A new survey has been unveiled which ranks the world’s most religious and least religious countries on the planet. According to a report from NPR, parts of the Middle East and North Africa are amongst some of the most religious areas in the world, with around 80 percent of participants claiming to have a faith.

Amongst some of the least religious countries, the UK ranks in sixth place of the 65 countries that took part in the survey. This is despite Prime Minister David Cameron claiming that the United Kingdom is “still a Christian country.”

According to the Guardian, only around 30 percent of the UK population claim to have any religious beliefs. Around 53 percent stated that they didn’t hold any faith at all while 13 percent said they were atheists. However, this doesn’t compare to China, where a much larger number (around 61 percent) of people claimed to be atheists.

The survey also showed that only around half of Western Europe were religious, compared to the U.S., where around 56 percent of the population were faithful. It also showed that people who were aged 34 and under tended to be more religious and are more likely to have no formal education.

Overall, on a global scale, around two-thirds of the world’s population considered religion an important part of their daily life, according to the president of Win/Gallup International, Jean-Marc Leger.

“Religion continues to dominate our everyday lives and we see that the total number of people who consider themselves to be religious is actually relatively high… Furthermore, with the trend of an increasingly religious youth globally, we can assume that the number of people who consider themselves religious will only continue to increase.”

For those interested, the methodology used to conduct this worldwide survey of religious countries is as follows.

“A total of 63,898 persons were interviewed globally. In each country a representative sample of around 1000 men and women was interviewed either face to face (31 countries; n=33862), via telephone (12 countries; n=9784) or online (22 countries; n=20356). Details are attached. The field work was conducted during September 2014 – December 2014. The margin of error for the survey is between 2.14 and 4.45 +3-5 percent at 95 percent confidence level…The global average has been computed according to the share of the covered adult population of the surveyed countries.”

As well as the UK and China, other countries in the survey that were not considered as religious were Japan (13 percent), Sweden (19 percent), Czech Republic (23 percent), and the Netherlands and Hong Kong (26 percent each), while Thailand is considered one of the most religious with around 94 percent of the population having a belief structure.

[Image source: YouTube]