Data source: Gina A. Zurlo and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2024).
| Glossary item | Definition |
|---|---|
| religious communities | (1) Religious institutes (qv), orders, congregations, or societies of religious personnel for the religious life, total (for Catholic Church) 1,530. (2) Religious communities in the sense of buildings and centers (large monasteries, abbeys, priories, including monasteries in anti-Christian countries where their presence as legitimate or tolerated institutions is significant, mother houses of religious institutes, ashrams, and the like) number over 5000 |
| religious congregations | Religious institutes (qv). |
| religious distance | The number of religious frontiers or barriers that exist between a Christian worker, evangelist or missionary, or a group of such, and their target population; as defined here, up to a maximum of 5 frontiers. |
| religious drama | The portrayal of Christian verities through art, literature, music, song, theatre, including live theatre, cinema, music concerts, broadcasting, recordings, etc. Worldwide annual statistical totals: each year, 10 million people attend live theatricals or musicals of this kind (e.g. Oberammergau Passion Play 500,000 every decadal year); 50 million see commercially-distributed films of Christian or biblical content; 50 million attend live concerts of Christian music; 100 million listen to religious drama by radio, and 300 million on television. |
| religious education | Instruction in the principles of a particular religious faith. |
| religious frontier | The line of demarcation between one category of religion and another, from the Christian standpoint; up to a maximum of 5 frontiers. |
| religious geography | See geography of religion. |
| religious house | A convent or monastery. |
| religious humanism | A modern North American movement composed chiefly of non-theistic humanist churches and dedicated to achieving the ethical goals of religion without beliefs and rites resting upon supernaturalism; sometimes called Christian humanism. |
| religious institutes | In Catholic usage, religious orders, congregations and societies for the religious life. World totals (1997): for men (priests, monks, brothers), 80 orders, 90 clerical religious congregations, 30 societies of common life, 30 lay religious congregations, 6 secular institutes, totaling 230 religious institutes for men using a total of 740 distinct names; for women (nuns, sisters), 1,300 religious and 25 secular institutes or congregations. |
| religious institutes of perfection | Catholic term for clerical and lay religious orders and congregations, societies without vows, and secular institutes. |
| religious institutes, federations of | Some 190 Catholic national federations of male or female religious institutes exist (for clergy, monks, priests, brothers, sisters, nuns, with 3 international federations (CLAR, UISG, USG). |
| religious journalism | Organizations and centers significant at national and wider levels number over 300. |
| religious liberty | Defined here as encompassing the following 31 categories: freedom of inner belief and conscience, freedom of public worship indoors and outdoors, freedom of assembly, freedom of self-government, freedom of association, freedom to organize religious bodies, freedom to organize Bible study circles, freedom to run Christian libraries and bookshops, freedom to collect money and to disburse it, freedom to organize credit unions for the benefit of members, freedom to offer medical care where wanted, freedom to engage in mission at home and abroad, freedom to send abroad or receive from abroad foreign missionaries, freedom of Christian political expression, freedom to teach religion and to be taught, freedom for children to join religious associations and to receive Christian instruction, freedom to change one’s religion or be converted, freedom of propagation, freedom to travel on religious business within the country and abroad and to return, freedom to listen to radio religious broadcasts from any country, freedom to send and receive religious mail and literature uncensored both inland and abroad, freedom to use national press and broadcasting (radio and TV) facilities; freedom to publish, mail, broadcast, circulate scriptures, buy and sell literature, evangelize, proselytize and baptize; and freedom for minority churches and religions as well as majority religions. |
| religious liberty | Freedom to practice one’s religion with the full range of religious rights specified in the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. |
| religious libraries | See libraries, religious. |
| religious libraries | A large library (over 100,000 volumes) specializing mainly in the study of religion. |
| religious life | The life of those who aspire to perfection by retirement from the world and practice of the evangelical counsels (qv). |
| religious movement | A movement swept along by its own momentum long before it becomes organized or institutionalized. |
| religious Muslims | Ethnic Muslims (qv) who practice or profess Islam. |
| religious orders | See religious institutes. |
| religious orders (communities), Protestant | Total about 100 orders, brotherhoods, sisterhoods or communities especially of deaconesses, mainly Lutheran, Reformed, Church of South India, et alii. |
| religious orders in Anglicanism | There are 150 distinct Anglican religious communities (in 1999), with 450 lay religious brothers, 2,700 nuns or lay religious sisters, and about 200 ordained monks in priest’s or bishop’s orders. |
| religious periodicals | See periodicals, Christian. |
| religious persecution | Persecution of believers specifically on religious grounds, though this is often denied. |
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.