Size & Demographic Characteristics of Religious Groups

With Diwali celebrations underway, here are some facts about Hindus around the world.

Whether the U.S. will continue to have a Christian majority in 2070 will depend on many factors, including religious “switching.”

India’s artificially wide ratio of baby boys to baby girls – which arose in the 1970s from the use of prenatal diagnostic technology to facilitate sex-selective abortions – now appears to be narrowing. Son bias has declined sharply among Sikhs, while Christians continue to have a natural balance of sons and daughters.

While the largest Christian traditions and religious “nones” can be consistently analyzed, smaller groups produce a large margin of error.

To highlight some of India’s religious, cultural and demographic differences, here are key facts about its states.

Religious pluralism has long been a core value in India. A new report shows that India’s religious composition has been fairly stable since 1951.

All major religious groups in India have shown sharp declines in their fertility rates, limiting change in the country’s religious composition since 1951. Meanwhile, fertility differences between India’s religious groups are generally much smaller than they used to be.

Indians see religious tolerance as a central part of who they are as a nation. Across the major religious groups, most people say it is very important to respect all religions to be “truly Indian.”

The gender gap in party identification remains the widest in a quarter century.

Globally, Muslims live in the biggest households, followed by Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Jews and the religiously unaffiliated.