Our Christian Earth: The astounding reach of the world’s largest religion, in charts and maps

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/18/our-christian-earth-the-astounding-reach-of-the-worlds-largest-religion-in-charts-and-maps/


Filipino Christians crowd into Manila’s streets for the annual procession of the Feast of the Black Nazarene. (David Greedy — Getty Images)

Christmas is an official government holiday in the United States, one that coincides with a smaller and informal but well-known tradition: debating whether or not there is a “war on Christmas.” In this thinking, American Christians are obligated to ”stand up and fight against this secular progressivism that wants to diminish the Christmas holiday,” as prominent Fox News host Bill O’Reilly recently argued. “We have to start to fight back against these people.” This is often portrayed as a global fight; O’Reilly, in one of his books, suggested that the “war on Christmas” is part of an effort to “mold [the U.S.] in the image of Western Europe.”
This movement to defend one of Christianity’s most important holiday can sometimes seem to begin from the assumption that Christianity itself is on the defensive in the world, a besieged minority or at least under threat of being made one.

A very different picture emerges from a just-out Pew report, “The Global Religious Landscape.” There are a number of fascinating trends and details in the study, but it’s worth examining what it indicates about the place of Christianity in the world. And, based on this data, the world’s largest religion seems to be doing just fine.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s examine what the visualizations of Pew’s research show us. (You’ll notice that the data is from 2010; it’s not up-to-the-minute, but, given the challenges of a global survey and the slow rate at which global trends move, it’s still relatively current.) First, here is a chart of the world’s major religions by number of adherents.