From: (Peter B. West)

Newsgroups: aus.religion,aus.religion.christian,alt.christnet.theology


Subject: Re: Anglicans, Catholics, Buddhists?

Date: Mon, 07 Apr 1997

On Sun, 06 Apr 1997 19:58:30 +1100, Rowland Croucher
<> wrote:


>Live wrote:

>>


>> Hi


>>


>> Does anyone know approximately how many


>> Anglicans

>> Catholics

>> Buddhists there are in the world?


>>


>> Also is the Anglican Church a "holding"
for the Presbyterians, Methodists,


>> Baptists? Or are they still separate?


>>


>> Thanks


>>


>>

>> http://www.sydneycity.net/


>


>A question: does anyone know if such statistics
are available on the Net?


>


>For example, I tried Alta Vista on Charles Barrett
(World Christian Encyclopedist)


>and didn’t get anywhere…


>


>Shalom! Rowland Croucher

From ‘The Public Square’ by Richard John Neuhaus


Copyright (c) 1997 First Things 70 (February 1997): 58-74. http://www.firstthings.com/

I first met David Barrett in 1971 in Nairobi, Kenya,
where he was doing pioneering work on indigenous religious movements
in Africa, a subject on which I was going to write a book, until
my attention was diverted by developments in South Africa. In
recent years, Barrett has been running the research office of
the AD2000 Global Evangelization Movement in Rockville, Virginia.
Among numbers crunchers on world religion, Barrett is at the top
of his field. He publishes an annual summary in the International
Bulletin of Missionary Research and edits the relevant sections
of the Britannica Book of the Year and Britannica World Data.
While Barrett’s data are state of the art, he cautions that the
art is precisely that, an art. Estimates involve some delicate
distinctions and carefully controlled guesswork. But it is fascinating
stuff.

For instance, there are 1.9 billion Christians in
the world and slightly over one billion Muslims. Barrett estimates
that in the year 2025 there will be over three billion Christians
and 1.8 billion Muslims. Among Christians, there are 56 million
Anglicans, 4 million Catholics (non- Roman), 20 million "marginal
Protestants" (non-Catholic but also not identified with any
Protestant tradition), 167 million nonwhite indigenous Christians
(mainly new African groups combining Christianity and tribal religions),
187 million Eastern Orthodox (Russian, Greek, et al.), 347 million
Protestants, and somewhat over a billion Roman Catholics.

Not everyone is happy with the way that Barrett
counts Jews. He says that in 1900 there were 12.2 million Jews,
15.5 million in 1970, 18.2 million at present, and he projects
that there will be 25.5 million in the year 2025. These figures
are in tension with the common claim that "half of world
Jewry" was wiped out in the Holocaust, and that the number
of Jews is declining. For twenty-five years, Barrett has been
in discussion with Jewish specialists who generally give a much
lower figure for the number of Jews living today. One Jewish publication
claims, "Statistical data are difficult to obtain among Jews
owing to the lack of public sources." Barrett challenges
that: "Half of all nations in the world enumerate religious
Jews and ethnic Jews in their decennial population censuses, and
I have records of them all going back 140 years. Polls, partial
censuses, sociological studies are all legion. Making sense of
them is more difficult, but again the literature is enormous."

He says that Jewish statistical experts use the concept
of "core Jew," meaning "real Jews" who are
known, professing, affiliated, and usually practicing. Barrett,
however, uses the larger category of "adherents" based
on the definition in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
He also includes adherents of "Jewish sects or cults, crypto-Jews,
Third World adherents of Judaism who are ignored or disowned by
core Jews, Black Jews, Black Hebrews, African groups like the
Bayahuda in Uganda, and Asian groups like the Cochin Jews in Kerala
and the Bney Israel in Bombay." There are also groups that
are somewhere between Christianity and Judaism or Islam and Judaism,
but are more Jewish than Christian or Muslim. Then, of course,
there are Messianic Jews, and ethnic Jews who are Christians or
atheists. "If one examines every source figure in this rigorous
fashion," says Barrett, "no conflicting figures emerge,
although proponents of core Judaism may not like the larger totals
that result."

Then there is the question of Christian martyrs.
During the Cold War, Barrett’s figure of 300,000 martyrs per year
was widely used. His definition is important: "A martyr is
a Christian believer who loses his or her life prematurely, in
a situation of witness, and as a result of human hostility"
(emphasis in original). So, for example, while forty million Christians
were killed in World War II, only three million can be called
martyrs. In that number he includes the one million of the six
million Jewish martyrs killed in the Holocaust who were Christian
Jews. Since 1991, when organized Soviet assassinations of Christian
leaders and other oppressions ceased, Barrett estimates that there
are 150,000 Christian martyrs each year. He adds, "Naturally,
these have to be estimates because, although I am on the lookout
for new information regularly, often I do not hear of even dreadful
massacres for months or even years after the event." He notes
that media coverage is always spasmodic, so we only hear about
a fraction of even the most egregious cases.

Just to round out the picture, there are a little
over a billion people classified as "non-religious"
or "atheist," 766 million Hindus, 337 million Buddhists,
and 20 million Sikhs. And of course within every group there are
disputes over who really belongs-who is a "real" Jew,
a "real" Muslim, a "real" Christian or, for
that matter, a "real" atheist. God alone searches hearts,
but among those who crunch numbers and keep spread sheets up to
date, there is probably none more conscientious than David Barrett.

__ /__ Peter B. West

/

/ "Master, to whom shall we go?"