Counting Every Soul on Earth

By Richard N. Ostling

A miracle from Nairobi: the first census of all religions

Until the Rev. Dr. David B. Barrett realized his pioneering mission, many important questions about the world's religions could not be answered. Is Christianity really growing? What percentage of the world's population is atheistic? What percentage is Jewish? Muslim? Barrett believed that the answers to these and similar questions should no longer, in this age of telecommunications, jet travel and computer analysis, remain a matter of faith. Some 14 years ago, huddling with church demographers in Nairobi, Kenya, Barrett launched a project that many churchmen around the world thought would take a virtual miracle to pull off: a nation-by-nation grand survey, complete with encyclopedic tables and computer-compiled statistics, of all the world's religions, minor and major--with no soul left uncounted.

The result, published in a fact-crammed, 1,010-page volume by Oxford University Press, is nothing less than a tour of considerable force: the World Christian Encyclopedia. Although the bulk of Barrett's information concerns Christianity, it also provides a rich assortment of data on all of the world's great faiths. It has LIFE magazine-size pages, endless charts and graphs, numerous illustrations and enough credibility in its facts, conclusions and methodology to make it a bench mark in our understanding of the true religious state of the planet. Even for as zealous a researcher as Barrett, 54, an Anglican missionary, the project required the patience of Job. He trekked to 212 countries and territories, often lugging bulky statistical histories, occasionally confronting suspicious customs agents, frequently phoning his team of 21 editors and consultants around the world. He also tapped some 500 local experts in various countries (100 of whom required strict confidentiality, including a worried Roman Catholic monk stationed in a ferociously Muslim nation in the Middle East).

The volume opens with a global analysis of Christianity, a chronology of 1,300 key events in the spread of the Christian faith since A.D. 27, and a 66-page explanation of Barrett's methods and definitions. It also offers a dictionary of terms, a Who's Who, and a comprehensive list of names and addresses of religious agencies under 76 categories. Interspersed with all that are 31 tables of global statistics, some of which cover a time span from A.D. 30 to the year 2000. Here one can discover, for instance, the number of literate and nonliterate Christians in eight regions of the world or the fact that fully 605 million Christians must currently struggle against political restrictions on their religious freedom. Nearly two-thirds of the book consists of detailed statistics on religions in countries from Afghanistan (where it is a capital crime for a Muslim to convert to Christianity) to Zimbabwe (where 40% of the people still practice tribal religions).

What Barrett and his demographers have discovered is sure to prove invaluable to churchmen and scholars everywhere. But it will also trigger new controversies. For example, Barrett concludes that Brazil, the world's biggest Catholic country, in fact has 11.4 million people on the Catholic rolls who are really Protestants, and 60 million who dabble in the worship of spirits.

But Christians will take heart from many of the findings. Indonesia has the biggest Muslim population, but gained 5.6 million Christians during the 1970s, more than one-third of them as converts rather than through natural population growth. In Saudi Arabia, Islam's epicenter, thousands of youths have covertly converted to Christianity through listening to radio preachers. In Nigeria, where as of 1900, 73% of the people followed tribal faiths and 26% Islam, the population today--Africa's largest--is 49% Christian and 45% Muslim. South Korea demonstrates the world's most dramatic Christian revival: the churches are growing by 6.6% a year, fully two-thirds through conversions rather than the birth rate. By the end of the century, Barrett projects, South Korea will be 42% Chris tian. The U.S. is the most disparate nation of all, Barrett concludes, with 2,050 denominations for its 161 million Christians, plus myriad non-Christians. It has the largest population of Jews in the world, 7.1 million. Between 1900 and 2000, classical Protestantism will have shrunk from two-thirds of the population to little more than one-third.

The English-born Barrett entered the Church of England ministry after his career as an aviation designer turned sour (he quit as a moral protest in 1951, when nuclear rocketry began taking over the field), and he made his way to Nairobi. There he served as a researcher for the Anglicans. "We are neither East nor West here," he says, "and Africa is also the continent where the religious ferment is one of the greatest in the world today."

Barrett analyzes a globe that is experiencing major spiritual changes. The most dramatic changes have been the rise for the first time of atheistic and nonreligious masses (now 20.8% of the world population as compared with .2% in 1900) and the precipitous decline of Chinese folk religions and tribal faiths elsewhere. After centuries as the predominant faith of the Northern Hemisphere, especially Europe, Christianity, as of last year, had a non-white majority for the first time in 1,200 years. In 1900 two-thirds of Christians lived in Europe and Russia; by 2000, three-fifths of them will live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. While Westerners cease to be practicing Christians at a rate of 7,600 per day, Africa is gaining 4,000 Christians per day through conversion from other religions, and three times that many through the birth rate.

Christianity is also shifting in denominational terms. The fastest growing category is what Barrett labels nonwhite indigenous churches. Including Africans not tied to Western missions, these groups by the year 2000 will number 154 million. The biggest distinct category of Protestants today does not consist of traditional Reformation groups, such as the Lutherans, but the Pentecostalists--at 51 million strong, a leading strain of the worldwide Evangelical movement. In addition, 11 million members of more traditional denominations follow Pentecostal practices. Barrett's astounding conclusion: the Evangelicals, taken all together, today command a healthy majority of Protestants in the world (157 million) as well as in the U.S. (59 million).

Barrett is obviously a missionary at heart, with a global strategy in view. He points out that during the present century, Christianity has become the first truly universal religion in world history, with indigenous outposts in all nations and among many inaccessible tribes. Bible translation is booming; church broadcasts reach 990 million people a month. Some 6,850 of the 8,990 ethnic or linguistic groups on earth have by now been penetrated to some extent with the gospel. Thus though the Christian proportion of the world population is declining a bit, "the outreach, impact and influence of Christianity have risen spectacularly," he maintains. If the church has not achieved its much touted turn-of-the-century goal of "the evangelization of the world in this generation," Barrett says, it has come closer than most Christians and non-Christians realize.

There are, he insists, many more Christians in the world than meet the eye. He cites the example of the Soviet Union, where his project coincided with an official Kremlin survey on the spread of atheism. Surprisingly, he won top-level clearance to work closely with Communist Party researchers, who turned out to be scrupulously objective in collecting data. The resulting estimates: 137 million Soviets are irreligious, but an impressive 97 million remain Christian. There, as elsewhere, Barrett found masses of members known only to the churches. Worldwide there appear to be 70 million so-called crypto-Christians. Even the Vatican's count may be conservative. In Rome, though official church documents were impressive in their detail, one questionnaire on the number of baptisms in an African country was answered by the harried local bishop with the scrawl: "Deus scit" (God only knows).

Barrett's statistics and conclusions are bound to stir up debate, but they are, without doubt, the best available estimates, combined with impressively detailed rundowns on most of Christianity's 20,000 subgroups. All this establishes the Anglican missionary as the Linnaeus of religious taxonomy. In fact, the book was so eagerly awaited in church circles that ecclesiastics began to visit Barrett's modest, cluttered offices in Nairobi for years before completion to find out how the numbers were running. A few men of God could not resist the temptation to filch advance copies. Now that it has been officially published, the World Christian Encyclopedia, even at the retail price of $74.50, will seem to many people concerned with the state of the world's religions like a real steal.

-- By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Allistar Matherson /Nairobi

With reporting by Alistair Matheson

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.