Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Washington, D.C. – The world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are united in their belief in God and the Prophet Muhammad and are bound together by such religious practices as fasting during the holy month of Ramadan and almsgiving to assist people in need. But they have widely differing views about many other aspects of their faith, […]
Ahmadi or Ahmadiyya A religious movement that emerged in late 19th-century India around Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908), whose followers believe he was a mujaddid (reformer) who showed the way to revive and restore Islam. Alawite or Alawi A sect of Shia Islam centered in Syria that highly venerates Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, […]
Spotlight on the United States The United States is often described as “a nation of immigrants,” a phrase coined by John F. Kennedy in an essay written in 1958 when he was the junior senator from Massachusetts.8 As the future president wrote, “This was the secret of America: a nation of people with the fresh […]
This report begins where all international migrants begin – in their home countries. More than 77 million migrants, or about 36% of the worldwide total, have come from the 10 leading origin countries. Overall, Mexico has been the largest single source of migrants (12.9 million), followed closely by India (11.8 million) and Russia (11.3 million). […]
People are on the move, and so are their faiths. The total number of international migrants living around the world has grown substantially over the past 50 years, climbing from about 80 million people (or 2.6% of the world’s population) in 1960 to about 214 million (or roughly 3% of the world’s population) in 2010, […]
This study focuses on the religious affiliation of international migrants, examining patterns of migration among seven major groups: Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, adherents of other religions and the religiously unaffiliated.
Nearly half of the world’s migrants are Christian, and more than a quarter are Muslim Washington, D.C. – A new report on religion and international migration by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that Christians comprise nearly half – an estimated 106 million, or 49% – of the world’s 214 […]
Conceptual Framework The religion of international migrants has been investigated in many parts of the world (for research reviews see Cadge and Ecklund 2007, Ebaugh 2003, and Koenig 2005).21 But most studies have focused on particular religious groups in specific destination countries, such as Catholic immigrants in the U.S. or Muslim immigrants in the United […]
This report divides the world into five regions to take a closer look at the geographic distribution of Christians. (To view all the countries in each region, see the Interactive Maps.) The five regions are presented in descending order of Christian population, with the region with the highest number of Christians (the Americas) appearing first […]