Just wondering, how is the RCC doing these years? Is it growing, remaining stable or decling? Any exact numbers or figures?
Catholicism is growing worldwide, but the yearly % increase isn’t as high as the overall global population growth and it’s not as high as the % increase of Christianity, either. Thus, the percentage of Christians in the world is dropping and the percentage of Catholics that are Christians is dropping as well.
The fastest growing group among Christians is the Charismatic movement, but that’s strictly based on its % increase. The overall numbers aren’t that impressive yet. Evangelical Christianity isn’t increasing at quite that pace, but it is growing faster than the world’s population and it presents the most viable long-term threat to Catholicism’s market share of Christianity.
Just over 50% of Christians in the world are Catholic. This figure includes non-practicing Catholics, those who were baptized Catholic but currently self-identify as something else, and anyone else who could possibly be called Catholic, however tenuous such an attribution may be. This percentage is dropping each year, and even though the Catholic Church continues to have a positive growth rate (around 1% each year), the growth rate of Christianity is higher (around 1.8%) and the world’s population growth is even higher (2.3%, if memory serves).
Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, and it outpaces that global growth rate by plenty. Looking to the future, Islam will probably overtake Christianity in raw numbers, but Catholicism will represent less than half of Christianity well before that happens. So you never know; maybe Christianity will grow faster when there’s a smaller percentage of Catholics. And since most of Islam’s growth is due to high birth rates rather than conversion, maybe growth at that rate will prove to be unsustainable in certain parts of the world.
The way I see it, athiests are growing in number. Technology seems to have an affect in religion in general.
Atheism is growing in Europe and America, along with a broader “no-religion” trend. Generally speaking, though, a population that’s 20 or 25% non-religious will only yield a 4 or 5%-sized segment that is relatively certain that there is no God, at least to the extent that they’d assent to the label of “atheist” and choose it from a list of options. Atheism generally isn’t counted all on its own- you’re usually going to be looking at a figure that represents a conglomeration of freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, non-religious humanists, and so forth. Less than a quarter of that group will actually self-identify as “atheists” who are relatively sure that there is no god, but it is rather commonplace for the group as a whole to be called the “atheist” group. As such…
Worldwide, atheism is growing in number, kind of like how Catholicism is technically “growing in number.” Thing is though, nearly every group of any kind is growing in number. The world’s population went up by, like, 2 billion in about 150 years. Groups of people that are actually shrinking in raw numbers are few and far between. As far as the percentage of atheists in the world, that is not growing worldwide. There’s certain parts of the world where the percentage has been slowly growing for quite some time and it will probably continue to grow in those places at about the same rate (America a little, western Europe more esp. in England, eastern Europe the most…have you seen Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania lately? Sweden, perhaps, or the Czech Republic?..), but overall, worldwide, the atheist percentage is shrinking very slightly or at best holding its own. There was significant growth during and after the World Wars, but it’s plateaued since then.
I hope that’s not the case. Also, is Islam the fastest growing religion?
Yes, without a doubt, Islam is the fastest growing religion. They aren’t very good at converting people, but they are pretty good at making sure people don’t convert away from it- especially if a country’s official state religion is Islam. This normally isn’t a great recipe for long-term success, but they’re also very good at making babies. So that’s where the growth is coming from.
I don’t know how long that growth can continue, though. Most of the countries that have Islam as the state religion also need to slow down population growth- it’s a pretty high priority for them. Look at Saudi Arabia, for example. For all the problems that people have to choose from, finding solutions to population growth is always at the top of the list of greatest concerns- and by a wide margin, too. And for some countries (clearly not Saudi, but some others), they appear to be on the verge of separating church and state just a bit, open up to the rest of the world, and make life a bit more free. It’ll be interesting to see how well the pace keeps up once that really starts happening.
Thing is, Muslim countries where Islam is the state religion are no different from Catholic countries where everyone is Catholic by virtue of being baptized that way. People there don’t necessarily practice either Islam or Catholicism (respectively), and it just varies from country to country. It’s hard to say how many of them would stick with their country’s religion (or how many of their kids would do so) if there were some meaningful choices. Perhaps Catholicism in Europe will give us a preview of what it’ll be like for its Islamic counterparts once they start going through a similar process. Matter of fact, keep an eye on Islam in Europe as well- Turkey especially, and perhaps Bulgaria to some extent. See how that continues to play out, and maybe we’ll all have something to learn from where North African and Persian and Arabian countries are concerned.
