The number of countries with majority Christian populations dropped between 2010 and 2020, according to a new Gallup analysis. Even so, there are still far more countries where over half of the population identifies as Christian than any other religion.
According to Gallup’s analysis, there were 120 Christian-majority countries in 2020, down from 124 in 2010. (The study excluded countries with fewer than 100,000 people.) The four countries that lost their Christian-majority status were the United Kingdom, Australia, France and Uruguay.
In the U.K. (49% Christian in 2020), Australia (47%) and France (46%), no single religion replaced Christianity as a majority. In Uruguay (44%), the new majority identified as “religiously unaffiliated.” Other countries where the religiously unaffiliated now form a majority include the Netherlands and New Zealand.
The number of countries with a majority Muslim (53), Hindu (2), Buddhist (7), Jewish (1) and other religious populations (1) remained unchanged between 2010 and 2020.
The Gallup analysis emphasized that “the share of countries where a certain religious group is the majority does not necessarily correspond to that religious group’s share of the global population.”
Gallup used Hinduism as an example, noting that while only 1% of all countries have a Hindu-majority population, 15% of the global population is Hindu. This is because 95% of the world’s Hindus live in India.
Similarly, while Christian-majority countries make up 60% of the world’s nation-states, only 29% of the global population is Christian.
More information on this Gallup analysis can be found here.
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