In certain to be unwelcome news to right-wing extremists throughout the Western world, Pew Research Center reports that “Babies born to Muslims will begin to outnumber Christian births by 2035.”
Pew adds that “Muslims are projected to be the world’s fastest-growing major religious group in the decades ahead…and signs of this rapid growth already are visible.”
And By 2060, “the global count of Muslims (3.0 billion) will near the Christian count (3.1 billion).” As of 2015, there were 2.3 billion Christians and 1.8 billion Muslims in the world.
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Think about the white nationalist reaction to immigration, especially from the Islamic world, with Trump’s hysteria over Syrian refugees being a case in point. Now add a Christian birthrate that isn’t keeping pace with that of Muslim countries. That equates to a lot of hair-pulling (not to mention nonsensical tweets).
Pew Research explains that “In Europe, deaths outnumbered births among Christians between 2010 and 2015 in 24 of 42 countries”:
While the relatively young Christian population of a region like sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow in the decades ahead, the same cannot be said for Christian populations everywhere. Indeed, in recent years, Christians have had a disproportionately large share of the world’s deaths (37%) – in large part because of the relatively advanced age of Christian populations in some places. This is especially true in Europe, where the number of deaths already is estimated to exceed the number of births among Christians. In Germany alone, for example, there were an estimated 1.4 million more Christian deaths than births between 2010 and 2015, a pattern that is expected to continue across much of Europe in the decades ahead.
The conclusion of this demographic study is that “By the 2055 to 2060 period, the birth gap between the two groups is expected to approach 6 million (232 million births among Muslims vs. 226 million births among Christians).”
As Pew’s Senior Demographer & Associate Director Conrad Hackett tells us,
Most religious population change between 2010 & 2015 came from natural increase rather than religious switchinghttps://t.co/N0BlBrpgEY pic.twitter.com/9CTZfolK7g
— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) April 5, 2017
You can see here that some people convert to Islam, by and large, people are not converting to Christianity:
It would appear that most of those Christians who are leaving their faith seem to be joining the unaffiliated, a group Pew sees as having problems of their own. Based on numbers of births, nones “are projected to decline as a share of the world’s population in the coming decades.”
Things look better for nones in the West, however. After all, while religious apostasy is illegal in many African and Middle Eastern countries, it is not in Europe or the Americas (excepting Guyana and Suriname) and Pew tells us “In many Europeans countries, births among the religiously-unaffiliated exceeded deaths.”
Pew Research Center observed in March that “64% of Americans say growing diversity in the U.S. makes country a better place to live,” and that’s a good thing, because despite all the efforts of Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and white supremacists, the world – and the United States – will become more diverse in the coming years.
Enemies of multiculturalism, globalism and self-styled defenders of Western civilization will continue to gnash their teeth and flail helplessly (and ineptly, if you’re Donald Trump) at facts, but they can’t wish reality away.
The world is a different place than conservatives wish it to be, and those differences are only going to become more pronounced.
Photo: Islam Beyond Borders
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
