Pew: The unaffiliated rank 3rd in world religions

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Jim Hollander / EPAFranciscan nuns and Nigerian Christians pray inside St. Catherine's Church, adjacent to the Church of the Nativity, traditionally accepted as the birthplace of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Monday.By Becky Bratu, NBC NewsRoughly one in six people around the world has no religious affiliation, a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life found, making the unaffiliated the third-largest religious group worldwide, behind Christians and Muslims, and about equal in size to the world’s Catholic population.

Follow @NBCNewsWorldThe religiously unaffiliated population includes atheists, agnostics and  people who do not identify with any particular religion in surveys, the  study issued Tuesday reads. Many of the religiously unaffiliated, however, hold  religious or spiritual beliefs, the study emphasized.

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