Statistics of Religious Beliefs in South Africa

Here are the last known statistics on who believes what in South Africa. The strange thing is that this comes from the 2001 Census; having just done the 2011 Census, we weren’t asked anything about religious beliefs. So how these stats will get updated, I have no idea… plus, since 2001 the population has increased by at least 4 million people.

You will see that 72.75% of the population are considered Christian (I have excluded Catholic and Orthodox); but of these, some are “dodgy” (to be euphemistic). So we Christians in South Africa still have our work cut out for us!

South Africa’s Statistics on Religious Beliefs, 2001
(From StatsSA, 2004 – Census 2001 by province, gender, religion recode (derived) and population group)

Affiliation (a)	Adherents	% of Population
No religion	6,767,165	15.10
Other Apostolic Churches (b)	5,627,320	12.56
Zion “Christian” Church	4,971,931	11.09
Pentecostal/Charismatic	3,695,211	8.24
Catholic Churches	3,181,332	7.10
Methodist Churches	3,035,719	6.77
Dutch Reformed Church	3,005,697	6.71
Other Christian Churches	2,890,151	6.45
Other Zionist Churches	1,887,147	4.21
Anglican Churches	1,722,076	3.84
Ethiopian Type Churches	1,150,102	2.57
Lutheran Churches	1,130,983	2.52
Presbyterian Churches	832,497	1.86
Baptist Churches	691,235	1.54
Other African Independent Churches	656,644	1.47
Congregational Churches	508,826	1.14
Bandla Lama Nazaretha	248,825	0.56
Apostolic Faith Mission	246,193	0.55
Other Reformed Churches	226,499	0.51
Orthodox Churches	42,253	0.09
African Traditional Belief	125,898	0.28
Islam	654,064	1.46
Undetermined	610,974	1.36
Hinduism	551,668	1.23
Other Beliefs	283,815	0.63

(a) Affiliation data includes infants, who were assigned the beliefs of their mothers.
(b) Bold includes affiliation that typically is included in enumerating AICs.