TODAY much of the world will grind to a halt for a man born approximately 2,000 years ago in a small village in modern-day Israel. Around the globe, shops cease trading, banks are shuttered, stockmarkets fall silent and families gather together in festivity. In total, five billion people across the world will enjoy a day off work ostensibly to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Americans alone will have spent around $150 billion on gifts for loved ones. Christmas feels as popular as ever. But what of Christianity itself?

There are 2.4 billion people across the globe who identify as Christian, according to data from the World Christian Database. But in practice, how many of them go to church on a regular basis? To answer that question, The Economist analysed survey data from the European Social Survey and World Values Survey, which together asked 140,000 people across 89 countries about their religious affiliation, attendance and other socio-economic questions. Using this data we then predicted values for the rest of the world based on their similarity to other countries.

Church attendance tends to be low and has been falling across the much of the rich world. Just 70m of Western Europe’s 375m adults attend church at least once a month. Meanwhile, in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the church appears as strong as ever. There are 277m adherent Christians in sub-Saharan Africa and 250m in Latin America. As Christianity has shifted southwards, that has moved the centre of Christianity to Niamey, the capital of Niger (calculated by taking the Christian-adherence weighted-average latitude and longitude of countries' capital cities). As the crow flies that is 2,433 miles from Bethlehem. It's unlikely that even someone of Jesus’s prophetic powers could have foreseen that 2,000 years ago.