Data source: Gina A. Zurlo, ed., World Religion Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2025).
| Glossary item | Definition |
|---|---|
| adherents | Followers, supporters, members, believers, devotees of a religion. |
| adult | A person who is over 14 years of age. |
| affiliated | Followers of a religion enrolled and known to its leadership, usually with names written on rolls. |
| Afro-American spiritists | Followers of Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Cuban and other African religious survivals in the Americas, low spiritists, syncretising Catholicism with African and Amerindian animistic religions. |
| agnostics | Persons who lack a religion or profess unbelief in a religion. The term includes (1) ‘classical’ agnostics (who hold that it is impossible to know for certain whether God – or deity of any kind – exists); (2) those who profess uncertainty as to the existence of God; and (3) other nonreligious persons such as secularists. |
| Ahmadiya | (Ahmadiyya) Ex-Shia Muslim messianic movement, pronounced heretical by Pakistan, following 1889 founder Ghulam Ahmad. |
| Anglicans | Christians related to the Anglican Communion, tracing their origin back to the ancient British (Celtic) and English churches; including Anglican dissidents. |
| animism | The attribution of consciousness and personality to natural phenomena such as thunder and fire, and to objects such as rocks and trees. |
| atheists | Persons who reject the idea of any deity. The term also includes opponents of theism and of organised religion who otherwise might be considered agnostics (qv). |
| Baha'is | Followers of the Baha’i World Faith, founded in 1844 by Baha’u’llah in what is now Iran. |
| birth rate | The number of births per year in a population, expressed as a percentage or permillage of the total population. |
| Buddhists | Followers of the Buddha, mostly across Asia, including three main traditions: (a) Mahayana (Greater Vehicle); (b) Theravada (Teaching of the Elders); (c) Tibetan (Lamaists); plus (d) traditional Buddhist groups, but excluding neo-Buddhist new religions or religious movements. |
| cargo cults | Religious movements in Oceania based on prophecies that if appropriate religious rites are performed, God will send ships and aircraft filled with cargo and goods. |
| Catholics | All Christians in communion with the Church of Rome, also known as Roman Catholics. Affiliated Catholics are defined here as baptised Catholics plus catechumens. |
| census | Large-scale formal act of counting or evaluating of people and property. |
| Charismatics | Baptised members affiliated to non-Pentecostal denominations who have entered into the experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit. |
| children | All persons under 15 years old, though often a distinction is made between infants (0–4 years old) and children proper, 5–14 years old. |
| Chinese folk-religionists | Followers of traditional Chinese religion (comprising a mixture of some or all of the following: local deities including Daoist ones, ancestor veneration, Confucian ethics, Chinese universism, divination and magic, some Buddhist elements). |
| Christian | Brethren Independent Fundamentalist Protestant tradition formed in 1828 out of the Church of England; also called Open Brethren. |
| Christians | Followers of Jesus Christ of all kinds: all traditions and confessions and all degrees of commitment. |
| Confucianists | Followers of the teachings of Confucius and Confucianism. Sometimes spelt Confucians. |
| continent | Any of the United Nations major areas of Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Northern America and Oceania |
| conversion | Change in a person’s allegiance or membership in one religion to allegiance or membership in another. |
| converts | Persons who have become followers of a religion, leaving their former religion or nonreligion. |
| country | Term covering both (1) sovereign nations and (2) non-sovereign territories (dependencies or colonies) that are not integral parts of larger parent nations. |
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Membership data, year begun, and rates of change.
Population and religion data on all major cities & provinces.
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