Baháʼí Faith by country

The Baháʼí Faith formed in the mid-19th century in Iran (Middle East), later gaining converts in India, East Africa, and the Western world. The Bahá'í Faith is established in more than 100,000 localities in virtually every country and territory around the world. Traveling promoters of the religion played a significant role in spreading the religion into most countries and territories during the second half of the 20th century, mostly seeded out of North America by the planned migration of individuals. The Baháʼí Faith was recognized as having a widespread international membership by the 1980s. Author Denis MacEoin asserted in 2000 that Baháʼí Faith was the second-most geographically widespread religion after Christianity.
The Baháʼí World Centre estimated over a million Bahá'ís in 1965, 5 million in 1991, and about 8 million in 2020. The official agencies of the religion have focused on publishing data such as numbers of local and national spiritual assemblies, countries and territories represented, languages and tribes represented, schools, and publishing trusts, not the total number of believers.
Analyzing Baháʼí data on localities and activity levels, Danish sociologist Margit Warburg suggested that by 2001, registered Baháʼís reliably numbered over 5 million. Other independent estimates, such as Encyclopædia Britannica in 2010, and the World Christian Encyclopedia in 2001, listed Baháʼís and sympathizers as over 7 million. The Baháʼí Faith was described in 2013 as the fastest growing religion by percentage across the 20th century.
The number of Baháʼí adherents is difficult to estimate accurately. Few national Baháʼí communities have the administrative capacity to enumerate their members and Baháʼí membership data does not break out active participation from the total number of people who have expressed their belief. Due to its small size, few censuses or religious surveys include the Baháʼí Faith as a separate category and some government censuses count Baháʼís as Muslims or Hindus. Country-level detail from the World Christian Encyclopedia (WCE), on which many estimates rely, counts declared Baháʼís along with sympathizers, leading to much higher counts than those of self-identifying Baháʼís.
The fact that the religion is diffuse and proportionally small is a major barrier to demographic research by outsiders. Even in the United States, where significant resources are dedicated to gathering data, the Baháʼí Faith is often omitted from religious surveys due to the high sample size required to reduce the margin of error. In the Middle East, especially Iran, Baháʼís face persecution, and the lack of Baháʼí administration makes it difficult to maintain a count.
Baháʼí authors Peter Smith and Moojan Momen, commenting on the difficulties of counting Baháʼís, wrote the following:
Throughout the early development of the Baháʼí Faith in Iran and the West, Baháʼís often retained some of the religious identity that they converted from, many remaining members of churches and mosques. Later, Shoghi Effendi made it clear that the Baháʼí Faith was its own tradition with laws and institutions, and that Baháʼís could not remain members of other religions. The practice of maintaining membership rolls of believers began in the 1920s.
In the 1930s the Baháʼís of the United States and Canada began requiring new adherents to sign a declaration of faith, stating their belief in Baháʼu'lláh, the Báb, and ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, and affirming that there are laws and institutions to obey. The original purpose of signing a declaration card was to allow followers to apply for lawful exemption from active military service. The signature of a card later became optional in Canada, but in the US is still used for records and administrative requirements.
All local and national Spiritual Assemblies are expected to keep membership records that include declarations of faith and withdrawals, which are used for annual assembly elections. The Baháʼí system of membership thus has a system of contracting into the religion and some maintenance of the membership list is required for community functioning. Being removed from membership requires an opposite declaration of disbelief.
A peculiar difficulty arises in counting Baháʼís because a tenet of the faith is that parents cannot choose the religion of their children and that 15 is the age of spiritual maturity when an individual can make the choice. Early membership rolls excluded children of Baháʼís and didn't even count them separately. In 1979 the Universal House of Justice requested that children be included separately for statistical purposes, matching the methodology of most censuses and surveys. Before that, membership rolls may have only indicated ages 21 or older (the age required for voting).
The change toward including children in statistics caused an increase in the total number of reported Baháʼís in the late 1980s, but has been consistent since.
Another difficulty arises from defining membership based on participation. The number of active participants in any religious movement will always be smaller than the number who profess belief. The prevailing norm in the Western world is that members of minority religious groups must be actively participating to be considered a member, and members of majority religious groups have a large number of passive adherents. Margit Warburg wrote,
Warburg also noted: "Baháʼís do not lose membership status just by being inactive."
In the 1980s the Baháʼís of the United States started including “address unknown” in their membership statistics; members designated as such may profess belief but are no longer participating in community life. For example, in its 2020 Annual Report the US National Spiritual Assembly had 177,647 registered Baháʼís of all ages, only 77,290 of which had good addresses, and 57,341 total participants in core activities, with 37% of attendees from outside of the Baháʼí population. The higher American number has been challenged because it includes some who no longer believe, but the lower number with good addresses does not include inactive Baháʼís who continue their belief. As author William Garlington noted,
Using activity data, Warburg estimated a percentage of activity in Baháʼí communities around the world and concluded that in 2001 there were reliably 5.1 million registered Baháʼís in the world and 900,000 active Baháʼís, or 18% of the total. The estimates on activity were broken out by continent: Europe 82% active, USA and Canada 71%, Australia and New Zealand 91%, Africa 22%, India 5%, Other Asia 26%, Latin America 13%, and Oceania 43%. On the question of whether the Baháʼí numbers are intentionally inflated, Warburg feels that the “numbers are not rooted in any sinister manipulation of data”.
During ʻAbdu'l-Bahá's tour of North America, several newspapers made claims of how large the religion was, with figures in the range of millions of people:
Although the Baháʼí News Service has reported on the total number of Baháʼís in the world, the data is not broken out by country.
The World Christian Encyclopedia (WCE), and its successor The World Christian Database (WCD), is an authority on membership data for religions in the world, and its decades-long study by David Barrett and co-workers is a basis for many other estimates of Baháʼís in the world, such as ARDA. The data were released in editions of 1982, 2001, and 2018, and includes a break down by country. The WCE data has consistently reported higher numbers of Baháʼís than the reports of Baháʼí institutions. Danish researcher Margit Warburg studied Baháʼí membership data and feels that the WCE data is overstated for Baháʼís. For instance, WCE reports an estimated 1,600 Baháʼís in Denmark in 1995 and 682,000 Baháʼís in the USA. The number of registered Baháʼís at the same time were 240 and 130,000, respectively. Peter Smith found that the WCE data is meant to include "members plus those who regularly attend Baháʼí events, that is including a wider circle of sympathizers as well as declared Baháʼís".
The Association for Religious Data Archives (ARDA) is "a collection of surveys, polls, and other data submitted by the foremost scholars and research centers in the world." It gathers data from, "the US Census Bureau's International Data Base, the US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report, the United Nations Human Development Reports, and others" including World Christian Database.
The following data comes from World Christian Encyclopedia (1st ed., 1982).
The following data comes from World Christian Encyclopedia (2st ed., 2001).
In "The Baha'i Faith 1957–1988: A Survey of Contemporary Developments" (Religion: 1989), Baháʼí authors Momen and Smith provide the following estimates of the Baháʼís in the world over 3 decades, broken out by cultural areas. They derived numbers from, "calculation of approximate numbers from the number of Bahá'í organizations; extrapolating back from the official figures for the number of individual Bahá'ís provided more recently; estimates provided by informed Bahá'ís; and when the first draft of this paper was completed, a copy was sent to the Department of Statistics in Haifa and the present table incorporates some of the statistical information given in the reply to this, dated 8 July 1988."