The Global Religious Landscape

Of the whole worlds population 84% identify

themselves with a religious group. This
percentage is about 5.8 billion of the 2010
world population of 6.9 billion people.
Christians make up the worlds largest
religious group with 2.2 billion people, which
is equivalent to 32% of the population. 23% of
the worlds population is Muslim making it the
second-largest group with 1.6 billion people.
The third-largest group is 1.1 billion people, or
16% of the population who have no religious

affiliation at all.
Several of the religious groups are
concentrated in the Asia-Pacific
region, which includes the
majority of the Hindus and
Buddhists but of the people
who are not religiously affiliated also live in the Asia-Pacific region. The
number of unaffiliated people in China alone is about 700 million people,
which is more than two times the total population of all of the US. Christians
are pretty evenly dispersed throughout the world with roughly equal numbers
living in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Virtually 75% of the worlds people live

in countries where their religious group
makes up a majority of the population,
leaving only about 25% of all people who
live as religious minorities throughout
the world. The Hindus and Christians
tend to live in countries where they are
in the majority while Jews and Buddhists
tend to live in countries where they are
the minority.
Countries with a large
share of believers in fastgrowing, developing
countries tend to have a
lot younger populations,
however, those religious
groups in China and in
advanced industrial
countries tend to have
older populations.
Christians have a median
age of 30 years old, and
other members of other religions have a median age of 32 years old.
Worldwide, about 1 in 3
people are Christian, and
about 50% of those are
Catholic. Christianity is
very widespread, and
99% of Christians live
outside of the Middle
East-North Africa, which
is where Christianity
began. 26% of the
worlds Christians are
found in Europe, and 24%
are found in Latin
America and the
Caribbean.
23% of the worlds population is Muslim. There are two major branches of
Islam, which are Sunni and Shia. 9 in 10 Muslims are Sunnis. 60% of Muslims
live in the Asia-Pacific region of the world and 20% live in North-Africa and

sub-Saharan Africa, while the rest of the worlds Muslims are settled in
Europe, North America, and the Caribbean.