Anam Cara pointed out something regarding that last post that had bothered me as well. I’m listing Adherents‘ stats for how many Christians there are worldwide, but Adherents counts a lot of the culties as Christian: Mormons, Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. etc. It doesn’t seem right to include them in a worldwide Christian tally.

So, looking to get a more accurate number than the original 33%, I went to a different page of Adherents that breaks Christians out by denominational family and did the tallies again.

The answer is …

… 30.75%. If I take the cults out (which only represent .7% of total religious membership), I get 30.75% as the world population of Christian adherents. Since Islam, the next-largest religion, has 21%, that still means that Christianity is the largest world religion by a sizable margin. (If you’re wondering why the combined number doesn’t add up to 33%, Adherents says that this second chart of denominations isn’t totally complete. Rather than wonder whether the other 2.55% were Christians or cults, I just left them out.)
If I get nit-picky and only count the largest denominational families — Catholic, Orthodox, Conservative Protestant, Liberal Protestant, Pentecostal and Anglican — I still get a number of 29.8%.

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Fun with numbers

Here are the three Excel charts that get you there.
The figures for the first two are taken from the chart called “Major Denominational Families of Christianity” on this page. The figures for the third one come from a chart further down the page called “Significant Sociologically Distinct Branches of Christianity”. So …

And by the way, I don’t think all that much of this numbers game. You end up sounding like you’re saying “Bigger is better,” which is a pretty primitive slogan. I only went through the exercise because of Village of 100’s efforts to try to minimize us. But now that I’ve had a little workout with Excel, I’ll go on to something more fun and less mathematical.