I recently came upon this The Guardian article which does a great job of clearly describing religious trends in the world today. Here are some of my notes.
If you read nothing else, just read the first paragraph:
If you think religion belongs to the past and we live in a new age of reason, you need to check out the facts: 84% of the world’s population identifies with a religious group. Members of this demographic are generally younger and produce more children than those who have no religious affiliation, so the world is getting more religious, not less – although there are significant geographical variations.
Asia is not only the most religiously populated region in the world, it’s also home to the largest population of the religiously unaffiliated: China.
Asia-Pacific is the most populous region in the world, and also the most religious. It is home to 99% of Hindus, 99% of Buddhists, and 90% of those practising folk or traditional religions.
The region also hosts 76% of the world’s religiously unaffiliated people, 700m of whom are Chinese.
But it’s important to remember that 700M Chinese are “religiously unaffiliated” because communism. Without the Cultural Revolution, this 700M number may have been much lower, which makes sense when we observe the sustained growth of Christianity inside China:
China has seen a huge religious revival in recent years and some predict it will have the world’s largest Christian population by 2030. The number of Chinese Protestants has grown by an average of 10 % annually since 1979, to between 93 million and 115 million, according to one estimate. There are reckoned to be another 10-12 million Catholics.
Islam will likely overtake Christianity as the world’s largest religion in a generation or two, barring any big changes to demographics and fertility rates.
And even though Christians will also outgrow the general population over that period, with an increase of 34% forecast mainly thanks to population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, Christianity is likely to lose its top spot in the world religion league table to Islam by the middle of this century.
And finally, there’s this:
In 2016, the Temple of the Jedi Order, members of which follow the tenets of the faith central to the Star Wars films, failed in its effort to be recognised as a religious organisation under UK charity law. In the last two censuses, Jedi has been the most popular alternative religion with more than 390,000 people (0.7% of the population) describing themselves as Jedi Knights on the 2001 census. By 2011, numbers had dropped sharply, but there were still 176,632 people who told the government they were Jedi Knights.