Christianity Today

How many Christians are there?

About 2.3 billion people were Christian in 2020, according to Pew Research Center, which makes Christians the world's largest religious group.¹ Their number rose by 122 million from 2010, a growth of 6 percent. Over the same decade the number of non-Christians grew by 15 percent, so the Christian share of the world fell by 1.8 percentage points, to 28.8 percent.¹² Pew counts anyone who identifies as Christian as Christian.³ Its 2011 report on Christianity named Latter-day Saints among the smaller Christian groups it counts.⁴

Why is the Christian share of the world falling?

Pew links the fall mainly to religious switching: many people raised as Christians stop identifying with any religion as adults. Among adults ages 18 to 54 in the 117 countries and territories it studied, 3.1 people left Christianity for every one who joined, the largest net loss of any group.¹ Most former Christians now have no religion, though some have joined another faith.¹

Most of the countries with large declines are in Europe and the Americas. In the United States, the Christian share of the whole population fell from 78.3 percent in 2010 to 64.0 percent in 2020.¹ By 2020, Christians had dropped below half the population in the United Kingdom (49 percent), Australia (47 percent), France (46 percent), and Uruguay (44 percent).¹ Pew adds that its surveys since 2020 suggest the Christian share in the United States may have leveled off.¹

Where do Christians live?

Sub-Saharan Africa has the most Christians, having passed Europe between 2010 and 2020. The first four rows of the table are Pew's estimates.² The last two rows are this site's calculations from Pew's region figures.⁵

Region	Share of the world's Christians, 2020	Change since 2010
Sub-Saharan Africa	31 percent	up 6 points
Latin America and the Caribbean	24 percent	down 1 point
Europe	22 percent	down 4 points
North America	10 percent	down 2 points
Asia and the Pacific	about 12 percent (calculated)	about the same (calculated)
Middle East and North Africa	under 1 percent (calculated)	about the same (calculated)

In that decade the number of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa grew by 31 percent, to 697 million. It fell in Europe and North America.²

The United States has more Christians than any other country, about one-tenth of the world's total.² By Pew's country figures, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, and Russia come next.⁵ Estimates for China vary widely. About 25 million people there identified as Christian in surveys, but Pew notes that many worship in unregistered churches and may be reluctant to say so, and some reports have suggested 100 million or more.²⁶ The spread map shows how the faith reached each region over time.

What do the projections say?

These projections come from a Pew Research Center report of April 2015, which looked ahead from 2010 to 2050 by extending the trends of the time.⁷ If those trends continued, the report projected that Christians would grow to 2.9 billion by 2050, about 31 percent of the world's population.⁸ It also projected that sub-Saharan Africa's share of the world's Christians would rise from 24 percent in 2010 to 38 percent in 2050. Europe's share would fall from 26 percent to about 16 percent.⁸

These projections start from Pew's original 2010 estimates, which it has since revised; the largest change raised the 2010 share of people with no religion from 16 to 23 percent.⁹

How are Christians organized?

Each branch has its own pattern of leadership.

• The Catholic Church is led by the pope, the bishop of Rome. Catholic teaching holds that the pope, as successor of the apostle Peter, has full, supreme, and universal authority over the whole Church.¹⁰
• The Eastern Orthodox churches are self-governing, or autocephalous, churches that share one faith and sacramental life.¹¹ They regard the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople as first among equals, not an Orthodox pope.¹¹¹² The Ecumenical Patriarchate and its supporters hold that this role includes settling disputes between churches; in the Ukraine dispute below, the Russian Orthodox Church rejected Constantinople's action as an intrusion on its own territory.¹²¹³
• The Oriental Orthodox churches, among them the Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, and Syrian Orthodox churches, form a separate family that is not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox. Their heads met in 1965 and reaffirmed that they share one faith.¹⁴
• Protestant churches belong to many separate denominations.⁴ The World Evangelical Alliance said on its website in 2026 that it represents more than 650 million evangelical Christians through 164 national alliances.¹⁵
• Bodies that link churches. The World Council of Churches listed 356 member churches on its website in 2026, in more than 120 countries, representing over 580 million Christians. Its members include most Orthodox churches and many Protestant ones.¹⁶ The Catholic Church is not a member but sits on its Faith and Order Commission.¹⁷ These membership figures are the bodies' own counts.

Some movements cross these lines. Pentecostal churches teach that Christians should seek the baptism of the Holy Spirit after conversion, and charismatics hold similar beliefs inside Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches. A 2011 Pew analysis, based mainly on figures from Christian organizations, estimated 584 million pentecostal and charismatic Christians in 2010, about 27 percent of all Christians.¹⁸

What questions are Christians debating today?

Christians today debate church unity, marriage and sexuality, and authority among the Orthodox churches.

Unity and the date of Easter. In November 2025, the Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate marked 1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council, a gathering of the church's bishops to settle matters of doctrine and discipline.¹⁹⁴ In a joint declaration, the pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch noted that all Christians had celebrated Easter on the same day that year. They said they wanted to keep exploring a way to celebrate it together every year.¹⁹ Western and Eastern churches have set Easter by different calendars since the Western calendar reform of 1582, so their dates can differ.²⁰ The Practices page explains how.

Marriage and sexuality. Churches disagree, and sometimes divide, over same-sex relationships. Catholic teaching, the Orthodox Church in America, and the Southern Baptist Convention hold that marriage is between a man and a woman.²¹²²²³ The Episcopal Church, an Anglican church in the United States, has allowed same-sex marriages since 2015. Supporters traced the change to a 1976 church resolution that gay people are children of God, fully and equally entitled to the church's love, acceptance, and pastoral care.²⁴

In December 2023, the Vatican's doctrinal office allowed priests to bless same-sex couples in a simple, non-liturgical way, for people who ask God to enrich what is good in their lives, while keeping Catholic teaching on marriage unchanged.²⁵ In January 2024, the Catholic bishops of Africa and Madagascar said there would be no such blessings in their churches. They stressed that church teaching on marriage was unchanged, reaffirmed their communion with the pope, and said the blessings would cause confusion and contradict African cultural values.²⁶

In the United Methodist Church, a 2019 policy let congregations leave over conscience on homosexuality, and more than 7,600 churches in the United States did so. Most were theologically conservative, and departures sped up after the Global Methodist Church, a conservative denomination, launched in 2022.²⁷ That policy expired at the end of 2023, and in 2024 the General Conference removed it from church law and removed the church's ban on gay clergy, which dated from 1984, a change its backers had long sought to make the church fully inclusive.²⁸

Authority among the Orthodox. On October 11, 2018, the Ecumenical Patriarchate announced that it would grant self-governing status to an Orthodox church in Ukraine. On October 15 the Russian Orthodox Church broke communion with it, saying Constantinople had encroached on Russian church territory and placed itself outside canonical order.²⁹¹³ In January 2019 Constantinople granted that status to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which it holds is part of its role.¹²

Hostility toward Christians. Pew Research Center's report for 2023, published in 2026, found that Christians were harassed by governments or social groups in 165 of the 198 countries and territories it studied.³⁰ Pew counts a country if its sources report even one incident in the year, whether physical or nonphysical.³⁰ The figure shows how many countries, not how severe the harassment was or how many incidents occurred.³⁰