I wanted to share some conclusions from this Pew Research report on the world’s religions:
Islam is catching up to Christianity and, if present demographic trends persist (an important “if”), Muslims will become the world’s largest religious population before the 22nd century.
Among the major religions, Hinduism and Christianity will keep pace with population growth, while Buddhism and Judaism will decline.
The unaffiliated (including agnostics and atheists and the spiritual but not religious) will grow in America and Western Europe, but will actually decline as a percentage of the world’s population. It’s driven, in part, by two realities: we’re older, and we have fewer children. In the bubble that is my social and career circles we assume that the world is leaving religion, that atheism is winning, that to some degree people are ‘coming to their senses’. The numbers say otherwise. And I believe that’s a good thing. I’ll explain why in future posts.
This note was also interesting:
China’s 1.3 billion people (as of 2010) loom very large in global trends. At present, about 5% of China’s population is estimated to be Christian, and more than 50% is religiously unaffiliated. Because reliable figures on religious switching in China are not available, the projections do not contain any forecast for conversions in the world’s most populous country. But if Christianity expands in China in the decades to come – as some experts predict – then by 2050, the global numbers of Christians may be higher than projected, and the decline in the percentage of the world’s population that is religiously unaffiliated may be even sharper.
Full article here.