Updates

The latest edition of the annual Status of Global Christianity, 2026, table from the International Bulletin of Mission Research is available in the FAQ section.

Also in the FAQ, the glossary has been trimmed to include the terms most directly relevant to the database, and the methodology document has similarly been streamlined.

Core data remains the same except that the "percentage of people who know Christians" fields have been changed in the country table, to better reflect the likely margin of error, from a single percentage to a range and those same fields have been removed from the peoples table.

The populations of every religion in every country in all years are freshly reconciled following the biennial revision of population data produced by the UN: (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects: The 2024 Revision).

This WCD update provides the latest reconciliation of statistics on Christian denominations (to 2020) and world religions together with projections to 2050.

Additionally, the "base year" of the database is now set to 2025 so unless labelled otherwise, all data in WCD now refer to 2025, except for Christian denominations and communions which have just now been finalized for 2020.