Christians, Muslims almost equal in numbers in Africa

A continent once known more for witchcraft than worship has become a stronghold - and a flash point - for the world’s two largest religions, the Pew Forum said in a survey released Thursday.

With more than 90 percent of the region’s population saying faith is “very important” in their lives, it’s also on one of the major fault lines of religious conflict.

Northern Africa is heavily Muslim and southern Africa is mostly Christian but where the two religions meet in a 4,000-mile belt from Somalia to Senegal has often turned violent, especially in Nigeria, where hundreds of Muslims and Christians have died since January fighting each other.

At least 45 percent of the Christians surveyed in Ghana, Zambia, Mozambique, Cameroon, Kenya, Uganda and Chad - which topped the list at 70 percent - consider Muslims to be violent. Far smaller percentages of Muslims see Christians as violent - Djibouti had the largest percentage at 40 percent, followed by Kenya and Uganda in the low 30s.

“Christians are less positive in their views of Muslims than Muslims are in their views of Christians,” senior researcher Greg Smith said, adding that both Christians and Muslims also showed concern about extremism within their own ranks.

The massive survey, called “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa,” charts how a region that gave birth to the term “global South” is a world leader in religious practice.

From December 2008 to April 2009, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life conducted 25,000 interviews in more than 60 languages or dialects in 19 countries to ascertain the state of belief and practice among 820 million people in one of the world’s most religiously volatile regions.

The survey had input from scholars at Princeton University, Boston University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Depending on the country surveyed, it has a margin of error ranging from four to five percentage points for overall answers, and from four to 10 points for answers within the religion.

A century ago, the bulk of world Christianity was concentrated in Europe and in the Western Hemisphere. Today, 20 percent of the world’s Christians now live south of the Sahara Desert. Islam, which was concentrated in sub-tropical countries to the north and east of Africa, now has 15 percent of its worldwide adherents living there.

“It is fascinating to probe the question of why the expansion has happened and the why of the forces behind it,” Mr. Smith said.

“There’s a high percentage of Christians and Muslims in every country who say they are committed to spreading their faith and winning converts over to their side. It’s that commitment at the grass-roots level by Christians and Muslims that is a driving factor.”

And Africa, he added, “is the only continent in the world where you have a roughly equal division of the two largest religions in the world.”

According to the World Religion Database, 48 percent of Africa’s 1 billion inhabitants are Christian (495.8 million); 41 percent are Muslim (423.5 million) and 11 percent are “other” or unaffiliated.

South of the Sahara, Muslim adherents have gone from 11 million in 1900 to 234 million in 2010; Christians have gone from 7 million to 470 million.

A century ago in Sub-Saharan Africa, animist religions made up the bulk of the population with less than one-quarter adhering to either Islam or Christianity.

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