Religion: Counting Every Soul on Earth

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.