Religion in the US, Canada, UK and Australia

I’ve put together a comparison of religious demographics in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. It’s not done to prove any kind of point – it’s for no reason other than the fact that I think it’s fascinating. If you do too, then enjoy…

One of my blogging friends Pam recently tweeted about the large percentage of people identifying with no religion in the Pacific North-West of the United States.

This got me curious about a comparison of religion around the world. We all know that Saudi Arabia is Muslim and Thailand is Buddhist and Spain or Costa Rica are Catholic, but I wanted to compare English-speaking countries. We share a language but not always a culture.

I compared the US, UK, Canada and Australia. I just used Wikipedia as a quick and ready source – I know it’s not an absolute authority but this isn’t an academic treatise. I would have looked at New Zealand and the Republic of Ireland as well but Wikipedia didn’t list the percentages in a readily accessible form.

In all four countries Christianity is the majority religion. There’s no surprises there, but what did surprise me is how Christianity is far less dominant in Australia than elsewhere. I knew Christianity was strong in North America but it’s also stronger in the UK than Australia – possibly since it’s the state religion. I was also intrigued by the differing make-up of the minority religions, reflecting immigration patterns and social change.

Percentage of population identifying as Christian in 2001

• Canada: 77%
• USA*: 76.7%
• UK: 71.6%
• Australia: 68%

* This is based on the 2001 Census in Australia, Canada and the UK. However, the US Census does not collect information on religious affiliation. For the US it’s based on the ARIS survey (but this only covers the contiguous states, not Alaska and Hawaii).

Australia does its Census every five rather than 10 years, like the UK and Canada. By 2006, the percentage of Australians identifying as Christian had dropped to 63.9%. That’s quite a significant change – a drop of 4.1 percentage points between 2001 and 2006.

By contrast, in the United States, Christianity held relatively steady – the 2008 ARIS survey shows 76% of Americans identified as Christian. That’s a decline of only 0.7 percentage points – practically a rounding error. The change over time is more dramatic – in the 1990 survey, the figure was 86.2%.

Other religions

Australia [2006 census]

• Christian: 63.9%
• No religion: 18.7%
• Not stated: 11.2%
• Buddhist: 2.1%
• Muslim: 1.7%
• Other : 1.2%
• Hindu: 0.7%
• Jewish: 0.5%

United Kingdom [2001 census]

• Christian: 71.6%
• No religion : 15.5%
• Not Answered: 7.3%
• Muslim: 2.7%
• Hindu: 1%
• Sikh: 0.6%
• Jewish: 0.5%
• Buddhist: 0.3%
• Other: 0.3%

United States [2007 survey*]

• Christianity: 78.4%
• Unaffiliated, including atheist or agnostic: 16.1%
• Judaism: 1.7%
• Other: 1.2%
• Buddhist: 0.7%
• Islam: 0.6%
• Hinduism: 0.4%

* This is now a different survey, done by the PEW Forum. I went with this one because the ARIS survey just had a generic category for “Eastern religions”. The statistics are pretty similar otherwise. (I wish I had Census data though!).

Canada – 2001 Census

• Christian: 77%
• No religion: 16.2%
• Muslim: 2%
• Jewish: 1.1%
• Buddhist: 1%
• Hindu: 1%
• Sikh: 0.9%
• Other: 0.8%

Australia is the most secular with 18.7% stating they have no religion and a further 11.2% not answering the question.

The biggest minority religions are Buddhism in Australia, Islam in Canada and the UK and Judaism in the US.

The smallest minority religions are Judaism in Australia, Buddhism in the UK, Hinduism in the US and Sikhism in Canada. (However, Sikhism is not broken out as a separate religion in the Australian or US survey results – presumably it is so small it is part of the ‘other’ category).

(As an aside, I once met a UK religious studies teacher who said she taught comparative religion in high school about the world’s six major world religions. I asked her what they were because I could only think of five that I would class as ‘major’ – was it Taoism perhaps, or maybe atheism, or maybe animism and nature worship? No, her six were: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Not to dismiss Sikhism in any way, but I suspect that had more to do with Britain’s demographics than anything else).

Islam is the biggest minority religion in Canada (2%) and the UK (2.7%) and and it is also a significant demographic in Australia (1.7%). However, both this PEW Forum survey and the ARIS one put the US Muslim population at 0.6% of the nation. I do wonder if this is accurate or if many Muslim-Americans prefer not to state their religion when taking a survey. There is no way for me to know but it seems plausible this might be a factor in the post 9/11 climate.

Types of Christianity

It gets messy when you look at brands of Christianity because denominations are defined and established differently in various countries. There are a few things I’ve been able to glean from the data.

Roman Catholicism as percentage of population
Canada [2001]: 43.6%
Australia [2006]: 25.8%
Australia [2001]: 26.6%
USA [2008]: 25.1%
USA [2001]: 24.5%
Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) [2007 survey]: 9%
Northern Ireland [2001]: 40.3%

Interesting that the percentage of Catholics in the US actually went up between 2001 and 2008. I’m guessing this might be due to immigration from Latin America.

Biggest Protestant denominations
The remaining Christians are mostly Protestant, with small numbers of Eastern Orthodox or Coptic Christians, and some that identify as “generically Christian”.

Here is the biggest Protestant denomination in each country:

Australia: Anglican | 18.7% of overall population [2006]
United States: Baptist | 15.8% of overall population [2008]
Great Britain: Church of England (Anglican church in England) | 20.9%
Canada: United Church of Canada | 9.6%

The Church of England is the established state religion in England and there are equivalents elsewhere in Great Britain. The Anglican Church of Australia is part of the worldwide Anglican communion and affiliated with the Church of England but it is not a state religion – Australia has separation of church and state.

The Anglican Church and the United Church of Canada (consisting of Presbyterians, Methodists and such like, similar to the Uniting Church in Australia) are both fairly liberal churches in their stances on things like ordination of women and gay marriage. (Though not without controversy, I might add!).

I’ve always thought of American Baptists as being conservative but according to Wikipedia there are varying types of Baptist and schisms between the Northern Baptists and the Southern Baptists and so on. I profess blissful ignorance about the differences.

In Australia, only 1.6% of the population is Baptist and another 1.1% identify as Pentecostal, according to the 2006 census.