As of 2020, roughly 650 million people live in the Latin America-Caribbean region, an increase of about 10% since 2010. The region is overwhelmingly Christian; almost every country in the region has a Christian majority. The lone exception is Uruguay, where more than half the population is religiously unaffiliated.
As in North America, Europe, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region, disaffiliation drove much of the religious change that has occurred across Latin America and the Caribbean since 2010. In many Latin American and Caribbean countries, substantial numbers of adults say they were raised as Christians but now identify with no religion.
In addition, although this report does not delve into the size of Christian subgroups, other research shows that many adults in Latin America and the Caribbean have switched from Catholicism to evangelical and Pentecostal branches of Protestantism in recent decades.
Religious change
Based on numbers (or counts), most religious groups in the Latin America-Caribbean region grew between 2010 and 2020. People belonging to the “other religions” category are estimated to have increased in number the most rapidly (up 101%). This change is largely due to a doubling of followers of other religions in Brazil, the region’s most populous country. Throughout the region, the “other religions” category includes various Indigenous and Afro-Latin religious traditions, such as Candomblé in Brazil.
The size of the region’s religiously unaffiliated population also grew considerably (up 67%), while Muslims (up 6%), Hindus (up 5%) and Christians (up 3%) grew less rapidly. Across all of Latin America and the Caribbean in 2020, Muslims, Hindus, Jews and Buddhists still numbered fewer than 1 million each. By comparison, there were approximately 547 million Christians, 77 million religiously unaffiliated people and 20 million followers of other religions.
During this period, the region’s small population of Jews shrank the most (down 13%).
There were fewer changes in the percentage (or share) each religious group made up of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean. Christians grew more slowly in number than most other groups from 2010 to 2020, so their share of the region’s residents fell 5 points, to 85% in 2020. The religiously unaffiliated grew 4 points (to 12%), and people in the “other religions” category increased by about 1 point, to make up 3% of the population in 2020. Other groups held fairly steady.
Substantial change within countries
Across Latin American and the Caribbean – as in North America and Europe – Christians and religiously unaffiliated people are the only groups whose share of the population in any single country changed substantially (by at least 5 percentage points) from 2010 to 2020.
The share of residents who self-identify as Christians fell substantially in eight countries, while in five of these countries, the share of religiously unaffiliated people grew substantially.
Change was most pronounced in Chile, where the share of Christians in the country’s overall population shrank to 68% (down 18 points) and the religiously unaffiliated grew to 30% (up 17 points).
Similarly, Christians made up 44% of Uruguay’s population in 2020 (down 16 points), while religiously unaffiliated people accounted for 52% (up 16 points), making Uruguay the only country in the region without a Christian majority. Other countries’ populations experienced smaller declines in their share of Christians and/or growth of religiously unaffiliated people.
Median age of religious groups
The religiously unaffiliated, with a median age of 28, are the youngest group in the Latin America-Caribbean region. This median age is much lower than among religiously unaffiliated people globally (37 years).
Christians are the region’s next-youngest religious group – about half are 31 or younger. Buddhists are the oldest group in the region, with a median age of 41. Hindus (36) and people of other religions (39) fall in between. (We do not have sufficient data on the relatively small numbers of Jews and Muslims across Latin America and the Caribbean to reliably estimate their age structures.)
Recommended Citation: Hackett, Conrad, Marcin Stonawski, Yunping Tong, Stephanie Kramer, Anne Shi and Dalia Fahmy. 2025. “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020.” Pew Research Center. doi: 10.58094/fj71-ny11.
