International religious demography:
A new discipline driven by missionary scholarship
A new discipline driven by missionary scholarship
In our previous blog we noticed that the religious profile of Indian Subcontinent has
changed drastically during the last decade, with the Muslims enhancing their
share from less than 20 to nearly 30 percent between 1881 and 2011 and
Christians gaining between 2 percentage points by the Census count and by
around 5 percentage points by the count of the international Christian organizations.
Share of the religions of Indian origin, Indian Religionists as we have called
them, has consequently declined from 79 to between 67 percent by the Census
counts and is likely to go below 50 percent within the current century. To put
these dramatic changes in the religious profile of Indian Subcontinent in
perspective, it is instructive to look at the changes that have taken place in
the religious composition of the world in this period, which we propose to do
in a later note. Before presenting the numbers for the world and its different
regions and countries, however, we offer here some background of the sources of
data on this subject.
Most of the countries of the world do carry out
regular censuses, but only about half of them include the question on religion
in their counts. It is therefore necessary to go beyond the national censuses
to compile data on the religious demography of the world. Presently such data
is available mainly from Christian missionary sources. They began collecting
data on the numbers of adherents of different religions, faiths and
denominations in different countries of the world around the middle of the
1960s. In about half a century, their efforts have led to the evolution of the
new academic discipline of “international religious demography”, which is being
seriously pursued in some of the major universities of the world. These efforts
of Christian scholars and missionaries have also led to the publication of
major compilations of statistics on international religious demography such as
the “World Christian Encyclopedia” and the “World’s Religions in Figures”. These are
the most easily accessible sources for the data on the changing religious
demography of the world.
In this note, we give a brief history of how a pioneering
research effort by an Anglican missionary in East Africa to collect data on the
adherents of different faiths and denominations has evolved into a major
academic discipline, and how this in turn has helped the Church to carry
forward its worldwide agenda of evangelisation. The compilation of the changing
numbers of the adherents of different faiths in the world helped the Church
focus its attention and resources into more fruitful directions, which ensured
that Christianity was able to retain its share in the population of the world
at a time when the relative population of the core Christian nations was
declining and people there were fast losing interest in religion.
Christian origins of international religious demography
International Christian missionary
sources have been collecting systematic and extensive data on the changing
religious demography of the world. The World
Christian Encyclopedia, first published in 1982, is perhaps the most
authentic compilation of such data. The second edition of the Encyclopedia was published in 2001. It compiles
data for all countries of the world from 1900 to 2000. We used this source to
tabulate data on the religious demography of different regions and countries of
the world in our publications, Religious
Demography of India (Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai 2003 and 2005). The
next edition of the Encyclopedia is
scheduled for 2020. For the numbers of 2010, therefore, we use a related
source, The World’s Religions in Figures:
An Introduction to International
Religious Demography (Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 2013).
In this note, we give the
background of both these sources and a brief history of how the efforts of a
few Christian scholars engaged in systematic collection of religious demographic
data from across the world—mainly in the support of missionary organizations
worldwide—have led to the development of the new academic discipline of International
Religious Demography.
World Evangelization Research Centre at Nairobi
The story begins with Rev.
Dr. David B. Barrett, a British aeronautical engineer, who chose to be an
Anglican missionary in Africa and was sent to Nairobi, Kenya in 1957. As part
of his missionary work, he conducted a field survey of church affiliations in that
country. After 4 years in Kenya, he went to the USA to earn a Ph.D. degree awarded
jointly by the Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University; the former is
located in the campus of Columbia. He returned to Nairobi to organize and
oversee research for the Anglican Church through the World Evangelization
Research Centre (WERC), which he founded in 1965. With time, his research interests expanded to
encompass all kinds of religious affiliations and across all countries of the
world. This led to the compilation of the first edition of World Christian
Encyclopedia (David B. Barrett, World
Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the
Modern World, A.D. 1900-2000, Oxford University Press, 1982).
There was widespread recognition
of the work of Rev. Barrett, both for its utility for the evangelizing missions
and for its academic merit. For a long-time, he was one of the major
contributors of statistics on global religious adherence to the Britannica
Book of the Year. Scholars associated with and inspired by him are today
considered major authorities on international religious demography.
Move to Richmond, Virginia
In 1985, Rev. Barrett and
WERC moved to Richmond, Virginia at the invitation of the Southern Baptist
Foreign (now International) Mission Board. The second edition of the Encyclopedia
was the result of nearly two decades of work at WERC, Richmond. For this much
larger edition, Barrett had T. M. Johnson and G. T. Kurian as his co-editors. (David
B. Barrett, et al, World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative
Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2nd Edition,
2 Volumes, Oxford University Press, 2001).
George Thomas Kurian
(1931-2015) was a professional editor. He edited or co-edited more than 60 reference
works, which included 27 encyclopedias. In addition to the World Encyclopedia of Christianity, he was associated with Nelson’s New Christian Dictionary,
Encyclopedia of the Third World, Encyclopedia of Political Science,
Encyclopedia of American Studies and several other compilations on varied
subjects.
Todd M. Johnson, who joined
Barrett at Richmond in 1989, is a missionary researcher, who rose to become the
Director of WERC and its successor institution, the Centre for Research on
Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Centre for Research on Global Christianity
After the publication of
the second edition of the Encyclopedia,
high Christian authorities in the United States decided to place the work of
WERC in formal academic stream. For this purpose, they founded the Centre for
Research on Global Christianity (CRGC) as a part of the Gordon-Conwell
Theological Seminary at its main campus in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. Dr.
Johnson moved from Richmond to South Hamilton in 2003, but Rev. Barrett, always
jealous of his independence as a scholar, continued his work at Richmond until
his death in 2011.
The CRGC is currently
engaged in producing the third edition of the Encyclopedia in collaboration with the Edinburgh University Press. This
is a long-term project and the third edition is likely to be published in 2020.
Meanwhile, the CRGC has launched the World
Christian Database, an online platform to continuously collect and update
data on religions and denominations across the world. In 2009, the GRCG also
published Atlas of Global Christianity (Todd
M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross, Edinburgh University Press, 2009), which
graphically documents the shift of Christianity from Europe and North America
to Africa, Asia and Latin America during the twentieth century.
International Religious Demography Project of Boston University
The CRGC is closely
associated with the Boston University. In collaboration with the CRGC, the University
launched its “International Religious Demography Project (IRD)” in 2008. The
project is based at the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs
(CURA), which is a part of the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston
University. For this project, the University also collaborates with the “Religion
and Public Life Project” of the Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC. Todd M.
Johnson of the CRGC and Brian J. Grim, formerly of the Pew Research Centre, are
the main scholars running the IRD project. Both are affiliated scholars of the
Institute of Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA) of the Boston
University.
Brian J. Grim has interests
wider than international religious demography alone. He is also an expert on the state of what have been termed as
“religious freedoms” in different parts of the world. In that capacity, he is
affiliated to the Religious Freedom Project of Georgetown University and has
co-authored, with Roger Finke, The Price
of Freedom Denied (Cambridge, 2011). Role of global business in promoting
religious freedoms is another of his areas of interest. Currently, he is President
of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation. Earlier, he was Director of
Cross-National Data and Senior Researcher in religion and world affairs at the
Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. He is also a member
of the “World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Role of Faith” and in
this capacity participated in the recent annual meeting of WEF at
Davos-Klosters, where he organized and participated in discussions designed to
underline the role of faith and of religious freedoms in advancing the global
development goals of the WEF.
Todd M. Johnson and Brian
J. Grim are co-editors of the World
Religions Database, an online platform of the International Religions
Project of Boston University. This Database
is intended to complement the World
Christian Database of CRGC. The two are also the co-authors of The World’s Religions in Figures: An
Introduction to International Religious Demography (Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford
2013), another product of the IRD project of Boston University. Since 2014, the
project has been producing a yearly publication, Yearbook of International Religious Demography. Todd M. Johnson and
Brian G. Grim are also the editors (with others) of the Yearbook. World Christian Database and the Yearbook of International Religious
Demography are both published by Brill, Leiden.
Evolution of a new and vigorous academic discipline
Thus the work of a
passionately committed missionary researcher in far off East Africa has led to
the evolution of a new and vigorous academic discipline that involves many
reputed institutions and publishers around the world. International Religious
Demography Project of Boston University asserts that: “The science of counting
religionists around the world […] is a relatively new field of study—the
development of the academic discipline of international religious demography
has taken place largely in the latter part of the twentieth century. …”
The Project also claims
that part of the reason for the development of this new discipline is the
unexpectedly increased prominence of religion in the academia: “The increased
prominence religion has assumed in academic fields—including history,
sociology, international relations, and a host of others—is one of the
unexpected developments of the early twenty-first century. In the latter part
of the twentieth century, conventional wisdom held that religion was on the
wane and, by implication that the study of religion was of little importance to
understanding the world. However, this has not been the reality, …”
It seems that Rev. Dr.
Barrett and his determined and rigorous compilation of the numbers of adherents
of different religions, faiths and denominations across the world has indeed
acted as a catalyst in generating this new interest in the study of religions
and religious demographics.
Religious demography in support of worldwide evangelization
Rev. Dr. Barrett began his
research initially to support the mission work of the Anglican Church in East
Africa and continued with it to support the evangelizing missions worldwide
with crucial data and information. The Church has used his work to give a new
direction to its missionary activities and has been generous in acknowledging
his contribution. On the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of WERC by Rev.
Barrett in Nairobi in 1965, its successor institution, the Centre for the Study
of Global Christianity, published a booklet outlining the history and impact of
his work. It quotes a statement issued by the International Board of the
Southern Baptist Convention—Rev. Barrett’s hosts at Richmond—after his death in
2011, acknowledging his role in helping them refocus their resources on the
least evangelized people in the world: “When David Barrett came to the Foreign
Mission Board as a consultant in 1985, less than 3 percent of our mission force
was deployed to this last frontier. Today, as a result of Barrett’s prophetic
push, more than 80 percent of the people groups our missionaries serve among
are unreached.”
As we shall see in our
forthcoming note on the religious demography of the world, the expansion of
Christianity into the unreached parts of Africa and into parts of Asia during
the later half of the twentieth century has been a great success story of the
worldwide missionary activity. This has helped Christianity keep its share in
the population of the world intact at a time when both the demographic share of
Europe and the commitment of the European people to Christianity were
declining.
Religious demography in support of Religious Freedom
The work on international
religious demography, and the new academic interest in religious studies that
it has helped generate, has also offered an academic veneer to the longstanding
efforts of the international Church to dissuade national governments from
regulating conversions in the name of protection of religious freedoms. As we
have seen, institutions like the Pew Research Centre and scholars like Brian J.
Grim, who have earned academic standing largely through their quantitative work
on international religious demography, also actively pursue the cause of
international religious freedoms at different forums. The pressure to conform
to what the Church calls “religious freedoms”—which for all practical purposes
imply unfettered freedom to convert—is now being carried beyond the national
governments to private business entities through institutions like the World
Economic Forum. It is interesting to note that Brian J. Grim, one of the
scholars leading the International Religious Demography Project of Boston
University, is also the leader of these approaches to the business world in his
role as the President of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation.
Conclusion
In the course of a few
decades, international religious demography has evolved into an important
academic field of study in some of the major universities of the world. The
effort that began with a passionately committed Anglican missionary, Rev. Dr.
David B. Barrett, was encouraged and supported by various evangelizing mission
organizations and continues to be led by scholars and institutions closely
associated with the Church. The International Demography Project of Boston
University, the most significant project in this field, has been conceived and
designed by and is being implemented in collaboration with high Church
organizations in the United States.
This investment into the
evolution of a new field of study has paid dividends for the Church. It has
helped it focus its resources into more fruitful directions and expand into
newer regions of the world. It has also helped the Church to take its concerns
and agenda into newer forums, especially into the formal academic settings and
generate a new wave of interest in religion and religious studies in the academia.
We have recounted this
history as an example of how functioning societies and civilizations can put
the research undertaken by isolated and committed individuals to larger uses
and create not only new academic disciplines out of it but also new opportunities
for taking their mission forward. Perhaps, there is a lesson in this story for
the Indian society and civilization.
To comprehend and respond
to the sharply changing religious demography of Indian Subcontinent, we do need
to have our own academically competent institutions of religious demography to
produce our own encyclopedias, databases and yearbooks that record both micro
and macro level details of the changing religious profile of different parts of
the Indian subcontinent.
References: The history of international religious demography narrated
above is based largely on the documents of the Centre for Research on Global
Christianity of Gordon-Conwell Seminary and International
Religious Demography Project of the Boston University. Two of such documents
may be accessed at CRGC
and IRD.
Tailpiece: In a review of the first edition of our book, Religious Demography of India (Centre for
Policy Studies, Chennai 2003), published in “The Hindu”, Prof. Ashish Bose, the
late doyen of demographic studies in India, took us to task for using the world
“Religionist”, which he reminded us “is not an English word”. That was the time
when the new discipline of international religious demography—which the Boston
University defines as “the science of counting religionists around the world…”—was being evolved by native English
speakers in major institutions of the English-speaking world.
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