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GLOBAL RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE
Preface
Three years ago the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life launched an effort
to generate up-to-date and fully sourced estimates of the current size and projected growth
of the world’s major religious groups. As part of this multi-phase project, the Pew Forum
has assembled data on the size and geographic distribution of eight major religious groups –
including the religiously unaf liated – as of
. These estimates are presented in this report.
The estimates are based on a country-by-country analysis of data from more than ,
censuses, surveys and of cial population registers that were collected, evaluated and
standardized by the staff of the Pew Forum over the past several years. Researchers at the
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, and at the
Vienna Institute of Demography in Vienna, Austria, collaborated on the analysis.
This effort is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes
religious change and its impact on societies around the world. The project is jointly and
generously funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation.
In order to present data that are comparable across countries, this study focuses on groups and
individuals who identify themselves in censuses, large-scale surveys and other sources as being
members of ve widely recognized world religions – uddhism, Christianity,
induism, Islam
and Judaism. The study also includes estimates for the size and geographic distribution of
three other groups: the religiously unaf liated (those who say they are atheists and agnostics,
as well as people who do not identify with any particular religion in surveys); adherents of
folk or traditional religions, including members of African traditional religions, Chinese folk
religions, Native American religions and Australian aboriginal religions; and adherents of
other religions.
Some of the fait