A Matter of Faith

For many people around the world, religion plays a prominent role in their everyday lives, while others embrace secular ideas. According to a Statista Consumer Insights survey, carried out between January 2024 and March 2025, many of the most religious countries in the world can be found in Africa and the Middle East. Among the countries included in the survey, Pakistan, Egypt and Nigeria scored highest with 99 percent of all adults in the surveyed age group professing to a religion.

The most secular country in the survey was China, with only 17 percent of the adult population saying that they followed a religion. The number is not surprising given the fact that religious faith was marginalized under Communism in the country. Other relatively secular places in Asia included Vietnam, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong.

In Europe, Czechia (30 percent follow a religion) is the country with the fewest people who declare themselves believers – a fact that is in part tied to the country’s communist past, while tensions with and rejection of the Catholic Church started much earlier in the country. Further East in Europe, religion has not been stifled as much despite a socialist past – for example in Romania, Serbia or Lithuania. Poland, the home of famous pope John Paul II, also showed more religious tendencies than many of its Western European neighbors. In the West of the continent, Ireland was the most religious, while in Southern Europe, religion was most widespread in Greece, Italy and Portugal.

Peru and Brazil were the only countries surveyed on the American continent with at least 80 percent saying they followed a religion. Most other countries here – with the exception of Canada – did nevertheless score consistently high on religious faith with little difference between North and South.