Which Religion is Right? A Look at Relgion by the Numbers

I sometimes wonder… With all the religions in the world, which one is right?  Most of the ones I’m familiar with pretty much preach that they are the ONLY TRUE religion.  Often times you must believe worship in that one religion or be banished to an eternity in some fiery netherworld.  If you don’t belong to the right religion, you cannot be saved.

The whole idea strikes me as being rather silly.  For one, I don’t believe that we need to be “saved.”  As I mentioned before, I believe we chose to come to this Earth to live out a physical existence.  I don’t see any reason to be saved if I made the choice to come here in the first place.  Number two, and possibly less controversial, is that if many religions claim to be the only true religion, someone has to be wrong.

To me, the intolerance and lack of acceptance of one religion by another seems out of alignment with God.  I believe God would be tolerant and loving of all, whether they accepted him/her as God or not.  Not long ago I chatted for a few minutes with someone working for the Campus Crusade for Christ.  I am always interested in talking about religion because I am fascinated by many aspects of it.  In this short conversation I mentioned how the intolerance of other religions seemed rather silly, especially since many religions share the same roots, with an example being Christianity and Islam.  Well let me tell you, that conversation came to an end rather quickly.  He quickly said they did not share the same origins and then made his way to talk to some other folks.

I was a little surprised by his reaction as it was just casual conversation and I was genuinely interested in discussing it.  I don’t know much about religions outside of Christianity and do really enjoy discussing them.  I figured someone working in a Christian organization would have some basic education in other religions as well, but I get the feeling that wasn’t the case.  Perhaps he wasn’t open minded enough to consider or learn about other religions, or maybe he just didn’t like talking about it; who knows?

Show me the Numbers

That conversation and some other conversations I’ve had with folks from different Christian denominations got me thinking.  We seem very Christian centric in the United States.  I wonder what the actual numbers look like.  Being the Google whiz that I am, I did a little searching and came across Adherents.com.  This is a site that lists numbers of adherents for religions around the world.  (Adherent is the name given to someone following any given religion.)

They had some charts and graphs, but I decided to make my own instead.  The following chart shows the number of adherents in the United States.  You can click the chart to make it bigger.

Number Of Adherents In The United States (click chart to enlarge)

That was quite an eye opener to me.  82% of the United States call themselves Christians.  I also found it interesting that 14% don’t associate with any religion.  Also that Judaism only accounts for one percent.  Judaism seems much larger, possibly because they discuss it more freely, or at least it seems that way to me.

Break it Down

Now anyone living anywhere near the bible belt knows (I’m a little South of it, but it trickles down here,) we have a number of different branches of Christianity in full force.  I wonder what the split is.  I assume Catholic and Baptist are somewhere near the top.  So I dug up some more info from Adherents.com and came up with the following chart.  This chart shows the number of adherents in the US by denomination.  Note this chart shows only Christianity, and doesn’t include other religions.

Number of Adherents in the United States by Denomination (click chart to enlarge)

As I suspected Catholic and Baptist are the top two at 38% and 25% respectively.  That’s over 60% of all Christian denominations in the US.

How the Rest of the World Worships

Of course now I’m curious about the rest of the World.  I know the US is different on a great many things; the whole metric system for one thing.  But I suspect a big difference in religion as well.   Let’s look at the number of adherents worldwide.

Number Of Adherents Worldwide (click chart to enlarge)

That chart is very interesting to me.  I didn’t expect Islam to be so high, and Buddhism to be so low.  I also didn’t expect to see Primal-indegenous even show up on the chart.

World Branches of Religion

I have one more chart to complete my peek into the numbers of religion.  Like we looked at denominations of Christianity in the US, I know that several of the religions outside of Christianity also have branches.  I want to see what the numbers look like for all the branches.  Here is the chart for major branches of religions and the number of adherents worldwide.

Number of Adherents Worldwide by Major Branches of World Religions (click chart to enlarge)

The top three on that chart are Catholic (Christianity,) Sunni (Islam,) and Vaishnavites (Hinduism.)  I find it interesting that while Baptist is second in the United States, it is 15^th worldwide with only about 2%.  Nothing wrong with that, I just find it interesting.

The things that stand out to me are the numbers of followers of various religions.  There are a great many people that won’t be “saved” in the eyes of other religions.  Also that the top three branches of world religion outnumber all the other branches combined.

I enjoyed looking at the numbers.  If you want to see the raw data, you can view the Excel spreadsheet here.  I am just amazed at the number of different religions and branches of religion and also at the number of people following these religions.  Even the smaller religions like Scientology (500,000 worldwide adherents), Rastafarianism (600,000), and Unitarian-Universalism (800,000) have very significant numbers.  500,000 followers, although the smallest comparatively is quite a large following.

I hope you enjoyed this journey into the numbers of religion.  I know I enjoyed looking up the facts and sharing them with you.  Do you have any thoughts on these numbers?  Any insight you’d like to share on religion?  I’d love to hear from you!

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Tagged as: Open Mind, Religion, Spirituality