How Many Evangelicals in the World? A New Assessment from the World Christian Database

The question of “who is an Evangelical” has occupied historians and social scientists with renewed urgency in the last 10 years. As Evangelical churches and international organizations have increasingly recognized the rise of a global South majority, they have also expressed a growing interest in accurately assessing the size and composition of this movement. This paper operationalizes Evangelicalism for the twenty-first century by analyzing demographic trends and religious taxonomies using data from the World Christian Database . It proposes a new threefold typology of Evangelicalism: denominational Evangelicals, Pentecostals/Charismatics, and Majority World Protestants. Taken together, this “Wider Evangelical” movement comprises approximately 930 million adherents, 87.2 percent of whom live in the global South (47.5% in Africa, 26.3% in Asia, and 12.3%in Latin America). Although the United States has been the country with the most Evangelicals for over a century, this new demographic assessment of shared family resemblances suggests that the new demographic center is the global South broadly, and specifically, sub-Saharan Africa.