Although Christianity remained the largest global religion from 2010 to 2020, the last study of the Pew Research Center found that the followers of Islam growing all religions of the world during that decade.
The recently published report, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed from 2010 to 2020 (How the world religious landscape changed from 2010 to 2020), includes data of more than 2,700 sources, including national censuses, demographic surveys and population records. Some of the report estimates come from data from 2020 that were not available until 2024 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which delayed censuses in at least 65 countries.
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The report covered 201 countries, focusing on seven religious categories: Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, people who belong to other less known religions and non -affiliated people religiously.
According to the report, the total number of Christians increased by 122 million from 2010 to 2020, while the total number of Muslims grew by 327 million, “more than all other combined religions.” The world Christian population reached 2.3 billion in 2020, while the world Muslim population reached 2,000 million.
Apart from the Muslims, the only other group that grew as a percentage of the world’s population was that of those who identify as non -religious, known as “Nones.”
The report described this phenomenon as “surprising” because non -religiously affiliated people are usually higher and have lower fertility rates, which puts them at “disadvantage” for population growth.
However, at the end of 2020, the “Nones” represented 24.2% of the world’s population, becoming the third largest group in the study, after Christians and Muslims.
According to the report, “the abandonment of religious identity after having been raised as Christians” is the main reason why people not affiliated religiously exceeded the religiously affiliated persons during the decade. After Christianity, Buddhism was the second religion that lost the most followers due to religious change.
The United States was one of the many countries where a large percentage of its Christian population became not affiliated between 2010 and 2020. However, Pew pointed out that the findings since 2020 indicate that the decrease seems to have stabilized. In 2020, the United States had the second largest population of non -affiliated people in the world, after China.
As for regional distribution, sub -Saharan Africa is now the home of most Christians in the world, with 30.7% living in the region in 2020. This represents a change compared to 2010, when 24.8% lived in sub -Saharan Africa and 25.8%, most Christians in the world lived in Europe.
The change was due to both the natural increase of the population in sub -Saharan Africa and the “generalized Christian disingebus in Western Europe,” according to the report, which points out: “This is an important geographical change since the beginning of the twentieth century, when Christians in sub -Saharan Africa represented 1% of the world Christian population and two thirds of Christians lived in Europe.”
In fact, Christians experienced substantial changes in more countries than any other religious group, reducing their proportion in the population in all countries except one: Mozambique, where the proportion of Christians increased by 5 percentage points.
The regional concentrations of Jews also changed, according to the report, with 45.9% living in the Middle East-Africa region of the North and 41% living in North America. In 2010, the greatest number of Jews lived in North America. The change was largely due to the growth of the population of Israel, which went from 5.8 million to 6.8 million through migration and the natural increase during the decade.
Few countries experienced substantial changes in the percentage of Muslims in their populations, according to the report, despite having the highest global population growth. This is because growth occurred in countries where Muslims were already the dominant religious group. The growth of the Islamic population was greatly attributed to the high fertility rates.
The Hindus were the fourth largest religious group in 2020, growing around 12% from 2010 to 2020, with the most notable growth in the Northern Middle East Region, where they increased to 3.2 million, 62% more. However, most Hindus are still in India, and religion remained stable in 14.9% of the world’s population during the decade.
Of all the religions represented in the report, the Buddhists were the only group that experienced a worldwide decrease between 2010 and 2020, with the number of Buddhists in the world decreasing 5%, from 343 million in 2010 to 324 million in 2020.
This was due to the religious disingerance among Buddhists in Eastern Asia and a relatively low birth rate among Buddhists, which tend to live in countries with more aging populations, the report explained.
Pew also examined the growth of people who adhere to “other religions”, including Bahaíes, Jainists, Shinto, Sikhs, Taoists, Wiccanos, Zoroastrianos and others. PEW estimated that the number of people belonging to this category increased by 12%, from 154 million to 172 million from 2010 to 2020. However, the world population grew approximately at the same rate, so the percentage of adherents to “other religions” remained stable around 2% of the world’s population.
Translated and adapted by the ACI Press team. Originally published in CNA.
Low Elhabbal
Madalaine Elhabbal is a CNA journalist based in the Washington DC office in EWTN. He has published articles in Catholicvote and has also worked as a foreign language assistant in France. She is a graduate of Benedictine College.