Getting Started
- World Religion DatabaseStatistical data on religious affiliation for every country of the world. 1900 to the present, with projections out to 2050.
- CIA The World FactbookCIA world factbook entries for world religions
- British Religion in NumbersHosted by the University of Manchester includes government data sources, opinion polls, and historical faith community sources.
- Association of Statisticians of American Religious BodiesGathers statistics on American Religious bodies
- Statistical Abstacts of the United States (1878-2012)Tables on the religion composition of the US population
- Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA)Formerly American Religious Data Archive. Compiles statistics, maps, and directories on religious activities around the world, with an emphasis on the United States.
Raw Data Sets
- ICPSRThe Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) "maintains a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields."
Search "religion" various public opinion religion surveys
Search Tips and Suggestions
Statistics on religion, like all statistics, require a critical eye. Most of the statistics are surveys of religious institutions themselves or surveys of individuals and their self-reported affiliations. Surveys of religious institutions are self-reporting and ]
Some organizations do not have numbers or do not share those numbers with the public. In the U.S., the last government-mandated count of religious organizations was in 1936.
Religious organizations might call themselves by a different name than they are generally known. Also, "religion" is a term imposed from the outside; it is not a first-person term of self-categorization. What religion is or isn't, and what practices and rituals constitute "religion" is culturally, geographically, and temporally dependent. For more, see JZ Smith's Religion, Religions, Religious in Critical Terms for Religious Study.
Books
American Jewish Year Book 2014 by ISBN: 3319096230Publication Date: 2014-11-19This book, in its 114th year, provides insight into major trends in the North American Jewish communities, examining the recently completed Pew Report (A Portrait of Jewish American), gender in American Jewish life, national and Jewish communal affairs and the US and world Jewish population. It also acts as an important resource with lists of Jewish Institutions, Jewish periodicals and academic resources as well as Jewish honorees, obituaries and major recent events. It should prove useful to social scientists and historians of the American Jewish community, Jewish communal workers and the press, among others.
American Jewish Year Book is available through Ishare from 2013-2019.
The Year Book of International Religious Demography is also available through Ishare or through InterLibrary Loan.
After 2018 it is available as the Journal of Religion and Demography