This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Around 1910, close to two thirds of the world's Christians lived in Europe. A century later the balance had reversed entirely: by 2010 the Global South, Africa, Latin America and Asia together, held a clear majority of the world's Christian population, roughly sixty one percent against thirty nine for Europe and North America combined.
Africa's own Christian population drove the largest single share of that reversal, growing from an estimated ten million believers in 1900 to several hundred million by the early twenty first century. The shift was not confined to one church or communion: the Catholic population specifically is estimated to have passed fifty percent Southern by 1970, four decades ahead of the wider Christian population crossing the same line.
No single country anchors a change this diffuse, spread as it was across Africa, Latin America and Asia at once. Africa is used here as the largest single component of the shift, and that choice is named plainly as a simplification rather than a claim that the change belongs to Africa alone. What this changed for Christianity's spread was a full reversal of where the faith's center of gravity sat: a religion whose numerical weight had rested in Europe for most of its history moved, within one century, to rest mostly in the Global South instead.