Religious Demography
The country has an area of 6,592,769 square miles (17,075,190 km2) and a population of 142.8 million. In practice, only a minority of citizens actively participated in any religion. Many who identified themselves as members of a faith participated in religious life rarely or not at all. There is no one set of reliable statistics that breaks down the population by denomination, and the statistics below are compiled from government, polling, and religious group sources.
Approximately 100 million citizens consider themselves Russian Orthodox Christians, although the vast majority are not regular churchgoers. Fourteen to 23 million Muslims form the country's largest religious minority. The majority of Muslims live in the Volga-Urals region and the North Caucasus, although Moscow, St. Petersburg, and parts of Siberia also have sizable Muslim populations. The Buddhist Association of Russia estimated there were between 1.5 and 2 million Buddhists, who live in the traditionally Buddhist regions of Buryatiya, Tuva, and Kalmykiya. According to the Slavic Center for Law and Justice, Protestants make up the second largest group of Christian believers, with 3,500 registered organizations and more than 2 million followers. There are an estimated 600,000 Jews (0.4 percent of the population); the vast majority live in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Catholic Church estimated that there are 600,000 Catholics, most of whom are not ethnic Russians. In some areas, such as Yakutiya and Chukotka, pantheistic and nature-based religions are practiced independently or alongside other religions.
According to Human Rights Ombudsman Lukin's annual report, the Ministry of Justice had registered 22,956 religious organizations as of 1 January, 2007, 443 more than January 2006. Among the registered religious groups are Russian Orthodox, Orthodox Old Believers, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, Evangelical Christians, Catholic, and other denominations.
There were a large number of foreign missionaries operating in the country. Sr. Y and Fr. Okello did a research on this sites
Read more about this topic: Freedom Of Religion In Russia
Famous quotes containing the word religious:
“It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down.... Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)