Church of All Nations (Wikipedia)
On the eve of Christmas 2023 coming on Monday, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics released the official data on the country’s Christian population. Approximately 187,900 Christians live in Israel, comprising about 1.9% of the State of Israel’s population.
The Christian population grew by 1.3% in 2022. 75.3% of the Christians in Israel are Arab and constitute 6.9% of the total Arab population of Israel. Most of the Arab Christians reside in the Northern District (70.2%) and in the Haifa District (13.6%).
38.7% of the non-Arab Christians reside in the Tel Aviv and Central Districts, as compared to 36.5% in the Northern and Haifa Districts.
The localities with the largest Arab Christian populations are Nazareth (20,800), Haifa (16,800), Jerusalem (13,000), and Shefar’am (10,600).
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815 Christian couples married in Israel in 2021. The average age at the first marriage of Christian grooms was 30.7, and that of Christian brides was 27.4. These ages are higher than the average marriage ages among the other religions, for both grooms and brides.
In 2022, 2,343 infants were born to Christian women, about 73% of whom (1,704 infants) were born to Arab Christian women.
In 2022, the total fertility rate of a Christian woman was an average of 1.68 children per woman. The number of children per Arab Christian woman was lower still, at 1.62 children per woman.
The average size of a household headed by a Christian was 2.99 persons – similar to the size of households headed by a Jew (3.02), and lower than the size of households headed by a Moslem (4.30).
The average number of children up to age 17 in Christian families with children up to this age is 1.87. Of these Christian families, the average number of children up to age 17 in Arab Christian families is 1.98 – smaller than the numbers in Jewish families (2.44) and in Moslem families (2.57).
In the 2022/23 school year, 26,776 Christian students – 1.4% of the total number of students – attended primary and secondary schools.
84.1% of Christian 12th-grade students were eligible for a matriculation certificate.
55.1% of the Arab Christians continued their studies toward a first degree within eight years of graduating high school, compared to only 34.6% of the total number of high-school graduates in the Arab school system and 48.1% in the Hebrew education.
The proportion of women among the Christian students was similar to the proportion of women among the total number of students – 61.6% and 60.4%, respectively.
Compared with Moslem students, the percentage of Christian-Arab students studying for a first degree (bachelor’s degree) was lower in education and teacher training (23.4% vs. 9.0%, respectively), whereas the percentage of those who studied engineering and architecture was higher (14.6% vs. 24.2%, respectively).
The percentage of participation in the labor force in 2022 among Christians aged 15 and over was 70.5% (73.5% of men and 68.2% of women). This figure was 62.2% among Christian Arabs (69.0% of men and 55.8% of women).
