Christians

• 1. Introduction

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  Christians are the largest single religious community on the planet, numbering approximately 2.4 billion people as of 2020 - roughly a third of the entire human race. That figure has grown from around 600 million in 1910, a more than fourfold expansion across a single century. Yet behind those staggering numbers lies a story of remarkable diversity: people who share the name Christian disagree profoundly about what that name actually means, and in some cases refuse to apply it to one another at all. What unites them, according to scholar Linda Woodhead, is a single conviction: that Jesus has a unique significance. How that significance is understood, celebrated, and defended has shaped empires, languages, legal systems, and entire ways of life. This documentary asks a deceptively simple question: who, exactly, is a Christian, and how did that word come to carry such weight across so many centuries and cultures?

• 2. The Word Itself

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  The city of Antioch had a reputation, recorded in ancient sources, for bestowing clever and sometimes cutting nicknames on groups. It was there, according to Acts 11:26, that the followers of Jesus were first called Christians. The word was almost certainly meant as a jibe. Scholar Kenneth Samuel Wuest argues that all three New Testament uses of the term carry a derisive edge, pointing to people who refused to acknowledge the emperor of Rome as divine. The Greek root is Christos, meaning "anointed one," which itself translates the Hebrew word mashiach - messiah - from the Septuagint. Latin then added an adjectival suffix that, in Roman usage, could even denote ownership, as in the relationship between a slave and a master. The first outsider to use the term was the historian Josephus, who mentions "the tribe of Christians, so named from him." Pliny the Younger used it in correspondence with the emperor Trajan. Tacitus, writing at the beginning of the 2nd century, identified Christians as the group Nero chose as scapegoats for the Great Fire of Rome.

  The name could have gone another way entirely. The New Testament also calls followers of Jesus "Nazarenes," drawn from Jesus's hometown of Nazareth in Galilee. The Jewish lawyer Tertullus recorded the phrase "the Jews call us Nazarenes" around the early centuries of the common era, and around 331 AD Eusebius confirmed that Christians were once widely known by that name. In the Babylonian Talmud, the Hebrew equivalent Notzrim appears, and that term remains the modern Israeli Hebrew word for Christian to this day. Peter's apparent embrace of "Christian" in 1 Peter 4:16 - urging believers not to be ashamed of the name - helped shift the balance, and from Ignatius and Polycarp onward, Christian became the standard word in the Early Church Fathers. The abbreviated forms Xian and Xtian, using the Greek letter chi for the first syllable of Christos, were already in common use by 1634, as the Oxford English Dictionary records; the same contraction survives in the word Xmas.

• 3. A World of Names

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  Arabic offers a window into how layered the identity can become. Two distinct words serve different purposes: Naṣrānī, tracing back through Syriac to the Nazarene tradition, tends to describe someone from a Christian cultural background; Masīḥī, meaning "follower of the Messiah," is the term Christians use of themselves as a declaration of active faith. A third Arabic word, Ṣalībī, carries heavier historical freight - it evokes the Crusaders and can carry negative connotations. But that word is actually a modern coinage; Muslim writers of the medieval period described European Christian Crusaders not as Ṣalībīyūn but as al-Faranj or Alfranj, a word rooted in "the Franks." That usage is documented in the Arab historical text Al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh by Ali ibn al-Athir.

  In Japan, the word kirishitan - borrowed from the Portuguese cristão and written in Edo-period documents in kanji - referred specifically to Roman Catholics in the 16th and 17th centuries, before the Tokugawa shogunate banned the religion altogether. The modern Japanese term is the quite different Kirisuto-kyōto, or an English-derived loanword. In the Philippines, the Spanish cristiano became Kristiyano in most Philippine languages, and some Protestant Filipinos adopted the term specifically to distinguish themselves from Catholics. The Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala, India, inherited the Syriac term Nasrani, linking them linguistically to the ancient Aramaic-speaking churches of the Near East. In Thailand the common phrase chao khrit literally means "people of Christ," while Maltese, a Semitic language related to Arabic but written in the Latin alphabet, preserves its own form: Nsara.

• 4. Who Counts as a Christian?

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  According to scholar Timothy Beal, nearly 77 percent of Americans describe themselves as Christian - yet that group encompasses people who would flatly deny that label to one another. Most Baptists and Christian fundamentalists, Beal notes, would not consider Mormonism or Christian Science to fall within Christianity at all. The near 77 percent is, in his framing, a diverse pluribus of Christianities rather than any unified body. Michael Martin approached the problem differently, working through three historic creeds - the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed - to identify a shared baseline: belief in theism, the historicity of Jesus, the Incarnation, salvation through faith in Jesus, and Jesus as an ethical model.

  At the denominational level, the Roman Catholic Church is the single largest body, with 1.3 billion adherents representing roughly half of all Christians worldwide. Protestants account for more than a third, at 37 percent. Eastern Christians, a grouping that includes the Eastern Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, and the Church of the East, make up 12 percent. In the broader demographic picture, about 37 percent of all Christians live in the Americas, 26 percent in Europe, 24 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, and 13 percent in Asia and the Pacific. Christians form a majority of the population in 158 countries and territories, while 280 million Christians live as a minority. Pew Research projections indicate the global Christian population will exceed 3 billion by 2050.

• 5. Education and Persecution

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  A 2016 Pew Research Center study ranked Christians as the second most educated religious group in the world after Jews, with an average of 9.3 years of schooling. The highest averages among Christian populations were recorded in Germany at 13.6 years, New Zealand at 13.5, and Estonia at 13.1. Christians held the second-highest rate of graduate and post-graduate degrees per capita, and the highest in absolute numbers at 220 million. Singapore led all nations in the share of Christians holding a university degree, at 67 percent, followed by Israel at 63 percent and Georgia at 57 percent. The study attributed part of this pattern to the fact that many of the world's universities were built by historic Christian denominations, and to the documented role of Protestant reformers in promoting female literacy.

  The picture turns darker when the subject is physical safety. In 2017, the human rights organization Open Doors estimated that approximately 260 million Christians faced "high, very high, or extreme persecution" annually, with North Korea identified as the most dangerous country for Christians. A 2019 investigation commissioned by the United Kingdom's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs found that religious persecution had intensified, was concentrated in the Middle East, North Africa, India, China, North Korea, and Latin America, and was not limited to any single state type. That report concluded that approximately 80 percent of persecuted religious believers worldwide are Christians - a figure that stands in stark contrast to the community's demographic dominance, and one that the 2019 inquiry described as global in scope.