{"id":13286,"date":"2025-06-12T12:09:50","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T16:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/?p=13286"},"modified":"2025-06-12T12:09:50","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T16:09:50","slug":"christianity-has-fallen-behind-islam-as-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2025\/06\/christianity-has-fallen-behind-islam-as-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religion.html","title":{"rendered":"Christianity Has Fallen Behind Islam as the World\u2019s Fastest Growing Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_13289\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-13289\" style=\"width: 1200px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13289\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/409\/2025\/06\/Christianity_credit-Adobe-Stock.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-13289\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Adobe Stock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>A recent Pew Research Center <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pewresearch.org\/short-reads\/2025\/06\/10\/islam-was-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religion-from-2010-to-2020\/\">study<\/a> has found that Islam is now the world\u2019s fastest growing religion, surpassing Christianity. While Christianity remains the globe\u2019s largest religious group at 2.3 billion, Islam grew from 2010 to 2020 at a rate of 4 times greater than Christianity. During that decade, the number of Christians worldwide grew by 122 million, while Islam grew by 347 million people, bringing its worldwide total to 2 billion people. In fact, Muslims added more believers during that time period than all other non-Muslim religious groups combined.<\/p>\n<p>One factor that impacted the number of Christians worldwide was the rate of disaffiliation. According to Pew, those who are \u201creligiously unaffiliated\u201d received the most growth from \u201creligious switching,\u201d i.e. changing from one religion to another or leaving religion altogether. According to Pew\u2019s analysis, for every 5.5 people that joined the Christian faith, 17.1 left, making a net loss of 11.6. Meanwhile, the number of Muslims grew twice as fast as the rest of the world\u2019s population.<\/p>\n<p>Kazakhstan experienced the highest rate of growth amongst Muslims, expanding by 8 points. The study did note that Kazakhstan is a \u201cMuslim-majority country that tightly restricts religious activity.\u201d Christianity had the greatest decrease in Australia, down 20 points, with Christianity also declining in Canada and the US by 14 points. The only country with significant growth in Christianity was Mozambique, which has grown by 5 points. One third of the world\u2019s Christians reside now in sub-Saharan Africa, making Africa the continent with the largest share of Christians.<\/p>\n<p>Conrad Hackett, a senior demographer at Pew Research Center, described the study\u2019s methodology to <em>Religion News Service<\/em>. \u201cWe look at the demographic characteristics of these groups, their age structure, how many children they\u2019re having, how much education they have, because these demographic characteristics affect the future size of the religious groups,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sltrib.com\/religion\/2025\/06\/10\/islam-is-fastest-growing-faith\/\">he said<\/a>. \u201cMuslims are having children at a greater number than Muslims are dying. Very little of the change in Muslim population size is a result of people becoming Muslim as adults or leaving Islam as adults,\u201d he added. According to Hackett, for every one young adult who becomes a Christian, three more who were raised in the faith leave. While noting that in some countries like China, people may be religiously affiliated without admitting it, Hackett stated he believed the study showed a broader worldwide trend away from faith. \u201cSometimes we hear rumors of religious revival, and it\u2019s certainly possible that in particular places religion could grow,\u201d he admitted. \u201cBut in this careful 10-year study that we\u2019ve done, the broad trend is that in many places people are moving away from religion.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A recent Pew Research Center study has found that Islam is now the world\u2019s fastest growing religion, surpassing Christianity. While Christianity remains the globe\u2019s largest religious group at 2.3 billion, Islam grew from 2010 to 2020 at a rate of 4 times greater than Christianity. During that decade, the number of Christians worldwide grew by&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":516,"featured_media":13289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Christianity Has Fallen Behind Islam as the World\u2019s Fastest Growing Religion<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Islam is now the world\u2019s fastest-growing religion, outpacing Christianity 4 to 1 in the past decade, according to Pew Research Center.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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