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New Data on World Religions: Introducing the International Religious Demography Project

The academic field of religious demography is underdeveloped. Although there are thousands of sources for religious demography, little has been done by scholars in religion, sociology, or other disciplines to collect, collate, and analyze these. As a consequence, there is much confusion over the status of religion and its adherents around the world.

Secondary sources for religious demography, such as Adherents.com, Wikipedia, or the CIA Factbook, are woefully inadequate and riddled with errors and contradictions. The World Christian Database (WCD) is the most extensive source, but its focus and methodology have been directed toward measuring Christian adherence.

In 2008, the International Religious Demography (IRD) project was launched for the purpose of providing comprehensive religious demographic information. The IRD project is collecting, collating, and analyzing primary and secondary source material on religious demography for all major religions in every country of the world.

As data is collected and analyzed, estimates from these sources are made readily available and fully transparent to the scholarly community. The IRD project is currently publishing its findings in an online database (World Religion Database or WRD), and in the future will publish its findings in print. By offering best estimates based upon a methodologically-rigorous reconciliation of the various sources’ estimates, the IRD is a valuable resource for anyone doing research on religion.

The IRD project is based at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) at Boston University. The data primarily come from an analysis of the two largest collections of religious demographic data:

• The Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts (USA), has over one million documents on Christian and religious demography. This center has detailed information on Christian denominations as well as numerous documents related to other religions. The center has published much of this data related to Christianity in the World Christian Encyclopedia¹ and online in the World Christian Database, but has detailed information on other religions that has not been published.
  
  
• The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a project of the Pew Research Center in Washington, DC, has collected census, survey, and other primary source material on religious demography for many countries and is currently developing detailed adherent estimates for the countries of Africa. The Pew Forum is posting some of this material online, with plans to greatly expand its online religious demographic analysis. Other targeted demographic projects are being planned for the future, including a demographic analysis of the Muslim world in cooperation with Muslim demographers. In time, much of this material will be archived here for scholars and students to use.

The IRD project at CURA provides a venue for the cross-validation of religious demography sources, reconciling conflicting sources of data and determining the best sources for countries where data are in short supply. The project has the capacity to compare cross-tabulated adherent data from demographic and health surveys, census data, and other social science sources with other demographic information such as age, level of religious participation, and so forth.