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Short answer: The 2001 edition of Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia, identifies 10,000 distinct religions, of which 150 have 1 million or more followers. Within Christianity (counted as just one religion), 33,830 different denominations are counted. This would include denominations as large as Catholicism and as small as Shakers.
It could be pointed out that most of these religions are confined to a fairly restricted geographical region and often to single ethnic groups. The Major Religions of the World web page lists only 22 "major world religions." This is far fewer than the 150 religions Barrett lists which have 1 million or more adherents. This is because the list of "major world religions" only includes religions with a significant presence beyond a single country.

For the number of religions in the United States, the best source to consult is the excellent Encyclopedia of American Religions by J. Gordon Melton.

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How Many Groups? How Many Members?

Counting NRMs and their members precisely is flatly impossible. Groups come and go steadily, as do their members. One’s definition of NRM can have a powerful effect on one’s counting. Size also becomes an issue: do we count every little local group with a handful of members? There are, for example, thousands of independently-organized local pagan/wiccan groups with anywhere from three or four to a few dozen members each; counting all of them would give us tens of thousands of movements, at least, and several hundreds of thousands of members. If we assume that a movement has to have some kind of critical mass—some level of national recognition and more than handful of members—then numbers drop sharply. Recent editions of J. Gordon Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions lists some 2,300 religious groups active in the United States; most of them either have at least 2,000 members or operate in multiple, widely separated geographic locations to qualify for inclusion. A majority of Melton’s religious organizations are mainstream groups, so those qualifying as NRMs would number well below 1,000. Their members likely number well below a million, although firm statistics here do not exist; many reports of NRM membership use figures reported by the groups themselves, and many groups exaggerate their numbers, sometimes wildly.

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Zitat von Sleepwalker
Wow danke, du hast uns echt genial geholfen!:)
Das reicht vollkommen. Und es sollten ja nur Näherrungswerte sein, von daher is das perfekt;)
Danke danke danke, ich (oder besser er:D) is dir jetzt was schuldig :)

--> kann dann auch geschlossen werden, es sei denn jmd. will darüber diskutieren;)

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