Sub-Saharan Africa has replaced Europe as the focus for the world’s Christians, due to both higher birthrates and Western Europe’s “widespread Christian disaffiliation”—with Christians declining as a share of the world’s population due to adherents leaving the faith, according to new research by the Pew Research Centre.
Christians, tallied across denominations, remain the world’s largest religious group—a majority in all regions except the Asia-Pacific, Middle East and North Africa areas—but “they are shrinking as a share of the global population, as large numbers of Christians around the world ‘switch’ out of religion to become religiously unaffiliated,” said Pew in its new report, “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed from 2010 to 2020,” released on 9 June.
The data—drawn from more than 2,700 sources, including national censuses, large-scale demographic and population surveys as well as population registers—represents 201 countries and territories with populations of at least 100,000.
While the total number of Christians in the world increased from 2.1 billion to 2.3 billion during the decade from 2010-2020, the total population of non-Christians concurrently grew by 15 per cent to 5.6 billion.
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