New figures on registration in Iceland’s religious institutions have yielded some interesting results.
Vísir recently compiled data that they requested from the National Registry on the numbers of people registered with different religious institutions in Iceland. Unsurprisingly, the largest number of registrants belonged to the national church; some 240,395 Icelanders out of the total population of 331,244 belong to the church, either by voluntary registration or from being autoregistered at birth.
Where other religious institutions are concerned, one of the more interesting data points is that there are exactly 666 registered members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Iceland.
The number of total registered Muslims in Iceland, combining the totals from both the Muslim Society of Iceland and the Islamic Cultural Centre of Iceland, is 839. Fríkirkjan – a Lutheran church unaffiliated with the national church – has 19,343 members, while there are 12,207 Catholics. There are 3,101 members of the pagan Ásatrú Society; 1,041 members of the Buddhist Society (although there are Buddhists registered in other religious organisations as well); and 888 Orthodox Christians, combining totals from the Russian and Serbian Orthodox churches.
There were no immediately apparent Jewish organisations in Iceland seen in the data, but the smallest registered religious organisation is the Theosophical Society branch Nýja Avalon, which has precisely one member.
Those who were not registered in any religious group at all numbered 20,023, and people leaving the national church has been on the rise. At the same time, Siðmennt, the Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association, claims 1,217 members.
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