We are already 8 billion on the planet, says the UN. And not only is God still on the rise, he will be more popular than ever as we approach 10 billion humans, something predicted for just over 30 years.
The question is, which God is that? Contrary to past predictions, which spoke of mass secularization, the world tends to become even more religious, according to projections from the Pew Research Center, an American organization that addresses issues of faith in its research. It will also become more Muslim.
The belief with the most affiliates will still be Christian, but Islam will grow faster than any of the major global religions. By 2050, the Muslim bloc will only be residually smaller than the Christian bloc — if you round up the statistic, both will have 3 out of 10 people living on Earth.
Another consequence of this religious traffic will be the shrinking of a group that, until recently, symbolizes the weakening of this framework of faith, which is precisely that of those who do not declare any particular belief.
Key word to understand this dynamic: demography. Pew Associate Director Conrad Hackett estimates that Koran followers will grow from 1.8 billion in 2015 to nearly 3 billion by 2060, expanding twice as fast as the general population average. “The main reason for this trend is demographic dynamics: Muslims have younger populations and more children per woman than any other major religious group,” he explains.
It is the opposite of what happens in many of the richest countries. “A growing share of people who were raised in a religion are voluntarily moving away from it,” says Hackett. “However, fewer children are born to these women, limiting the global growth of the non-religious population.”
The high fecundity of women religious will guarantee the high circulation of the faith in poorer nations. Stratum dilation that does not identify with a specific belief will be slowed by slow population expansion, or even shrinkage in some cases.
This niche is quite plural – it includes atheists, agnostics (those who do not think there are enough elements to demonstrate neither that God exists nor that he does not exist) and types that do not necessarily rule out the prevalence of a superior force, but do not systematize it in a religion.
Projections indicate that the non-religious will decrease in the global percentage, but will increase in places like the United States and France, where the fertility rate just doesn’t slow down anymore because of the migratory flow. In three decades, 10% of Europe is expected to be Muslim, for example.
In the US, Christians, who now make up three-quarters of the population, are expected to drop to two-thirds by 2050. Judaism will no longer be the largest non-Christian religion in the world’s richest nation—if the US is going to hold that post until then, it’s another five hundred. Muslims are expected to take this post.
As Pew does not analyze religious subgroups in this survey, it does not distinguish between different Christian matrices. But the Catholic dehydration towards evangelicalism is a strong phenomenon especially in Latin America, with echoes in Africa as well.
The conversionist appetite makes the Pentecostals, the most branch of the evangelical segment, lead the religious growth rates in the region. This is what happens in Brazil, where Catholicism reigned almost sovereign until the 1980s, when nine out of ten Brazilians recognized themselves in it, but began to lose ground to heirs of the Protestant Reformation and also to people without religious affiliation. Today they are half the population, in a bleeding that should last a few more years until it is stopped.
There is no accurate statistic here, especially because there are many outdated census movements, which is the case in Brazil itself. But believers make up at least 20% of the region, according to Peruvian sociologist José LuÃs Pérez Guadalupe, who researches the rise of evangelicalism in South and Central America. In countries like Guatemala and Honduras, double that. Here, they should reach close to 40% in the next decade.
This population expansion does not even need to displace Catholics to produce chain effects, says Guadalupe. “It’s not just the percentage, but the militancy. The issue is how much of this religious portion is committed, engaged. The vast majority of evangelicals in Latin America are committed to their faith, and Catholics are not. That’s what makes the difference .” How many non-practicing evangelicals are there out there? Well, much less than the contingent adept of Catholicism.
More than the numerical rise of Christians, “what we live is public visibility”, says Guatemalan Brenda Carranza, coordinator of Unicamp’s Laboratory of Anthropology of Religion. Pastors have articulated over the last 30 years to put theirs in the Legislative, Judiciary and Executive.
Here it is necessary to remember Dominion Theology, says Carranza. “It will allow the Christian right, in the 1970s, to take its place in the Republican Party. [nos EUA]. It is extremely conservative, with fundamentalist traits, and it plants the idea that there is a spiritual war in which the devil radically contaminates politics, and it has to be rescued in the name of God.”
This premise that evangelicals have a moral duty to restore Christian values ​​to the planet has contaminated the religious wing of Bolsonarism. It is wide open when First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro says that the Planalto Palace was consecrated to demons before her husband’s arrival and now belongs “to the Lord Jesus”.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
