The Global Religious Landscape June 2012 | Page 16

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GLOBAL RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE

De ning the Religious Groups
This study is based on self-identi cation. It seeks to estimate the number of people around
the world who view themselves as belonging to various religious groups. It does not attempt
to measure the degree to which members of these groups actively practice their faiths or how
religious they are.
In order to obtain statistics that are comparable across countries, the study attempts to count
groups and individuals who self-identify as members of ve widely recognized world religions
– uddhists, Christians, indus, Muslims and Jews – as well as people associated with three
other religious categories that may be less familiar:

Folk or Traditional Religions
Folk religions are closely tied to a particular people, ethnicity or tribe. In some cases, elements
of other world religions are blended with local beliefs and customs. These faiths often have no
formal creeds or sacred texts. Examples of folk religions include African traditional religions,
Chinese folk religions, Native American religions and Australian aboriginal religions.

The Religiously Unaffiliated
The religiously unaf liated population includes atheists, agnostics and people who do not
identify with any particular religion in surveys. owever, many of the religiously unaf liated
do hold religious or spiritual beliefs. For example, various surveys have found that belief in
God or a higher power is shared by
of unaf liated Chinese adults,
of unaf liated
6
French adults and
of unaf liated U.S. adults.

Other Religions
The “other religions” category is diverse and comprises groups not classi ed elsewhere. This
category includes followers of religions that often are not measured separately in censuses and
surveys: the aha’i faith, Jainism, Shintoism, Sikhism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, icca, oroastrianism and many other religions. ecause of the lack of data on these faiths in many countries, the
Pew Forum has not attempted to estimate the size of individual religions within this category,
though some roug