Updates

The populations of every religion in every country in all years are freshly reconciled following the biennial revision of population data produced by the UN: (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects: The 2024 Revision).

This WCD update provides the latest reconciliation of statistics on Christian denominations (to 2020) and world religions together with projections to 2050.

Additionally, the "base year" of the database is now set to 2025 so unless labelled otherwise, all data in WCD now refer to 2025, except for Christian denominations and communions which have just now been finalized for 2020.

Data update: 2020 data for denominations has been released for the first time and so denominations now default to showing 2020 rather than 2015. This milestone in the five year denominational research cycle also marks the beginning of the next cycle: starting with initial (unpublished) projections for 2025 and over the next five years analyzing the actual status as reports by churches and censuses become available.