Statistics of Religions

From the Catholic Encyclopedia

This study concerns itself with religious bodies, the number of their members, and their distribution over various countries. In a wider sense the numerical account of the external manifestations of religious life also belongs to the same study, but of late it has been customary to comprise this latter group of facts under the designation of "Ecclesiastical Statistics" and to treat of them separately. As the whole field has only in the last decades been thoroughly worked, language has not as yet afforded a clear distinction between these terms. Practical reasons, however, speak in favour of such a distinction, and therefore we retain it in the present article, and treat ecclesiastical statistics separately (see STATISTICS, ECCLESIASTICAL).

The first attempts to determine exactly the number of members of a religious body are found in the records of the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But they only give the number of the Christians, and not that of the adherents of the indigenous religions in the respective countries. Dating from the eighteenth century, some accounts indeed of the various religious systems and their spread are extant, but they only mention the countries over which the respective religions extended; as to the number of their followers we possess but scattered data even of that period, and no comprehensive and comparative records. It was only in the nineteenth century that an effort was made to distinguish statistically, according to religion, the entire population of the earth. The accounts given in Table I are the most accurate.

In all these calculations the total of the earth's population is considerably underrated. The numbers of the non-Christians are evidently only vague estimates without any solid foundation, as is clear from the round numbers and the great differences between the various estimates. Regarding Christians the computation is indeed more accurate but very far from the exactness requisite for scientific research. Even the attempts made by geographers, such as Hübner, Peterman, Kolb, between 1850 and 1880, do not show any essential progress.