How Many?

The McCook Daily Gazette has a small editorial on the state of religion in the world today and lists off the numbers of adherants to each.

“The largest category is Christianity. Some 2.1 billion people say they are Christians, about one third of the world’s inhabitants. The following represents a breakdown of the remaining religious/nonreligious adherents: Islam: 1.3 billion; nonreligious: 1.1 billion; Hinduism: 900 million; Chinese traditional religion: 394 million; Buddhism: 376 million; primal-indigenous: 300 million; African Traditional and Diasporic: 100 million; Sikhism: 23 million; Juche: 19 million; Spiritism: 15 million; Judaism: 14 million; Baha’I: 7 million; Jainism: 4.2 million; Shinto: 4 million; Cao Dai: 4 million; Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million; Tenrikyo: 2 million; Neo-Paganism: 1 million; Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand; Rastafariansim: 600 thousand, and Scientology: 500 thousand. There are many other groups that don’t fall into any of these categories with smaller numbers of adherents.”

Which begs the question, how many modern Pagans are there in the world. How can we even begin to tackle an accurate number for a religion that in many cases values secrecy and is often reluctant to broadcast their faith to those who may not be tolerant.

James R. Lewis in the Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism runs through some of the few attempts at a census and other estimates and claims that 750,000 modern Pagans in North America alone is “probably a conservative estimate”.

The Witches Voice (the largest and most visited modern Pagan website) gives a somewhat larger estimate. “Our best estimate here at The Witches’ Voice is about 1 million in the U.S. and 3 million worldwide.”

Meanwhile, Religious Tolerance.org brings forward the what may be the biggest estimate of them all from a Barnes and Noble executive in 1999.

“A marketing executive from Barnes and Noble, the “World’s Largest Bookseller Online,” estimates a U.S. “Pagan Buying Audience” of 10 million. This number would not include those who scan the Internet or frequent the public library as their main sources of information. Of course, this number is only an estimate of the number of people who buy Pagan books — not the number of actual Pagans. B&N allocates more space to Pagan books than the audience would indicate, because “Pagan book buyers” tend to buy more books per capita than those of all other faith groups.”

Personally, I subscribe to the Witches Voice number and think there are around 3 million modern Pagans world-wide. With about 1 million in North America. I also think that most estimates don’t take into account what James R. Lewis calls “New Economy Neo-Paganism” or “NEN”. This is the post-Internet modern Pagan community, and it is the hardest to track, but it is also if Lewis is correct where most of the explosive growth of our movement is coming from. So while we may not be the “fastest growing religion” our family of faiths is growing at a steady pace, and we have most likely outgrown the rather conservative estimates of 1 million worldwide.

Tags: Neopaganism