Growth of religion

Many different religions currently or previously have claimed to be the fastest growing religion. The world's largest religions that are showing increases that outrun birth-rate include Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. There is often little coverage of the "unaffiliated" category (which includes deists, agnostics, atheists, and theists) although some evidence suggests they are growing rapidly; see non-religious, below. "The" fastest growing religion depends on the definition (below), such as absolute number vs. percentage, conversions only or also births, etc., how broadly a religion is defined (e.g., Christianity as a whole, or a particular denomination), and the period and region in question.

Definition

Religions can grow in numbers because of conversion or because of higher birth rates in a religious group or both. Measures counting absolute numbers tend to favour the larger religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism for example which have at least 800 million followers and more). Measures counting percentage growth tend to favour smaller ones such as Wicca, Falun Gong and other minority religions.

The fastest growing religion could refer to:

• The religion whose absolute number of adherents is growing the fastest.
• The religion that is growing fastest in terms of percentage growth per year.
• The religion that is gaining the greatest number of converts in the world.

Data collection

Statistics on religious adherence are difficult to gather and often contradictory; statistics for the change of religious adherence are even more so, requiring multiple surveys separated by many years using the same data gathering rules. This has only been achieved in rare cases, and then only for a particular country, such as the American Religious Identification Survey in the USA, or census data from Australia (which has included a voluntary religious question since 1911).

Statistics

Buddhism

Buddhism is being recognized as the fastest growing religion in Western societies both in terms of new converts and more so in terms of friends of Buddhism, who seek to study and practice various aspects of Buddhism. As in the United States, Buddhism is ranked among the fastest growing religions in many Western European countries.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics through statistical analysis held Buddhism to be the fastest growing spiritual tradition/religion in Australia in terms of percentage gain with a growth of 79.1% for the period 1996 to 2001 (200,000→358,000). However, because Australia is statistically small, no inferences can be drawn from that for the whole world.

Buddhism is the fastest-growing religion in England's jails, with the number of followers rising eightfold over the past decade.

Christianity

According to a 2005 paper submitted to a meeting of the American Political Science Association, most of this growth has occurred in non-Western countries, such as Latin America and Africa, and concludes the Pentecostalism movement is the fastest growing religion worldwide.

Evangelical Christianity is the fastest growing religion in Brazil.

Evangelical Christianity is the fastest growing religion in France.

In Vietnam, the US Department of State estimates that Protestants in Vietnam may have grown 600% over the last decade. In Nigeria, the numbers of Christians has grown from 21.4% in 1953 to 48.2% in 2003. In South Africa, Pentecostalism has grown from 0.2% in 1951 to 7.6% in 2001. In South Korea, Christianity has grown from 20.7% in 1985 to 29.2% in 2005 according to the Pew Forum.

Mormonism

The records of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints show membership growth every decade since its beginning in the 1830s. Following initial growth rates that averaged 10% to 25% per year in the 1830s through 1850s, it grew at about 4% per year through the last four decades of the 19th century. After a steady slowing of growth in the first four decades of the 20th century to a rate of about 2% per year in the 1930s (the Great Depression years), growth boomed to an average of 6% per year for the decade around 1960, staying around 4% to 5% through 1990. After 1990, average annual growth again slowed steadily to a rate around 2.5% for the first decade of the 21st century, still double the world population growth rate of 1.2% for the same period. Rodney Stark predicts that it could become a major world religion by the end of the 21st century if the current growth trend of between 30% and 50% per decade continues. Currently its growth rate, not internationally but in the United States, is at 1.6%, about the rate of the growth of the rest of the U.S. population., which is still the largest growth of the top ten largest Christian denominations, with many other churches having negative growth.

Deism

The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) survey, which involved 50,000 participants, reported that the number of participants in the survey identifying themselves as deists grew at the rate of 717% between 1990 and 2001. If this were generalized to the US population as a whole, it would make deism the fastest-growing religious classification in the US for that period, with the reported total of 49,000 self-identified adherents representing about 0.02% of the US population at the time.

Hinduism

Some 80% of the population of the Republic of India are Hindus, accounting for about 90% of Hindus worldwide. Their 10-year growth rate is estimated at 20% (based on the period 1991 to 2001), corresponding to a yearly growth close to 2% or a doubling time of about 38 years. However, the percentage of Hindus in the population of India has decreased by 3 percentage points since 1961, dropping from 83.5% in 1961 to 80.5% in 2001.

Islam

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion by number of conversions each year: "Although the religion began in Arabia, by 2002 80% of all believers in Islam lived outside the Arab world. In the period 1990-2000, approximately 12.5 million more people converted to Islam than to Christianity". Part of the books quote can be seen online from this extract from Google Books. This was again shown in the 2005, 50th anniversary edition of Guinness Book of World Records, although the number of conversions was not mentioned this time.

In 1990, 935 million people were Muslims and this figure had risen to around 1.2 billion by the year 2000, meaning that around this time one in five people were followers of Islam. According to the BBC, a comprehensive American study concluded in 2009 the number stood at 1 in 4 with 60% of Muslims spread all over the Asian continent: "A report from an American think-tank has estimated 1.57 billion Muslims populate the world - with 60% in Asia". The report was done by the Pew Forum Research Centre. The forum also projected that in 2010 out of the total number of Muslims in the world 62.1% will live in Asia.

However the report also included a statement saying "While the global Muslim population is expected to grow at a faster rate than the non-Muslim population, the Muslim population nevertheless is expected to grow at a slower pace in the next two decades than it did in the previous two decades. From 1990 to 2010, the global Muslim population increased at an average annual rate of 2.2%, compared with the projected rate of 1.5% for the period from 2010 to 2030". The report also made reference to the fact that Muslims are estimated to make up 23.4% of the total global population in 2010 (out of a total of 6.9 billion people) and that by 2030 Muslims will represent about 26.4% of the global population (out of a total of 7.9 billion people). The Pew report also highlights that there is insufficient data available on religious conversion from its own findings given the complexities of identity and the difficulties of obtaining data: "Statistical data on conversion to and from Islam are scarce. What little information is available suggests that there is no substantial net gain or loss in the number of Muslims through conversion globally..."

Non-religious

Main article: Demographics of atheism

Irreligion, variously defined, appears to be increasing (along with secularization generally), particularly in some Western countries, and is increasing in absolute numbers with overall population growth, but is decreasing as a percentage of global population, due primarily to population increases in more religious, poorer nations outpacing population growth (or decline) in less religious, economically developed nations – see Demographics of atheism#Geographic distribution.

The American Religious Identification Survey gave non-religious groups the largest gain in terms of absolute numbers - 14,300,000 (8.4% of the population) to 29,400,000 (14.1% of the population) for the period 1990 to 2001 in the USA. Reuters describes how a study profiling the "No religion" demographic found that the so-called "Nones", at least in the U.S., are the fastest growing religious affiliation category. The "Nones" comprise 33% agnostics, 33% theists, and 10% atheists.

A similar pattern has been found in other countries such as Australia, Canada and Mexico. According to statistics in Canada, the number of "Nones" more than doubled (an increase of about 60%) between 1985 and 2004. In Australia, census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics give "no religion" the largest gains in absolute numbers over the 15 years from 1991 to 2006, from 2,948,888 (18.2% of the population that answered the question) to 3,706,555 (21.0% of the population that answered the question). According to INEGI, in Mexico, the number of atheists grows annually by 5.2%, while the number of Catholics grows by 1.7%.

Wicca

The American Religious Identification Survey gives Wicca an average annual growth of 143% for the period 1990 to 2001 (from 8,000 to 134,000 - U.S. data / similar for Canada & Australia). According to The Statesman Anne Elizabeth Wynn claims "The two most recent American Religious Identification Surveys declare Wicca, one form of paganism, as the fastest growing spiritual identification in America". The "Free Press Release Distribution Service" claims Wicca is one of the fastest growing religions in the United States as well.Wicca which is largely a Pagan religion is primarily attracting the followers of nature based religions in the Southern United States which is contributing towards its growth.

See also

• Trends in adherence
• Major religious groups

External links

• FAQ from Adherents.com describing why it is difficult to measure the fastest growing religion
• Religious Projections for the Next 200 Years from World Network of Religious Futurists