The World's Religions in Figures: An Introduction to International Religious Demography [Hardcover]

• Offers the first comprehensive overview of the field of international religious demography  detailing what we know about religious adherents around the world, and how we know it
• Examines religious freedom and diversity, including agnostics and atheists, on a global scale, highlighting trends over the past 100 years and projecting estimates for the year 2050
• Outlines the issues and challenges related to definitions, taxonomies, sources, analyses, and other techniques in interpreting data on religious adherence
• Considers data from religious communities, censuses, surveys, and scholarly research, along with several in-depth case studies on the global Muslim population, religion in China, and the religious demography of recently created Sudan and South Sudan
• Argues against the belief that the twentieth-century was a secular period by putting forward new evidence to the contrary
• Provides resources for measuring both qualitatively and quantitatively important data on the world's religious situation in the twenty-first century

List of Figures xiii

List of Tables xiv

Foreword xix

Acknowledgments xxiv

Introduction 1

Part I Overview 7

1 Global Religious Populations, 19102010 9

2 Regional Religious Populations, 19102010 81

3 Religious Diversity 93

4 Projecting Religious Populations, 201050 111

Part II Data and Methods 133

5 Defining Rl³*