Politics Christianity remains the largest religion in the world
Christianity remains the largest religion in the world, but Islam is growing and the number of non-believers is increasing. This is according to a study by the Pew Research Center on the development of religions between 2010 and 2020.
16.06.2025, 23:19
SDA
With 2.3 billion people (+122 million), Christians remain the largest religious group in the world, making up 28.8 percent of the population, according to the meta-analysis, which was compiled on the basis of more than 2,700 studies and censuses and recently published.
However, Christianity has not been able to keep pace with the world population and its weight has decreased by 1.8 percentage points.
Islam, the world's second largest religion with 2 billion people (+347 million), recorded the fastest growth of the decade and accounts for 25.6 percent of the world's population (+1.8 points).
Non-religious on the rise
The number of non-believers is also growing (1.9 billion people), which corresponds to almost a quarter (24.2 percent) of the world's population.
In the USA , where Christianity declined by 14 percentage points between 2010 and 2020, the number of non-believers has almost doubled to 101 million people: 30 percent of the population describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or "nothing in particular".
In the Netherlands, Uruguay and New Zealand, the religiously unaffiliated also make up more than half of the population.
In 2020, the world also counted 1.2 billion Hindus, 300,000 Buddhists and 14.8 million Jews.
Geographically speaking, the region with the most Christians (30.7 percent) is now sub-Saharan Africa and no longer Europe (22.3 percent). The study explains this trend with demographics and the widespread turning away from Christianity in Western Europe.
Alienation and birth rate
The study cites two main mechanisms: religious alienation, which is the main driving force behind the decline in the proportion of Christians in the global population, and population growth.
According to the study, the increase in Islam is largely due to the general population growth in Muslim countries, which is caused by a relatively young age pyramid and a relatively high birth rate.
The study also notes that people in richer countries are, on average, less religious than people in less developed economies.
