Most world religions aren’t really world religions. The vast majority of adherents are contained in a relatively small geographical location. Except Christianity.
According to data analysis by Pew Research, it takes 11 countries all around the globe to reach 50 percent of the world’s Christian population. Before you have a majority of all Christians, you must to travel from North America to South America across to Europe, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific.
The diversity can also be seen in the overall geographic distribution. According to Pew:
Of the major religious groups covered in this study, Christians are the most evenly dispersed. Roughly equal numbers of Christians live in Europe (26%), Latin America and the Caribbean (24%), and sub-Saharan Africa (24%).
Islam is the next closest with six countries in Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific constituting 53 percent of the total Muslim population.
Every other major religion is predominately isolated in only one or two countries.
Pew’s demographic study found almost 32 percent of the world’s population (2.2 billion people) are Christians—significantly larger than most of the other religions: 1.6 billion Muslims (23%), 1 billion Hindus (15%), and nearly 500 million Buddhists (7%).
Christians are the majority in 157 countries, while Muslims comprise the majority in 49 countries. Only a handful of countries are majority, Hindu, Buddhist, or unaffiliated. Israel, not surprisingly, is the only nation that is majority Jewish.
If you are curious about the breakdown of each nation, Pew has a table showing the religious composition for each country from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
