Number of Adherents
Based on the numbers of adherents, Orthodoxy is the second largest Christian communion in the world after the Roman Catholic Church. The most common estimates of the number of Orthodox Christians worldwide is approximately 300 million. The numerous Protestant groups in the world, if taken all together, outnumber the Orthodox, but they differ theologically and do not form a single communion.
Orthodoxy is the largest single religious faith in Greece (95%) and in Eastern Europe, including Moldova (93%), Georgia (89%), Romania (87%), Belarus (85%), Serbia (84%), Bulgaria (83%), Cyprus (80%), Ukraine (80%), Russia (75%), Montenegro (74%), and Macedonia (65%).
The number of Orthodox adherents represents about 38% of the population in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Albania the adherents number around 25% out of a 40% Christian population, the others being Roman Catholic. As the dominant religion in northern Kazakhstan, it represents 40% of Kazakhstan, and 4% of Lithuania and 13% of the Estonian population. Large Orthodox Christian communities exist in the Mediterranean countries of Lebanon (8% of the whole Lebanese population) Jordan (80% of Christian population), Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Palestinian Christians) with some families able to trace their ancestry to the earliest Christians of the Holy Land. Orthodox minorities live in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary (Romanian minority), Turkey and Azerbaijan.
In addition, there are also significant Eastern Orthodox communities in the rest of Europe (including the transplanted Greek, Romanian, Serbian, Macedonian, Albanian, Bulgarian and Russian communities), Africa, Asia (see the Orthodox Church of China and Orthodox Church of Japan), Australia, and North America through the pattern of immigration from Eastern Europe and the Middle East in the last 400 or some years. In USA and Canada the Orthodox minority is growing and at present comprises between 1% and 5% of the total population.
Ancient Eastern Orthodox communities still have large populations in countries such as Lebanon and Israel (Jerusalem and Bethlehem). Large Orthodox communities with ancient histories have been completely removed from some of their ancestral homes and therefore no longer have a presence in those locations, specifically Anatolia and Cappadocia.
Read more about this topic: Eastern Orthodox Church
Famous quotes containing the words number of, number and/or adherents:
“I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“In the U.S. for instance, the value of a homemaker’s productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar and the big number was attributed to the husband’s pain and suffering.”
—Gloria Steinem (20th century)
“Christianity is the religion of melancholy and hypochondria. Islam, on the other hand, promotes apathy, and Judaism instills its adherents with a certain choleric vehemence, the heathen Greeks may well be called happy optimists.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)