3 days ago
Islam is world's fastest-growing religion, new Pew study finds
The number of Muslims grew more than all other religions combined, making Islam the fastest-growing religion over the decade between 2010 and 2020, a new study by the Pew Research Center has found.
Pew's Global Religious Landscape study, released on Monday, attributed the growth of Islam to natural demographic growth. It also concluded that at the global level, Muslim population change had "little to do with people converting into or out of the faith".
"Muslims have more children and are younger, on average, than members of any other major religion," the study said.
"Based on data for the 2015-2020 period, we estimated a Muslim woman would have 2.9 children, on average, in her lifetime, compared with 2.2 children per non-Muslim woman," the report added.
The study, which examined how global religious composition changed between 2010 and 2020, concluded that while Christianity remained the world's largest religion, comprising 2.3 billion people, the gap between the proponents of Islam and Christianity continued to shrink.
According to the study, the world's Christian population decreased by about 1.8 percent since 2010.
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Regional changes
The increase in the number of Muslims in the world was concentrated primarily in Muslim-majority countries.
Islam saw the largest growth relative to other religions in Kazakhstan, Benin, and Lebanon, while the share of Muslims in Oman and Tanzania decreased.
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The percentage of religiously unaffiliated people grew particularly steeply in the US, with an increase of 97 percent from 2010.
The majority of religiously unaffiliated people live in China, where 1.3 billion people are not affiliated with any religion.
Pew's analysis found that Christians were still a majority in 60 percent of all countries and territories surveyed. However, Christianity decreased by at least five percent in 40 countries, while only significantly increasing in one.
Pew attributed part of this decline to people leaving Christianity, by measuring the number of adults who changed their religion to one different than the one they were raised in.
Between 2010 and 2020, for every one adult that joined Christianity, three left.
For the religiously unaffiliated, the opposite was true. For every one adult who stopped being unaffiliated religiously, three more became religiously unaffiliated.
Both Buddhism and Hinduism also saw more adults leave their religion than join it.
Islam was the only religion where more adults joined than left.
The growth of Islam
Islam is the world's second-largest religion, with around two billion people, or around a quarter of the world's population.
It grew by nearly 350 million people since 2010, almost three times as much as Christianity and more than all other religions combined.
There are also nearly two billion religiously unaffiliated people, an increase of 270 million people since 2010.
They were the only category, along with Muslims, to grow relative to other religions as a share of the world's population.
Hinduism, the world's third-largest religion, with 1.2 billion people, grew by 126 million people.
However, its percentage of the world's population remained unchanged.
The number of people belonging to other religions, such as Sikhism and Baha'i, grew to around 200 million people, or 2.2 percent of the world's population.
Judaism grew by nearly a million people, and remained around 0.2 percent of the world's population.
Buddhism was the only major religion to have fewer people in 2010 than in 2020, with a decrease of 18.6 million people.
It fell from around five percent to four percent of the world's population.
