria, home to more than 80 million Christians, has more Protestants than Germany, where the Protestant Reformation began.
Pew’s broad definition of Christianity includes Catholics and Protestants as well as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, although the latter two make up only a small percentage of the total population. Pew says Catholics comprise 50.1 percent of the world’s Christian population, Protestants 36.7 percent, Orthodox 11.9 percent and ‘other’ Christians — a category that includes Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses — 1.3 percent. (Evangelicals typically see the beliefs of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, particularly their views on the doctrines of God and Christ’s deity, as outside the tenets of historical Christianity.)
