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The second edition of David Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia is one of the richest and most original compilations of human data produced at the turn of the millennium. In two oversized volumes and 1,699 pages of fine print, this work seeks to count the number of human beings in every religion on Earth in the year 2000—and to provide comparative figures back to 1900 and projections to 2025.

This work represents a massive expansion of the single-volume first edition, which appeared in 1982. It states that more than five billion people (85 percent of the world's population) are "religionists," that is, members of one or another of the world's ten thousand distinct religions. Two billion are Christians, 1.18 billion are Muslims, and.8 billion Hindus.

The first volume is devoted largely to Christianity, which has kept pace with the rapid growth in world population but has dramatically changed its shape in the process. In the twentieth century, Christianity became a religion that is practiced everywhere in the inhabited world, but the overall growth of Christian adherents—from 588 million in 1900 to 2,000 million in 2000—has been almost entirely achieved in the world's less developed nations, where the growth over the same period was from 83 million to 1,120 million.

The overall rate of Muslim growth was greater worldwide than that of Christianity. In Africa, however, adherents of Christianity grew by 38 fold and now outnumber Muslims on that continent. (Muslims were three and a half times more numerous than Christians in Africa in 1900 but grew only by tenfold in the twentieth century.)

What emerges most dramatically from the data here presented is the accelerating fragmentation of Christianity, from 20,800 denominations in 1981 to 34,000 just 20 years later. Of the six major groups into which Christianity is here divided, growth is by the far the greatest in the "Independent" category: post-denominational Pentecostals and charismatics often unaffiliated with any but their own congregation. This category now accounts for 27.7 percent of global Christianity and 38 percent of the world's full-time Christian workers.

The great majority of Christians in this category are nonwhite, poor urban dwellers. Yet their collective wealth increased nearly tenfold between 1970 and 2000; they generally sustain family structures; and they are by far the most skillful in using modern media.

Other trends that stand out in the massive data sets include the persistence of tribal "ethnoreligions" (which grew from 117 million to 228 million in the twentieth century), the "meteoric rise of secular quasi-religions" (absolutist ideologies often framed explicitly as rivals to Christianity), and the disproportionate growth within the category labeled "marginal Christian" (Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and so on).

This project is a tribute to the truly heroic lifelong labors of its initiator, David Barrett. An Anglican missionary in Africa for 28 years, Barrett has been based in Virginia since 1985, working on this second edition with George Kurian and Todd Johnson. Barrett has visited most of the 238 nations and territories covered in this encyclopedia, and has gathered raw material from 444 specialists all over the world as well as from national census figures and United Nations data. He and his very small staff apparently continue to work in the basement of a Presbyterian church in Richmond and are preparing a cd-rom version of the encyclopedia with additional analytic elaboration.

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