Last week, Pew Research released their annual survey of religious beliefs in the United
States, creating predictable headlines suggesting the death of Christianity.
The bigger picture, however, is a lot more favorable than the headlines imply.
Stay tuned to learn more.
In Pew Research's 2019 survey of religious beliefs, 65% of American adults identify as
Christian, down from 69% in 2015.
Some of the decline on a percentage basis could be due to demographic shifts, as opposed
to changed beliefs, but even on an absolute basis the number of Christians in the United
States has declined, from roughly 221 million in 2015 to 215 million people today.
Furthermore, the decline cuts across all demographics measured: age, race, ethnicity, and even political
views.
Although genuine belief is hard to measure, there's no question that nominal Christianity
among Americans has declined in recent years.
In the same time period, those identifying as atheist or agnostic has risen from 8% to
9%, and those claiming “nothing in particular” have risen from 16% to 17%.
This last group is quite diverse, ranging from those with strong religious beliefs,
but choose not to identify with any particular organized religion to those who are essentially
atheist.
As such is it inaccurate to lump them together with atheists and agnostics as Pew typical
does.
Still, it is clear that even generic religious belief has also declined from 2015 to 2019.
No other religion topped 2% in 2019 and Islam remained stagnant at 1% of the population.
As it typical does, the Pew survey generated bold headlines – either celebrating or lamenting
the decline of Christianity depending on one's bias.
Americans like think of themselves as the only people who matter, but in reality the
United States represents just over 4% of the world's population.
Released around the same time was the Gordon Conwell report on the Status of Global Christianity.
Although the report receives comparatively little attention, in reality it's far more
important.
Pew's data shows Christianity is declining about 0.89% per year recently in the United
States, but globally the Gordon Conwell data shows that Christianity is growing at 1.22%
a year.
That is substantially higher than the overall population growth rate of 0.99%.
There are now more than 2.5 billion Christians in the world, representing 32.8% of the world
population.
Islam is a distant second with 1.8 billion adherents and Hinduism is third with just
over a billion.
Agnosticism and Atheism combined account for 850 million people, or about 11.1% of the
world's population.
Of the world's top 11 belief systems, only Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism are growing
faster than the world population.
Atheism and agnosticism are actually on the decline losing 0.72 and 0.21 percent annually,
respectively.
Islam is currently growing slightly faster than Christianity, although the gap is shrinking
as birth rates are declining throughout the Islamic world.
Among Christians, Evangelical, Pentecostal and Charismatic, and Independent Christian
Churches are growing the most rapidly, all topping 2% a year, exceeding Islam's 1.7%
annual growth rate.
Based on current demographics and trends, Christianity will account for a third of the
world's population within the next 5 years and over 35% by 2050.
Islam is expected to rise from 24% of the world's population currently to just under
29% in 2050.
Non-belief, meanwhile, is expected to fall to 10% of the world's population by 2025 and
8.4% by 2050.
All these predictions, of course, make no attempt to forecast new trends which, no doubt,
will shake things up considerably.
Part of the decline of Christianity in the West is due to academic criticism of the Bible
filtering down to the public.
The Church was not prepared for this and so many people were caught off guard and lost
their faith.
All these criticisms now have good answers and Christianity has passed the test.
The same sort of criticism is just starting to be applied to Islam.
Academics are examining the Quran and traditional history and finding them quite lacking.
This information mostly has not filtered down to the public.
The vast majority of Muslims have never heard even a basic critique of Islam, but the rise
of the information age is changing that.
Muslims are hearing the truth on satellite television, the internet, and reading it for
themselves in Qurans translated into the vernacular.
Muslim scholars are seeing the early results of this and are highly concerned, speaking
of avalanches of apostasy looming on the horizon.
And if we don't take constructive steps to deal with this, it is going to become an avalanche
I fully expect Islam's growth to cease and both Christianity and non-belief to outperform
predictions as Muslims leave Islam for the truth found in Christianity or give up on
religion entirely due to their disillusionment with Islam.
Also encouraging is the rise of global missions.
Many of us tend to think of mission work as something primarily done in the distant past,
but in fact about 40% of all planned evangelization (as opposed to normal friend-to-friend outreach)
since the foundation of Christianity has taken place in the last 20 years.
Likewise, the number of people involved in missions in increasing faster the the Christian
population as a whole.
Even so, more than 28% of the world's population has never heard the Gospel and an astonishing
82% of non-Christians don't know a single Christian personally.
As such, there's a huge field of opportunity for present and future Christians to evangelize.
Christianity is indeed declining the in the United States, but despite American's opinions
of themselves, God is not concerned.
Globally, more and more people are being saved and the true Church is growing.
There's still much work to be done, of course, but the global future is bright.
God's Church cannot be stopped; not by government oppression; not by jihadis; and certainly
not by the rise of secularism in the spoiled West.
Thanks for watching.