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Demography of Anglicans in Sub-Saharan Africa: Estimating the Population of Anglicans in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2020

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Abstract

There is an emerging debate about the growth of Anglicanism in sub-Saharan Africa. With this debate in mind, this paper uses four statistically representative surveys of sub-Saharan Africa to estimate the relative and absolute number who identify as Anglican in five countries: Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. The results for Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania are broadly consistent with previous scholarly assessments. The findings on Nigeria and Uganda, the two largest provinces, are likely to be more controversial. The evidence from statistically representative surveys finds that the claims often made of the Church of Nigeria consisting of ‘over 18 million’ exceedingly unlikely; the best statistical estimate is that under 8 million Nigerians identify as Anglican. The evidence presented here shows that Uganda (rather than Nigeria) has the strongest claim to being the largest province in Africa in terms of those who identify as Anglican, and is larger than is usually assumed. Evidence from the Ugandan Census of Populations and Households, however, also suggests the proportion of Ugandans that identify as Anglican is in decline, even if absolute numbers have been growing, driven by population growth.

Keywords

censusChurch growthdemographyKenyaNigeriaSouth Africasub-Saharan AfricasurveysTanzaniaUganda
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Anglican Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , May 2020 , pp. 42 - 60
Copyright
© The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust 2020

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Footnotes

1

Andrew McKinnon is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Science, University of Aberdeen, Edward Wright Building, Dunbar Street, King's College, Aberdeen, AB24 3QY, UK.

References

2 Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). David Barrett deserves credit for observing this global shift itself well before Jenkins. See David B. Barrett, ‘AD 2000: 350 Million Christians in Africa’, International Review of Mission 59.233 (1970), pp. 39-54.

3 Cf. James Tengatenga, ‘Anglicans’, in Kenneth Ross, J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu and Todd M. Johnson (eds.), Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2017), pp. 239-51.

4 Allan L. Effa, ‘Releasing the Trigger: The Nigerian Factor in Global Christianity’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 37.4 (2013), pp. 214-18; John Anderson, ‘Conservative Christianity, the Global South and the Battle over Sexual Orientation’, Third World Quarterly 32.9 (2011), pp. 1589-605; David Goodhew (ed.), Growth and Decline in the Anglican Communion: 1980 to the Present (London: Routledge, 2017).

5 Henry Luke Orombi, ‘What Is Anglicanism’, First Things (August/September 2007), pp. 23-27.

6 Daniel Muñoz, ‘North to South: A Reappraisal of Anglican Communion Membership Figures’, Journal of Anglican Studies 14.1 (2016), pp. 71-95.

7 Daniel Muñoz, ‘North to South’, pp. 82-85. I recognize that the concept of ‘membership’ within Anglicanism is unclear, varies by context, and is to some degree contested. In this paper I use the term in reviewing the relevant literature where the term is used. In the analysis, I adopt use of the notion of ‘religious identity’ which is something that the data employed can speak to (it would have nothing to contribute to a comparison of membership figures).

8 Goodhew, Growth and Decline, p. 7.

9 Joseph Galgalo, ‘Kenya’, in Goodhew (ed.), Growth and Decline.

10 Galgalo, ‘Kenya’, p. 123.

11 Linda Barley, ‘Stirrings in Barchester: Cathedrals and Church Growth’, in David Goodhew (ed.), Church Growth in Britain 1980 to the Present (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 77-89. Judith A. Muskett, ‘Reflections on the Shop Windows of the Church of England: Anglican Cathedrals and Vicarious Religion’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 30.2 (2015), pp. 273-89.

12 Barbara Bompani, ‘South Africa’, in Goodhew (ed.), Growth and Decline.

13 Gina A. Zurlo, ‘A Demographic Profile of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Ross et al. (eds.), Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, p. 5.

14 Douglas Jacobsen The World’s Christians (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 163. On the stability of Christians relative to Muslims and traditional religions, see Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life, Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa (Washington DC: Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life, 2010), p. 24.

15 See Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

16 Galgalo, ‘Kenya’.

17 A careful scholarly consideration of the Church of Nigeria’s own membership accounting, akin to Joseph Galgalo’s analysis of the Church of Kenya’s figures (in his article ‘Kenya’) would, in particular, be a significant contribution to our understanding of some of the questions considered here.

18 In practice, given the expense, many national censuses often incorporate some probability sampling into census methodology in order to save costs (i.e., long forms and short forms). More on probability sampling below.

19 http://www.afrobarometer.org/surveys-and-methods/sampling-principles (accessed 28 April 2018).

20 The proportion of Anglican-identified in each survey are themselves reported in Table 1.

21 For an introduction to these issues, see Liam Foster, Ian Diamond and Julie Jefferies, Beginning Social Statistics: An Introduction for Social Scientists (London: Sage, 2nd edn, 2015), pp. 147-55.

22 Foster et al., Beginning Social Statistics, pp. 139-46. More comprehensive overviews of probability sampling can be found in Steven K. Thompson, Sampling (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 3rd edn, 2012) and Paul S. Levy and Stanley Lemeshow, Sampling of Populations: Methods and Applications (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 4th edn, 2008).

23 G.H. Anderson, ‘World Christianity by the Numbers: A Review of the World Christian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed.’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 26 (2002), pp. 128-30; Robert D. Woodberry, ‘World Religion Database: Impressive—But Improvable’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research 34.1 (2010), pp. 21-22.

24 Becky Hsu, Amy Reynolds, Conrad Hackett, and James Gibbon, ‘Estimating the Religious Composition of all Nations: An Empirical Assessment of the World Christian Database’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47.4 (2008), pp. 678-93.

25 Woodberry, ‘World Religion Database’.

26 Kevin Ward, ‘The Role of the Anglican and Catholic Churches in Uganda in Public Discourse on Homosexuality and Ethics’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 9.1 (2015), p. 129.

27 Figures presented in Table 4.

28 Personal correspondence with Todd Johnson, World Christian Database (5 March 2018).

29 Correspondence with Todd Johnson, 5 March 2018.

30 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, ‘World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, Key Findings and Advance Tables’ (2017) ESA/P/WP/248.

31 Benjamin A. Kwashi, ‘The Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)’, in Ian S. Markham, J. Barney Hawkins IV, Justyn Terry and Leslie Nuñez-Steffensen (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Anglican Communion (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 182.

32 Church of England, Church of England Year Book, 2015 (London: Church House Publishing, 2015), p. 353.

33 Bompani, ‘South Africa’.

34 Galgalo, ‘Kenya’.

35 Burgess, ‘Nigeria’, pp. 78-80.

36 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division ‘World Population Prospects’ (2017).

37 Alessandro Gusman, ‘HIV/AIDS, Pentecostal Churches, and the “Joseph Generation” in Uganda’, Africa Today 56.1 (2009), pp. 67-86; Martina Prosén, ‘Pentecostalism in Eastern Africa’, in Elias Kifon Bongba (ed.), Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 297-316.

38 For a discussion of local religious terminology, with particular emphasis on evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, see Sophie Bremner, ‘Transforming Futures? Being Pentecostal in Kampala, Uganda’, PhD thesis, University of East Anglia, 2013.

39 In conversation with Pew Forum researchers, they surmised that the difference may stem from the question structure of the Pew Forum survey, which only asks those who have identified themselves as Christian in a previous question about their denominational affiliation. I am less convinced that such a question structure would suppress the number of Anglican respondents, or to such an extent (Neha Sahgal, personal correspondence to author, 15 March 2018). The difference between the representative surveys is much less, and if the real discrepancy stems from the overestimation of the number of Anglicans in the Census, the lower proportion of Anglicans in the Pew Forum requires less by way of explanation.

40 Christopher Craig Brittain and Andrew McKinnon, The Anglican Communion at a Crossroads: The Crises of a Global Church (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press), p. 79.

41 Amos Kasibante, ‘Revival and Pentecostalism in my Life’, in Kevin Ward and Emma Wild-Wood (eds.), The East African Revival: History and Legacies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 61-69.

42 Of course, this analysis is limited to the answers respondents give in response to a question. Gusman notes that in Uganda ‘many believers attend either the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Church and one or more [Pentecostal/Charismatic churches], but when asked, most of them tend to assert their belonging to a mainstream church’. The data simply do not allow us to take double identities/affiliations, or the greater salience of one or the other in different contexts, into account. See Gusman, ‘HIV/AIDS, Pentecostal Churches’, p. 81.

43 Muñoz, ‘North to South’.

44 David Voas, ‘The Church of England’, in Goodhew (ed.), Growth and Decline.