Often the picture of a “Christian” is a white American man. We obviously understand that there are Christians out there that aren’t this but it this seems to be the most common Christian. We maybe even associate this picture with Republican. As if these republicans were the same as the Christian.
However, if we take a look at the real numbers, this couldn’t be further from the truth. At the most basic of numbers, 80% of evangelicals live outside of the US and Europe. I heard a speaker tonight say that if you took the median average of Christians, it would be a young black woman (don’t have the source of this statistic but after seeing some of the following charts I believe it.)
Cartomission.com has some incredible graphs/maps with a ton of this information, but here’s one from 2010 that is crazy to visualize.
In fact, since this was created, China now has more evangelicals than the United States and is the largest missionary sending country in the world. A shocking statistic. Not to lose sight of the fact that China has the most unreligious people of any nation (China is huge, okay).
It’s also interesting to note how small of a population in Europe is evangelical.
I went to a class tonight where a guy presented a ton of statistics and charts around this stuff and it was crazy. We like to think that we understand how a lot of things work and look in the real world, but often we don’t know the real statistics behind them.
With almost 8/10 of the most populous evangelical countries being outside the Americas, I’m not sure we can still call Christianity a western religion. Christianity is spreading like wildfire and it’s the most spread religion in the world.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s because there’s truth and freedom in it.
What an exciting time.