Which countries are the most religious? — Here is a ranking of the importance of religion to the residents of many countries of the world. This is based upon a Gallup survey.
The Distribution of World Religions
The most religious countries tend to be either poor, Muslim or both. Your country is probably less religious if it is wealthy and European. Gallup just did a survey in 114 countries and found that religion pays an important part of the lives of most people in the world. I have taken their survey and worked with information from the CIA Factbook that I have listed on my “The Types of World Governments” post and came up with the table listed at the bottom of this page.
Here are some interesting things that I found while looking through this data:
The poorest countries are also the most religious ones;
- Examples; Congo, Burundi, Zimbabwe and Somalia.
Moslem countries tend to be more religious-
- than any other religious group. Examples; Indonesia, Yemen and Bangladesh.
Former Communist countries are not religious.
- The Communist repression of religion apparently worked; present and former communist countries tend to be some of the least religious. They also tend to have poor economies. Like Estonia, Vietnam and Albania.
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Some Buddhist countries are very religious
- like; Sri Lanka, Thailand and Cambodia.
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The least religious countries tend to be wealthier-
- and located in Europe or the Far East. The least religious countries in this survey are:
- Estonia
- Sweden
- Denmark
- Japan
- Hong Kong
Countries with lots of Lutherans are among the least religious
- (although Namibia is both Lutheran and religious). Examples are Estonia, Sweden and Denmark.
Non-Moslem countries that are both wealthy and religious are:
- Singapore (Buddhist)
- United States (Protestant)
- Ireland (Catholic)
- Greece (Orthodox)
- Italy (Catholic)
Related posts:
its interesting that countries with a constitutional monarchy style of government are either above the 90% range or below 40%…including three out of the four lowest countries in the polls…
Notice that the three least religious countries have at least a plurality of Lutherans. Does this mean that Lutheranism is a path out of religious belief?
I don’t understand Japan’s ranking as the fourth lowest on this list and I don’t know much about Shintoism. But, if you are like me then you were suprised to see that some countries that are dominated by Buddhist believers are very religious. So I would guess that either Shintoism or wealth is a Japanese path away from religious belief.
My partner and I really enjoyed reading this blog post, I was just itching to know do you trade featured posts? I am always trying to find someone to make trades with and merely thought I would ask.