{"id":71,"date":"2009-06-26T14:49:56","date_gmt":"2009-06-26T18:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cura\/programs\/projects\/religiousdemography\/"},"modified":"2024-06-12T22:00:01","modified_gmt":"2024-06-13T02:00:01","slug":"religiousdemography","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cura\/religiousdemography\/","title":{"rendered":"International Religious Demography"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quantitative Assessment of the World\u2019s Religions:
\nPast, Present, and Future
\n<\/i><\/b><\/h3>\n

Todd M. Johnson, Brian J. Grim, Gina A. Zurlo, Peter Crossing, and David Hannan<\/b><\/h3>\n

About the project<\/b><\/p>\n

Censuses of people have been conducted for several centuries. The science of counting religionists around the world, however, is a relatively new field of study\u2014the development of the academic discipline of international religious demography has taken place largely in the latter part of the twentieth century. We define \u201creligious demography\u201d as the scientific and statistical study of the demographic characteristics of religious populations, primarily with respect to their size, age-sex structure, density, growth, distribution, development, migration, and vital statistics, including the change of religious identity within human populations and how these characteristics relate to other social and economic indicators. In this sense, we go beyond basic demographic features of religion (age, sex, fertility, mortality) and look at religion as a demographic characteristic of human populations deserving its own field of inquiry.<\/p>\n

The increased prominence religion has assumed in academic fields\u2014including history, sociology, international relations, and a host of others\u2014is one of the unexpected developments of the early twenty-first century. In the latter part of the twentieth century, conventional wisdom held that religion was on the wane and, by implication, that the study of religion was of little importance to understanding the world. However, this has not been the reality, and the number of sources of religious data continues to expand. Approximately half of the world\u2019s national censuses ask questions on religion. Religious communities continue to collect data on their members and publish annual reports of the results. Professional survey groups conduct polls and surveys, increasingly outside of the Western world. Scholars are writing monographs on religious communities, including their demographics. All of these data offer a rich repository of information for an assessment of religious demographics.<\/p>\n

In 2008, the International Religious Demography (IRD) project was launched for the purpose of providing comprehensive religious demographic information. The IRD project is collecting, collating, and analyzing primary and secondary source material on religious demography for all major religions in every country of the world. As data is collected and analyzed, estimates from these sources are made readily available and fully transparent to the scholarly community. The IRD project is currently publishing its findings in the World Religion Database <\/i>(Leiden\/Boston: Brill) and has also produced a series of texts using WRD data.\u00a0By offering best estimates based on a methodologically rigorous reconciliation of the various sources\u2019 estimates, the IRD is a valuable resource for anyone doing research on religion.<\/p>\n

The IRD project is based at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) at Boston University. The data primarily come from an analysis of the two largest collections of religious demographic data:<\/p>\n