On my way to opening night at the new Nationals ball park last night, a man who was walking to a late Mass at a local church told me that he was upset by the report that Muslims had overtaken Roman Catholics as the largest single denomination. The story he read came from Reuters reporter Silvia Aloisi and here’s how it begins:
Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday.
I read that first paragraph and immediately had some questions about statistics and fruit.
I get that Roman Catholicism is a denomination within Christianity. But why are we comparing it to Islam, a religion that itself has denominations? Why this apple to apple by the bushel comparison? Aren’t we dealing with apples and oranges, here?
Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican’s newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world’s population and Catholics 17.4 percent.
“For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us,” Formenti told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006.
We’ve been discussing in recent weeks how things that appear in the Vatican newspaper are frequently misreported upon translation. Or they’re taken as official Vatican pronouncements instead of quotes in a newspaper.
Either way, Monsignor Formenti says that Muslims are increasing their percentages because of higher birth rates, something that is definitely worth exploring further.
Another point for media coverage to consider is whether Formenti is even right that this is the first time Muslims have overtaken Roman Catholics.
But we need, more than anything else, to know the number of Christians and then the number of Muslims. Here is one take on that, showing 2.1 billion Christians to 1.5 million Muslims. There are other statistics out there, but the size of that gap is pretty consistent.
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Comments (17) |
March 31, 2008, at 4:16 pm
i hava a follow up post with more numbers.
March 31, 2008, at 4:32 pm
I am led to guess that part of this is some lingering need to pretend that the Catholic Church is “all” of Christendom. It helps catch the attention of the media, anyway, between the urge to cheer on Catholic decline and the Islamic Menace. It would be interesting to throw the Barrett analysis at this, considering his window into African “Christianity”. It would not surprise me at all to learn that all of the moslem increase is powered by the big four Islamic countries of East Asia.
March 31, 2008, at 4:57 pm
It would not surprise me at all to learn that all of the moslem increase is powered by the big four Islamic countries of East Asia.
…huh? which are? indonesia is kind of in east asia, but what other muslim country? bangladesh, india (minority muslim, but one of the largest absolute numbers) and pakistan are in south asia. guess it’s a minor point…but you might confuse someone into thinking china is muslim.
i think your overall point has a lot going for it. the only caution i would offer is that the TFR of african and to a lesser extent middle eastern muslims is very high. indonesia has a lower TFR, and bangladesh’s has been dropping a lot in the past 10-15 years.
March 31, 2008, at 5:11 pm
anyone who thinks all Muslims agree on interpretation of the Koran and therefore Islam is a single “denomination” knows little or nothing about Islam. To point out the most well known division - Shiites and Sunnis.
March 31, 2008, at 5:54 pm
How do they get at these figures? National census figures? Church/mosque membership figures? All baptism figures including those for babies (in the case of Catholics)? Everyone in a country that hasn’t declared otherwise (in the case of Muslims in Islamic countries)?
March 31, 2008, at 6:08 pm
How do they get at these figures? National census figures? Church/mosque membership figures? All baptism figures including those for babies (in the case of Catholics)? Everyone in a country that hasn’t declared otherwise (in the case of Muslims in Islamic countries)?
for these coarse comparisons CIA factbook is usually sufficient. the ‘world christian encyclopedia’ is probably the best single source for these data; they cite all their own primary sources.
March 31, 2008, at 6:27 pm
A tiny feedback: Can you have your post titles be more informative? I am like many others following blogs with a feedcatcher (that just provides a title). All the best. Thanks for the story on Catholic counting.
andy
March 31, 2008, at 6:32 pm
If indeed it came from the Monsignor in those terms, it may be his way of trying to put it tactfully.
If he’d said Islam had overtaken Christianity as the largest religion, then Protestant leaders would’ve rightly, er…. protested (combined Catholics/Protestants obviously outnumber Muslims).
If he’d said total Christians still outnumber Muslims, he’d be giving somewhat official (if indirect) recognition to the Protestant church - a Vatican no-no.
Comparing Islam/Catholic “denominations” works around that problem, except as Steve noted above, Islam itself has denominations.
March 31, 2008, at 7:09 pm
Catholics giving bad news about themselves and still people are upset with them?
This was a report in the Vatican newspaper; can’t the church report its own info to its own people without being called to task for hogging the news? Usually the church is being castigated for being secretive. These statistics have been compiled yearly for a long time. Reuters doesn’t have to report any of the things that appear in the Vatican newspaper. A press conference was not called; Reuters picked it up from an interview appearing in the Vatican newspaper given to a reporter from that newspaper.
Are you really saying that “the Vatican” does not recognize that Protestants exist and are Christians? Extraordinary. Reuters cites the interviewee in the Vatican newspaper as saying that Christians altogether, incluing the Orthodox, Anglicans and Protestants, outnumber Muslims by quite a bit. There was no hiding of that fact.
March 31, 2008, at 7:24 pm
“Are you really saying that “the Vatican†does not recognize that Protestants exist and are Christians?”
Fair question Julia. Of course they recognize Protestants exist - the key word in my suggestion was “official”. After reading the full interview, I do recognize his statement about “all Christian groups” and retract my third point. Mea culpa.
Now what exactly he means by “all Christian groups” from an *official* Catholic perspective is another matter. My good Catholic friend (who’s well-versed in his “denomination”) understands and to some uncertain degree “recognizes” my faith, but also believes I’m not in the “true church”. There’s a reason non-Catholic Christians can’t take communion at Catholic mass.
April 1, 2008, at 8:49 am
The following is from adherents.com, one of the places you can obtain statistical information on religious groups. It has a listing of all religious bodies in the world having a million or more adherents [they don’t use the word members]. There is an explanation of where and how data is obtained and categorized. It has very interesting observations on the groupings used that is most pertinent to the issue of comparing apples with oranges. The following is an example from their website.
Source: http://www.adherents.com/adh_rb.html
April 1, 2008, at 9:39 am
Roman Catholicism is not a “denomination”. That is a term to refer to the various bodies of Western Christian protestantism, and apparently not used much for the newer evangelical strains. Whether than term can appropriately be used to distinguish among strains of other religious traditions (ie, Judaism, Islam, etc) I have no idea.
April 1, 2008, at 9:46 am
First of all, not everyone who would normally be counted as Christian has been baptized. (Some people haven’t been baptized yet, some churches don’t baptize, and some churches don’t baptize validly because they don’t follow Christ’s formula or have weird theology about Who Christ is. It’s hard to not baptize validly, but some folks manage it.)
Anyone who’s validly baptized is technically “in” the Catholic Church, as it’s considered a valid Catholic sacrament whenever it’s done validly. (This doesn’t count for purposes of marriage tribunals or census counts, though. I just learned that this week, and must pass it on.)
However, theologically, the Catholic Church is the Church. There are other churches which are separated from it by schism but not theology or validity of sacraments, who also count as churches. (Mostly the Orthodox ones.) Everybody else, because their theology and sacraments are wrong or dubious, is an “ecclesial community”, because their connection to the visible Church is not clear, and they are not in communion with the Catholic Church at all. It is of course possible for them to come into communion with the Catholic Church if things should change, but at the moment they’re not interested.
All these assume that the people and groups involved are just the unfortunate heirs of heresy and schism, honestly believe what they believe, and through no fault of their own are stuck out there on a volunteer sapling instead of the main body of the True Vine. They are Christian, but they aren’t members of what the Church considers a church.
This does not mean that the Catholic Church thinks that individual believers are bad, or that any ecclesial community is bad. It does mean that they’re not as good as they might be. Christ’s grace goes wherever He wants it to go, but the Church’s position is that He clearly meant its ordinary channel to be the Church that He founded.
What it means is that the Catholic Church believes certain revealed things about Christ and the Church, and that those beliefs lead us to certain logical conclusions. (If you think those revealed beliefs are all wrong or wrongly interpreted, those conclusions shouldn’t bother you.) But not everybody shares those conclusions; so there are problems in phrasing things correctly to reporters, and problems in reporting them correctly as well.
April 1, 2008, at 2:57 pm
It’s necessary to distinguish between what the Monsignor actually is quoted as saying in the Vatican newspaper, which is published in Italian, and the characterizations made by Reuters. For example, I greatly doubt that the Italian Monsignor used the term “denomination”.
In her post, Mollie linked to http://www.adherents.com, which I spent nearly an hour browsing. There are all kinds of lists made regarding religious bodies, with different criteria for what is being reported. The world is a big place and not everybody discusses religion or counts the people who embrace its different forms in the same way that we do in the US. For one, the act of formally joining a religious body is mostly a Western thing.
One of the most interesting things I read is that, according to the Japanese government, almost everybody in Japan is Shinto and is assigned to a shrine in their locality. The people themselves may be totally unaware of this and never even visit a shrine.
In Europe, in many countries there are church taxes collected by the government that are used for building upkeep and clergy salaries. There are many more people who check off the religion box than ever appear for services - perhaps such identification is necessary to have a church wedding or to be buried in a churchyard or some such thing - otherwise why pay a church tax if you don’t beleive in it or live it?
In some cases, for the purposes of statistics, everyone born in a certain country is presumed to be a particular religion. The site says that is how most Eastern Orthodox numbers are derived because non-diaspora Orthodoxy is territorial and, for instance, until recently almost everybody in Greece was Greek Orthodox.
It’s a fascinating website. It even has a section on the religious connections of famous people, like Bruce Springsteen, who many people erroneously assume is Jewish because of his last name.
April 1, 2008, at 7:10 pm
Beyond any of the translation and jurisdictional issues, I’ll repeat a caveat I’ve made in other quarters: What makes any count of believers plausible or comparable? Catholics, for instance, baptize infants, while many other Christian denominations do not. Some Baptist churches, in my experience, count relatively casual contact as “membership.” Many denominations are less than attentive about purging their rolls of people who have left. Some religious traditions, Islam for a particular example, don’t have a tradition of keeping close counts — particularly outside the U.S. Some entire nations find it hard to do a consistent national census, much less track members of particular religious groups. And so on. So I take any such broad claims as this one with a Dead Sea’s worth of grains of salt.
Counts of baptisms, Sunday School attendance, worship attendance, anything to do with money — these are generally more trustworthy and comparable. But “membership” is not only apples-to-oranges, but some of those apples and oranges are likely to be wax….1:-{)>
The real story here, as others have noted, is why a Vatican official would find it worth making this particular point at this particular time.
Here’s a link to a Martin Marty Sightings on the general subject.
April 2, 2008, at 9:48 am
Reuters got quite a few emails on this and we’ve issued a corrected version and posted our mea culpa here. Bob raises a good question as to why this was done at all. Well, it was done because the Vatican newspaper ran the interview and the journalist on duty, thinking this was interesting at a time when Catholic-Muslim relations are topical, thought it was worth noting. Maybe it wasn’t.
Formenti introduced the apples-and-oranges problem in his interview by saying that Muslims were now ahead of Catholics. In the original Italian, he did not say “as a denomination” or “as a religion” but simply compared the two. We tried to clarify the comparison by talking about the denomination. Some other media spoke about the largest religion. Both those efforts to clarify the statement only compounded the problem. The reports that got it right were the ones that simply repeated his comparison.
Why did Formenti do this in the first place? I don’t think it’s a question of the Vatican “not recognising” Protestants or their baptism. He mentions them and the Orthodox in his total for all Christians. But being a Vatican official and a native of Italy (where there are very few Protestants), his perspective on this naturally zeros in on Catholics and Muslims first. The original article is no longer on the Vatican website so I can’t check it (here’s the ANSA summary). But I did read it on Monday before it disappeared and I don’t remember seeing L’Osservatore Romano press him about the apples-and-oranges problem. L’Osservatore Romano, which used to be an absolutely news-free zone, has livened up considerably after getting a new editor last October. It now runs interviews like this that it would have never done before. But just because it’s the pope’s paper doesn’t mean it’s infallible
For what it’s worth, I think this episode says something quite different about the Vatican. The fact that there are more Muslims than Catholics in the world has been known for several years. The fact that the editor of the Vatican’s annual directory thinks this is news in 2008 is the real surprise here.
April 2, 2008, at 10:16 am
It wasn’t an announcement from the Vatican. Reuters took a little piece of a longer story in the Vatican newspaper about the annual yearbook with current information about the church. It’s huge and includes names, dates, etc. etc. etc. for the church in the entire world.
The bigger question is why the big fuss over an interview in a Vatican newspaper? Why not broadcast things appearing in Christianity Today?
You are assuming this Reuters story is aimed at the US. Reuters main office is on Fleet Street in London - it’s not an American outfit.
Richard Owen, The Times (of London) reporter in Rome, also reported it.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article3653800.ece
Mr Owen is the guy who claimed the Pope was getting ready to reconcile with Luther and wrote other notorious Vatican stories that have been noted here.
Besides Mr Owen, The Times has been running a number of other stories over the past few months about religious statistics. One a few months ago was about the Poles immigrating into the UK bumping the number of practicing Catholics above practicing Anglicans in England for the first time since the English Reformation. A Times story on March 28th (several days before the Reuters Vatican story) reported:
The Brits are really nervous about the increasing numbers of immigrants in their country so these kinds of stories are very interesting to them.