ISLAM IS THE FASTEST GROWING RELIGION IN THE WORLD: PEW RESEARCH

Wed 11 June 2025:

Muslims are the fastest-growing faith group, followed by the religiously unaffiliated, according to a new Pew Research Center study measuring the evolution of the global religious population between 2010 and 2020.

Christianity grew by 122 million members in that decade, but declined as an overall slice of the world’s population. Still, Christianity remains the world’s largest religion, with 2.3 billion believers — nearly 29% of the world’s population.

Pew’s Global Religious Landscape study, released on Monday (June 9), is the second edition of a demographic report of religious groups, started in 2010.

“We look at the demographic characteristics of these groups, their age structure, how many children they’re having, how much education they have, because these demographic characteristics affect the future size of the religious groups,” Conrad Hackett, a senior demographer at Pew Research Center, told RNS.

“Muslims are having children at a greater number than Muslims are dying,” Hackett said. “Very little of the change in Muslim population size is a result of people becoming Muslim as adults or leaving Islam as adults.”

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The Pew Research Center published the report after analyzing data from over 2,700 sources, including censuses, registrations, and surveys conducted over more than 10 years, as well as responses from participants in 201 countries regarding their religious affiliation.

According to the report, the global Muslim population share rose from 23.9% in 2010 to 25.6% in 2020, while the Christian population share declined from 30.6% to 28.8%. The report also noted that the decline in Christian population was most pronounced in Europe and the Americas.

Those leaving religion greatly impacted the proportion of the world’s Christian population. “Christians are seeing a lot of people who are raised in the faith changing as adults to people who don’t identify with any religion,” Hackett said.

The report states that Muslims are predominantly concentrated in regions such as Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and North Africa. It highlights that the Muslim population grew by 52.3% in North America, 33.8% in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 23.9% in the Middle East and North Africa.

Hindus, representing 14.9% of the world’s population, are the fourth largest group in the world. The majority of Hindus live in India (95%). And between 2010 and 2020, the number of Hindus increased by 62% in the Middle East-North Africa region, mostly due to migration. In North America, the Hindu population increased by 55%.

The world’s Jewish population, the smallest religious group analyzed in the report, grew by 6% between 2010 and 2020, from about 14 million to 15 million people. Jews represent 0.2% of the global population, which remained stagnant over 10 years, and 45.9% of Jews live in Israel — the highest percentage in any country.

In an earlier report published by Pew Research in 2017, Islam was identified as the fastest-growing religion in the world, with projections suggesting that by 2075, Islam could become the largest religion globally.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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