page_title: Pakistan
section_title: Christianity and other religions
hierarchical_section_title: Pakistan / Demographics / Religion / Christianity and other religions
caption_attribution_description: English: Sacred Heart Cathedral This is a photo of a monument in Pakistan identified as the PB-U-34
context_page_description: Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country with a population exceeding 212.2 million. It has the world's second-largest Muslim population. It is the 33rd-largest country by area, spanning 881,913 square kilometres. Pakistan has a 1,046-kilometre coastline along the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by India to the east, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China to the northeast. It is separated narrowly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor in the northwest, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.
  The territory that now constitutes Pakistan was the site of several ancient cultures and intertwined with the history of the broader Indian subcontinent. The ancient history involves the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh and the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation, and was later home to kingdoms ruled by people of different faiths and cultures, including Hindus, Indo-Greeks, Muslims, Turco-Mongols, Afghans and Sikhs.
context_section_description: Christians formed the next largest religious minority, after Hindus, with a population of 2,092,902, according to the 1998 census. They were followed by the Bahá'í Faith, which had a following of 30,000, then Sikhism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, each back then claiming 20,000 adherents, and a very small community of Jains. There is a Roman Catholic community in Karachi that was established by Goan and Tamil migrants when Karachi's infrastructure was being developed by the British during the colonial administration between World War I and World War II. The influence of atheism is very small, with 1.0% of the population identifying as atheist in 2005. However, the figure rose to 2.0% in 2012 according to Gallup.
caption: Sacred Heart Cathedral, Lahore
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