Religion: Counting Every Soul on Earth

• Share

(3 of 3)

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