More and more countries lose their Christian majority
People pray in an empty church. Photo EPA, Ronald Wittek
Christian Life
The number of countries where most people identify themselves as Christians continues to drop. That is shown by a new report from the Pew Research Center.
The Research Center analysed a total of 201 countries, Christian Post reports. Of those, the population of 120 states is still predominantly Christian as of 2020. This is a clear decline in comparison to 2010, when this number was 124. In total, this comes down to a decrease of 2 per cent.
The four countries that lost their Christian majority over the past decade are the UK, France, Australia and Uruguay. In the UK and France, there is no religious group that dominates society anymore.
Faith
The Pew Research Center states that the decline is due to more and more people abandoning Christianity. Oftentimes, these people do not transfer to a different religion but start identifying themselves as religiously unaffiliated. This shows an ongoing trend of secularisation in the world. In the Netherlands and New Zealand the majority of the population says not to belong to a religion anymore.
According to the Pew Research Center, the growth of the number of secular people is remarkable, because usually, these people are relatively old and have a lower fertility rate than their religious counterparts. Their number grows mainly because religious people, especially Christians, lose their faith and abandon their religion.
As a result of the changes in religious affiliation between 2010 and 2010, Europe no longer has the largest Christian population as a continent. Sub-Saharan Africa harbours 30.7 per cent of the world's Christians, compared to 22.3 per cent in Europe. This is mainly because Africa has a higher fertility rate and because of the fast secularisation of Europe.
Islam
In total, the number of Christians worldwide saw an increase of 122 million between 2010 and 2020. In total, there are around 2.3 billion Christians worldwide. However, when considered as a share of the world's population, the statistics are more depressing. Christians made up 28.8 per cent of the world's population in 2020. That is 1.8 percentage points less than in 2010.
Islam, on the other hand, was the fastest growing religion between 2010 and 2020. The number of Muslims worldwide increased by 347 million. Their share of the world's population rose by 1.8 per cent to a total of 25.6 per cent.
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