Does anyone know of a relative sizes of major religions?

Question

Most websites claim christianity accounts for 33% of the world population. I tend to doubt this figure for two big reasons.

1. the websites are maintained by christians, and therefore suspect to bias in favor of christians.

2. I believe there are 6.5 billion people on the planet, over half of whom are mainland chinese. The chinese census would easily skew things in any direction, and I believe christians are a minority in china.

So does anyone have a different set of data? I feel skeptical about the 33% figure.

Answer 1

According to the CIA:

Christians 33.03% (of which Roman Catholics 17.33%, Protestants 5.8%, Orthodox 3.42%, Anglicans 1.23%), Muslims 20.12%, Hindus 13.34%, Buddhists 5.89%, Sikhs 0.39%, Jews 0.23%, other religions 12.61%, non-religious 12.03%, atheists 2.36% (2004 est.)

Answer 2

The way I read the demographics it only includes people who believe in a religion. Since China is officially an atheist country I don't think that it is part of the survey. I may be wrong but it seems to account for the discrepency. I added up the numbers of adherents for each religion counted and it only comes to 5,627 million. China actually has 1.2 billion people, 20% of the world's population. There are a lot of different explanations for the figures on religion given on a number of websites.

Answer 3

The data is correct - kind of. There are over 2 Billion Christians, half of those being catholic, over 1 million Muslims, about 800,000 Hindus, about 300,000 Budhists.

The data is kind of correct, because these are the numbers of people that say that they are of that faith, but I bet the numbers would drop a lot if they reflected how many people actually believed in and practiced each faith.

Christianity is currently the largest faith.

Answer 4

Give the following url a go. I like them because they say that Pagans are the up and coming religion!!! Ya team!

Answer 5

http://www.adherents.com

http://www.religioustolerance.org/compuswrld.htm