Sub-Saharan Africa is now home to the largest number of Christians, surpassing Europe.

[Joe Knapp]

Regional change

Between 2010 and 2020, the share of the global population living in sub-Saharan Africa increased to 14.3% (up 2 percentage points), and the share living in the Middle East-North Africa region rose to 5.6% (up 0.5 points).

Every other region held a smaller share of the world’s population in 2020 than in 2010. These shifts are reflected in the geographic distribution of some religious groups, including Christians.

Sub-Saharan Africa is now home to the largest number of Christians, surpassing Europe. As of 2020, 30.7% of the world’s Christians live in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 22.3% in Europe. This change was fueled by differences in the two regions’ rates of natural increase (with much higher fertility rates in Africa than in Europe), as well as by widespread Christian disaffiliation in Western Europe.

The regional concentration of Jews also has changed. As of 2020, 45.9% of Jews live in the Middle East-North Africa region, while 41.2% reside in North America. In 2010, North America was the region where the largest number of Jews lived. This shift was primarily the result of Israel’s Jewish population growing from 5.8 million to 6.8 million between 2010 and 2020, through a combination of natural increase and migration.⁵

 

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/06/09/how-the-global-religious-landscape-changed-from-2010-to-2020/