June 2025
Measuring Christianity in China
On June 9, the Pew Research Center released a new report, "How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020," featuring a revised method for measuring religious affiliation in China. It found that 1.3 billion people—90% of China’s population—were religiously unaffiliated in 2020, making it the country with the largest unaffiliated population globally. China’s Christian population did not rank among the world’s ten largest. Departing from past “custom estimates,” Pew now uses standardized measures of "zongjiao (formal religious affiliation), allowing for better international comparisons and internal consistency over time. In early 2025, Pew’s Conrad Hackett published a follow-up paper suggesting that Christianity in China may have stopped growing since 2010, based on data from a 2023 report. The claim drew varied responses at home and abroad—but the actual number of Christians in China remains uncertain. This issue brings together new and past articles that examine this important and complex subject.
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