A new survey released this week by the widely repected Pew Research organisation reveals that while “Christians remained the world’s biggest religious group,” … “Christians (of all denominations, counted as one group) did not keep pace with global population growth from 2010 to 2020.”
Pew notes that between 2010 and 2020:
- The number of Christians rose by 122 million, reaching 2.3 billion.
- Yet, as a share of the world’s population, Christians fell 1.8 percentage points, to 28.8%.
Muslims were the fastest growing religious group in the decade , growing more than all other religious groups combined. “Nones,” people with no religion also increased aa share of the world’s population up one percentage point to 24.2%.
Hindus and Jews remainied steady. In their write up of this survey the Times of Israel noted that jews are still one million below their pre-holocaust population.
The Pew survey gives some demographic precision to the general observation that Africa has become the population centre of world christianity. “Sub-Saharan Africa is now home to the largest number of Christians, surpassing Europe. As of 2020, 30.7% of the world’s Christians live in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 22.3% in Europe. This change was fueled by differences in the two regions’ rates of natural increase (with much higher fertility rates in Africa than in Europe), as well as by widespread Christian disaffiliation in Western Europe.”
Main Image: Planet Earth from an Apollo mission. Image Credit: NASA
Graphics from Pew Research.