Data source: Gina A. Zurlo and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2024).
| Glossary item | Definition |
|---|---|
| Divine Science | See Religious Science. |
| divinity | The science of divine things; the science that deals with God, his laws and moral government, and the way of salvation; theology. |
| division | The act, process, or an instance of dividing into parts or portions; schism, breakoff, secession. |
| documentation center | A center for the collecting, assembling, coding and disseminating of recorded knowledge comprehensively treated, and for the processing of all kinds of documentation. |
| dogma | A doctrine or body of doctrines of theology and religion formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church. |
| dogmatic constitution | The most solemn form of conciliar utterance emanating from a Catholic ecumenical council. The most imposing achievement of Vatican II was ‘Constitutio Dogmatica de Ecclesia’, also called ‘Lumen Gentium’. |
| domestic church | A term used in Catholic circles for the family, or believers in a family. |
| dormant Christians | See non-practicing Christians. |
| double affiliation | See doubly-affiliated Christians. |
| doubling | The practice, in Africa and India, of having 2 preachers for a sermon: the first preaching a sentence at a time, the second repeating the sentence for emphasis and often (in the open air) louder or in a different direction. |
| doubly-affiliated Christians | Persons affiliated to or claimed by 2 denominations at once (especially by Evangelical and Catholic churches in Latin America and Latin Europe, and by state churches and free churches in Scandinavia). |
| doubly-affiliated Christians | Persons who are baptized members of 2 or more denominations at the same time. |
| doubly-counted Catholics | Catholics counted as members of an older diocese or jurisdiction who also get counted again as members of a newer diocese when it is divided off from its parent diocese. |
| doubly-counted religionists | Persons counted as belonging to 2 or more religions, hence counted twice in censuses. |
| doubter | An unbeliever, agnostic, skeptic. |
| drama, religious | See religious drama. |
| Dravidian | An Indo-Iranian ethnolinguistic family. |
| Druzes | Members of an 11th-century Muslim Shia Ismaili schism with Christian and Jewish elements; strongest in Syria and Lebanon. |
| dual citizenship | Dual nationality, multiple nationality; the status of an individual who is a citizen of 2 or more states. |
| dual membership | Overlapping membership (qv). |
| Dunkers | Dippers; German Baptists practicing trine immersion, love feasts and simplicity of life. |
| Dupka | Karma-pa or Red Hat (Unreformed) Lamaism (qv). |
| DXers | Amateur practitioners of long-distance radio transmission. |
| dynamic equivalence church | A local church, or denomination that has an equivalent impact on or in its own society and culture to that of the original New Testament church, with particular reference to indigeneity, degree of foreign dominance, relevance, vitality, scriptural quality, decisionmaking patterns, self-image, community-held image, et alia. |
| dynamic equivalence translation | A translation of Scripture, as developed by the United Bible Societies, designed to be the closest natural equivalent to the source-language message, i.e. to discover what the text meant at the time of writing in order to communicate its full equivalent meaning today (e.g. in English, the NEB, JB, GNB Bibles, with the NIV halfway between formal correspondence and dynamic equivalent). By contrast, a formal correspondence translation is an exact or literal or word-for-word translation of the original. |
Data on 18 categories of religion, including non-religious, by country, province, and people.
Data on all religions, Christian activities, and trends.
Membership data, year begun, and rates of change.
Population and religion data on all major cities & provinces.
Detailed information covering religion, culture, and geography.
A repository of historical data, including a chronology of Christianity from the 1st to 21st centuries.