Updates

The populations of every religion in every country are freshly reconciled following the biennial revisions of population data produced by the UN: (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). World Population Prospects: The 2019 Revision).

This WCD update provides the latest reconciliation of statistics on Christian denominations and world religions together with projections of all religious adherents for 2020, 2025 and 2050.

This update to the 2019 revision was purposely delayed so that this online WCD data would match the data printed in the 3rd edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia (2019) for as long as possible. While the UN's next revision is now imminent (due 2021) the significant demographic effects of COVID-19 are unlikely to be seen before the 2023 revision.

Update: The UN has pushed back the date of the next population revision from June 2021 to March 2022, with Urban prospects now not planned until 2023.

The base year of the World Christian Database has been updated from mid-2015 to mid-2020.

This means that estimates for the number of religionists in every country of the world are now reconciled with the United Nations population projections for mid-2020. The update includes statistics on all world religions as well as Country data plus preliminary data on Peoples and Cities and Provinces.

Unless labelled otherwise, all data in WCD now refer to 2020.

Note that Christian denominations and communions remain labelled as AD 2015 until at least July, by which time the first estimates for 2020 denominations should be added, along with a second round of reconciliation of 2020 data in the Peoples table.