section_path: Organisation and leadership/Adherents
section_name: Adherents
paragraph_text: Adherents
  
  The most reliable estimates currently available number Eastern Orthodox adherents at around 220 million worldwide, making Eastern Orthodoxy the second largest Christian communion in the world after the Catholic Church.
  
  According to the 2015 Yearbook of International Religious Demography, as of 2010, the Eastern Orthodox population was 4% of the global population, declining from 7.1% in 1910. The study also found a decrease in proportional terms, with Eastern Orthodox Christians making up 12.2% of the world's total Christian population in 2015 compared to 20.4% a century earlier. A 2017 report by the Pew Research Center reached similar figures, noting that Eastern Orthodoxy has seen slower growth and less geographic spread than Catholicism and Protestantism, which were driven by colonialism and missionary activity across the world.
  
  Over two-thirds of all Eastern Orthodox members are concentrated in Southeast Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, with significant minorities in Central Asia and the Levant. However, Eastern Orthodoxy has become more globalised over the last century, seeing greater growth in Western Europe, the Americas, and parts of Africa; churches are present in the major cities of most countries. Adherents constitute the largest single religious community in Russia —which is home to roughly half the world's Eastern Orthodox Christians—and are the majority in Ukraine, Romania, Belarus, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Georgia, North Macedonia, Cyprus, and Montenegro; communities also dominate the disputed territories of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. Significant Eastern Orthodox minorities exist in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Latvia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Albania, Syria, and many other countries.
  
  Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the fastest growing religion in certain Western countries, primarily through labour migration from Eastern Europe, and to a lesser degree conversion. Ireland saw a doubling of its Eastern Orthodox population between 2006 and 2011. Spain and Germany have the largest communities in Western Europe, at roughly 1.5 million each, followed by Italy with around 900,000 and France with between 500,000 and 700,000.
  
  In the Americas, four countries have over 100,000 Eastern Orthodox Christians: Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States; all but the latter had fewer than 20,000 at the turn of the 20th century. The U.S. has seen its community more than quadruple since 1910, from 460,000 to 1.8 million as of 2017; consequently, the number of Eastern Orthodox parishes has been growing, with a 16% increase between 2000 and 2010.
  
  Turkey, which for centuries once had one of the largest Eastern Orthodox communities, saw its overall Christian population fall from roughly one-fifth in 1914 to 2.5% in 1927. This was predominantly due to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which saw most Christian territories become independent nations. The remaining Christian population was reduced further by large-scale genocides against the Armenian, Greek, Assyrian communities; subsequent population exchanges between Greece and Turkey and Bulgaria and Turkey; and associated emigration of Christians to foreign countries (mostly in Europe and the Americas). Today, only 0.2% of Turkey's population represent various Christian denominations (320,000).