Most of you have probably heard of this recent Pew Survey projecting how, from demographic data, the world’s religions will fare over the period between 2010 and 2050.
Sadly, although the number of the religously “unaffiliated” (nonbelievers plus believers without a church) will rise a tad during those four decades, the proportion will fall a tad. Further bad news, in my view—for I see Islam as the world’s most pernicious faith at the moment—is the rise of Islam, which by 2050 will almost equal Christians in both absolute numbers and percentage of the world population (Christianity is and will remain, barely, the world’s most popular faith). The growth of Islam is due to a much higher fertility of Muslims than of members of other faiths.
Here is the most important data, with absolute numbers on the left and percentages on the right. Muslim percentages rise most rapidly, Christians and Hindus stay about the same, while the unaffiliated and the Buddhists take a hit. The total world population in 2050 is estimated to be 9.3 billion, a 35% increase over its 2010 value. That’s just too many people!
Here is what will happen to us, the “nones” (also including those with belief in numinous stuff but without formal membership in a church):
Heathens need to have more kids! (Not really; there are too many already.) And of course the reason for all the growth of Islam is not conversions, but fertility excess. The unaffiliated have only a bit more than half the fertility of Muslims, and significantly less than Christians. That is, of course, because unbelievers don’t have strictures like not using contraception, and are, I suspect, more ecologically aware! That puts us having a fitness as low as Buddhists. But look how far Muslims are above everyone else in birthrate:
The growth of Islam is augmented by the fact that, among world religions, it has the highest proportion of adherents approaching childbearing age. The proportion of Muslims in 2010 under age 15 was 34%, higher than that of any other faith (it’s 27% for Christians, for instance, 21% for Jews, and a meager 19% for the unaffiliated).
Some of the change, but not much, is due to religious switching, and most of that switching is either away from Christianity or towards “unaffiliated status”. But the heartening rise in the numbers who give up formal religion is not enough to overcome our lower fertility:
The Pew article has a ton more data, including information about immigration, and about how the U.S. itself will change, summarized in the figure below. What’s happening to the U.S. gives us at least some good news: Christians will decline by 12%, largely displaced by the “nones”, who will increase by 9.2%. Muslims increase only slightly, from 0.9% to 2.1%, of the total population but that’s still more than a doubling in percentage.
Finally, while the good news is that the whole world is becoming less dominated by Christians, the bad news is that it’s being replaced not by nonbelief, but by Islam. This will certainly cause more inter-faith tensions in the next few decades. As the chart below shows, Islam will become the dominant faith in several places, but in the enlightened nations of France, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, the dominant “faith” will no longer be Christianity, but “unaffiliated”! And in Australia and the UK, the proportions of Christians will drop below half, though of course that’s a purely arbitrary cutoff given the panoply of faiths on offer.
What can we expect from all this? I’m not a prognosticator, but unless Islam undergoes a reformation (which is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls for in her latest book Heretic (a Professor Ceiling Cat Recommendation™), we can predict more bloodshed, more religious rivalry (which of course wouldn’t exist if the whole world were unbelievers), and more strife in general. Let us hope that Islamic extremism wanes, and that Islamic moderates stop countenancing it to such a large extent. I don’t believe that will happen by 2050, but unless I live to be over a hundred, I won’t know.
h/t: Alberto, Heather
