A comprehensive demographic study of more
than 200 countries finds that there are 2.18 billion Christians of all
ages around the world, representing nearly a third of the estimated 2010
global population of 6.9 billion. Christians are also geographically
widespread – so far-flung, in fact, that no single continent or region
can indisputably claim to be the center of global Christianity.
A century ago, this
was not the case. In 1910, about two-thirds of the world’s Christians
lived in Europe, where the bulk of Christians had been for a millennium,
according to historical estimates by the Center for the Study of Global
Christianity.2
Today, only about a quarter of all Christians live in Europe (26%). A
plurality – more than a third – now are in the Americas (37%). About one
in every four Christians lives in sub-Saharan Africa (24%), and about
one-in-eight is found in Asia and the Pacific (13%).
The number of Christians around the world
has nearly quadrupled in the last 100 years, from about 600 million in
1910 to more than 2 billion in 2010. But the world’s overall population
also has risen rapidly, from an estimated 1.8 billion in 1910 to 6.9
billion in 2010. As a result, Christians make up about the same portion
of the world’s population today (32%) as they did a century ago (35%).
This apparent stability, however, masks a
momentous shift. Although Europe and the Americas still are home to a
majority of the world’s Christians (63%), that share is much lower than
it was in 1910 (93%). And the proportion of Europeans and Americans who
are Christian has dropped from 95% in 1910 to 76% in 2010 in Europe as a
whole, and from 96% to 86% in the Americas as a whole.
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