Kemetic Orthodoxy is all over this website. You read about the faith, and its current main temple the House of Netjer, on it. What the site hasn't said much about in the past is the who, how and why: demographics and other information about our membership. Mostly, this is because of a confidentality agreement with members' application forms. My first scribe assisted me recently in culling very basic, anonymous information from our membership database in preparation for informational material being made for my upcoming trip to the Parliament of World Religions, and what we found was very interesting, something I thought would be of interest to both current members and persons contemplating membership as well.

Kemetic Orthodoxy has grown to more than 40 times its original size in 1989, with a handful of members on my college campus and the founding of the House of Netjer temple (then the House of Bast); it nearly doubled in size again during the past year alone. Currently, applications are accepted in such numbers that we can no longer accept rolling enrollment and have "probationers' classes" of large groups of people every four to six months. Our waiting list for our next group is already half the size of the current group, so new membership application is steady and attrition is low, less than 10 percent. I find this especially interesting in the light that our faith is non-proselytizing; we do not expect members to recruit other persons for the faith, and other than interfaith work and communications such as this website, we do not perform any services considered "witnessing" or "missionary."

So, where are all these people coming from? Membership is nearly perfectly divided in gender: 53% female and 47% male. We have membership in ages from less than a year (welcome again, Dante) to over 70, with the bulk of membership in the age ranges of 25-34 years (34%) and 35-44 years (30%). Since we have an Internet community as well as a local one, current membership is located 90% within the USA and 10% in other countries, including Brazil, Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Within the United States, we are represented in 29 of 50 states, with the largest concentrations of membership in California, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas.

A vast number of occupations are held by Kemetic Orthodox: the most popular are related with communications (computer programming, journalism, advertising, writing, Internet design, publishing), and education (both students and teachers). We have a number of members in the trades (architects, carpenters, electricians, engineers, mechanics, builders), and military personnel, some of whom are in current tours of duty in Kosovo and the Middle East. Our membership also comprises retired people and homemakers as well as five priests, who hold outside jobs in addition to their vocation as our priesthood is not paid.

Perhaps the most interesting part of our membership survey was the previous religion section. One might think persons being called to an "esoteric" or otherwise non-mainstream religion might not come from mainstream backgrounds. We found this actually not to be the case, as fully 56% of the total membership of Kemetic Orthodoxy reported previous involvement with some denomination of Christianity: sects including Baptist, Roman Catholic, Church of God in Christ, Episcopalian, Evangelical/Fundamentalist, Greek Orthodox, Jehovah's Witnesses, Lutheran, Methodist, Mormon, Presbyterian, and Quaker, as well as persons who identified themselves as Protestant or other nonspecific denominations of Christanity.

The second largest group, 10% of our membership, believed themselves either to have no religion or to be agnostic or atheist before conversion; the rest of the membership divided itself into previously Baha'i; Buddhist; Hindu; other African Traditional Religions such as Ifa, Lukumi, Santeria and Vodou; Islam; Judaism and Messianic Judaism; and Taoism. Interestingly, only about 5% of our membership reported previous background in Wicca, New Age or other Pagan/Neopagan religions, areas from which I believe it has been assumed the bulk of our membership comes.

All in all, the impromptu survey showed an interesting cross-section of people, not slanted toward any one gender, age group or even religious practice (the sects of Christianity represented differ from each other in many respects, and distribution among them is strong, although about 20% of the persons reporting previous background in Christianity identified themselves as previously Roman Catholic, the majority within the denominations represented).

It can now be seen that Netjer calls people from all walks of life and that Kemetic Orthodoxy's differences enhance its commonalities: a people called to return to Netjer and to a philosophy older than us all.