How fast is islam spreading

In most Muslim majority countries, religious switching has been found to be relatively low. Often, countries strictly following Islamic laws, subject their citizens to severe punishments for apostasy. In general, most Muslims who are born to Muslim parents, usually adhere to Islam and do not switch their religion.

On the contrary, the Christian population is expected to dwindle as a large section of born Christians are expected to become non-believers or identify with no religion in the decades to follow. These people also tend to produce fewer children.

Those folks tend to have fewer children than people who have a religious affiliation. And then we have this population of the rapidly growing rest of the world, places like Africa — where almost everyone continues to identify with a religion — and the number of people there is multiplying greatly. By , four out of 10 of the world's Christians will live in sub-Saharan Africa, according to our projections, for example.

There's a big geographic shift underway in terms of where the world's Christians live, and the population of people who are religious increasingly are living outside of Europe, North America. We project that by the year , there will be more Muslims than [Jews] or Hindus or Buddhists in the U.

Currently, about 1 percent of the U. However, that's not the whole story. The Pew Research Center combined studies they conducted in , and with yearly data from the US Census which does not track religious affiliation to put together a portrait of the future of Muslims in America. According to their data, the Muslim population is growing at an accelerated rate, and will more than double from an estimated 3.

In the meantime, Muslims are expected to surpass Jews as the second-largest religious group. One easy answer is immigration -- Pew's research showed a record number of Muslims immigrated to the US in Former intern Joseph Naylor helped design maps, and David McClendon, another former intern, helped research global patterns of religious switching.

Grim and visiting senior research fellow Mehtab Karim. Communications support was provided by Katherine Ritchey and Russ Oates. While the data collection and projection methodology were guided by our consultants and advisers, the Pew Research Center is solely responsible for the interpretation and reporting of the data.

The remainder of this report details the projections from multiple angles. The first chapter looks at the demographic factors that shape the projections, including sections on fertility rates, life expectancy, age structure, religious switching and migration.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.

It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Newsletters Donate My Account. Research Topics. If current trends continue, by … The number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world. The global Buddhist population will be about the same size it was in , while the Hindu and Jewish populations will be larger than they are today.

India will retain a Hindu majority but also will have the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, surpassing Indonesia. In the United States, Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in to two-thirds in , and Judaism will no longer be the largest non-Christian religion. Muslims will be more numerous in the U. Four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa. Beyond the Year This report describes how the global religious landscape would change if current demographic trends continue.

Changing Religious Majorities Several countries are projected to have a different religious majority in than they did in This overall projection 9. A recent update from the United Nations has a somewhat higher estimate, 9.

The U. The Pew Research Center consulted several scholars on this historical question. Todd M. Bulliet, say it is possible that Muslims may have outnumbered Christians globally sometime between and C. All of the experts acknowledged that estimates of the size of religious groups in the Middle Ages are fraught with uncertainty.

Because of the scarcity of census and survey data, Pew Research has not projected the size of individual religions within this category.

Estimates of the global size of these faiths generally come from other sources, such as the religious groups themselves. By far the largest of these groups is Sikhs, who numbered about 25 million in , according to the World Religion Database. Estimates from other sources on the size of additional groups in this category can be found in the sidebar in Chapter 2.

Jews comprised 0. Both figures are rounded to 0. In countries with low infant and child mortality rates, a Total Fertility Rate close to 2.

Replacement-level fertility is higher in countries with elevated mortality rates. For more information on how fertility shapes population growth, see Chapter 1. These projections model a dynamic migrant population in GCC countries, in which some migrants leave as others arrive and, over time, there are net gains in the size of the foreign-born population within each GCC country.

A Pew Research survey found that more than one-in-five U. For the purposes of the religious group projections in this report, people who identify their religion as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular are categorized as unaffiliated.