Religion or none, most have faith

The study, based on extensive data for 2010, also showed Islam and Hinduism are the faiths mostly likely to expand in the future, while Jews have the weakest growth prospects.

It showed Christianity is the most evenly spread religion, present in all regions of the world, while Hinduism is the least global, with 94 per cent of its population found in one country, India.

Overall, 84 per cent of the world’s 6.9 billion inhabitants identify with a religion, according to the study, entitled The Global Religious Landscape, issued by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life yesterday.

The “unaffiliated” category covers all those who profess no religion, from atheists and agnostics to people with spiritual beliefs but who have no link to any established faith.

“Many of the religiously unaffiliated do hold religious or spiritual beliefs,” it stressed. “Belief in God or a higher power is shared by 7 per cent of unaffiliated Chinese adults, 30 per cent of unaffiliated French adults and 68 per cent of unaffiliated US adults.”

Exact numbers for religious populations are impossible to obtain and estimates for the size of the larger faiths can vary by hundreds of millions. This study by the Washington DC-based Pew Forum appears to be one of the most extensive to date.

Pew Forum demographer Conrad Hackett said the 2,500 censuses, surveys and population registers used to compile the report did not allow a further breakdown to estimate the world population of atheists and agnostics.

“It’s not the kind of data that’s available for every country,” he said. “A census will typically ask what your religion is and you can identify a number of particular affiliations or no religion.”

An age breakdown showed Muslims had the lowest median age at 23 years, compared with 28 for the whole world population. The median age highlights the bulge at the point where half the population is above and half below that number.

“Muslims are going to grow as a share of the world’s population and an important part of that is this young age structure,” Mr Hackett said.

By contrast, Judaism, which has 14 million adherents, or  0.2 per cent of the world population, has the highest median age at 36, meaning its growth prospects are weakest.

Mr Hackett noted that Israel, which has 40.5 per cent of the world Jewish population, had a younger age structure than the US, where 41.1 per cent of the world’s Jews live.

Global Christianity’s median age is 30 and Hinduism’s is 26. The study showed that, with a median age of 34, the growth prospects for religiously unaffiliated people are weak.

The study estimated that Christianity was the largest faith with 2.2 billion adherents, or 31.5 per cent of the world’s population. The Roman Catholic Church accounts for 50 per cent, with Protestants – including Anglicans and non-denominational churches – at 37 per cent and Orthodox at 12 per cent.

There are about 1.6 billion Muslims around the world, or 23 per cent of the global population, about 90 per cent of them Sunni and 10 per cent Shia.

Among the 1.1 billion unaffiliated people around the world, more than 700 million, or 62 per cent of them, live in China, where they make up 52.2 per cent of the Chinese population.

Japan comes next with 72 million, or 57 per cent of its population. After that comes the US, where 51 million – 16.4 per cent of all Americans – said they have no link to an established faith.

The world’s Hindu population is concentrated mostly in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Half of the world’s Buddhists live in China, followed far behind by Thailand at 13.2 per cent and Japan with 9.4 per cent.

The study found that about 405 million people followed folk religions. Another 58 million, or nearly 1 per cent of the world population, belonged to “other religions” including Baha’i, Taoism, Jainism, Shintoism, Sikhism, Tenrikyo, Wicca and Zoroastrianism.