Q&A: How we projected the future of world religions
Demographer Conrad Hackett explains how he and his team put together our major new report and why it differs from past efforts to predict religious change.
Hindus were the largest religious group in the Asia-Pacific region as of 2010, with about 1 billion adherents. While the number of Hindus is expected to grow to nearly 1.4 billion by 2050, Muslims are projected to grow even faster and become the largest religious group in the region by mid-century. The Muslim population in […]
The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the share of Americans who do not identify with any organized religion is growing. These changes affect all regions in the country and many demographic groups.
The world’s Christian population is expected to grow from 2.2 billion in 2010 to 2.9 billion in 2050.[1. numoffset=”39″ For more information on Christianity and different Christian traditions, see “Defining the Religious Groups.” See also the Pew Research Center’s December 2011 report “Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Christian […]
Christians remain by far the largest religious group in the United States, but the Christian share of the population has declined markedly. In the past seven years, the percentage of adults who describe themselves as Christians has dropped from 78.4% to 70.6%. Once an overwhelmingly Protestant nation, the U.S. no longer has a Protestant majority. […]
Like the 2007 Religious Landscape Study, the new survey shows a remarkable degree of churn in the U.S. religious landscape. If Protestantism is treated as a single religious group, then fully 34% of American adults currently have a religious identity different from the one in which they were raised, which is up six percentage points […]
This appendix details the methods used in this study to project changes in the population size and geographic distribution of eight major religious groups from 2010 to 2050. It is organized in five sections. The first section explains how the baseline (2010) religious composition estimates were derived. The second section describes how key input data […]