Religion: Counting Every Soul on Earth

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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).