A new report released on Monday studying the religious makeup of the world, has found that the global Muslim population grew the fastest, in line with a rise in the world’s population from 2010-2020.
This comes despite the Christians (all denominations included) growing by 121.6 million to form 28.8 per cent of the world’s population, because the Muslim population was relatively the “fastest-growing”—rising to occupy 25.6 per cent of the world’s population.
The new report by the Pew Research Center, titled ‘How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020’, aggregates more than 2,700 sources of data, “including national censuses, large-scale demographic surveys, general population surveys and population registers”.
The report added that while the Hindu population remained more or less steady at 14.9 per cent, Buddhism has seen a serious decline by 0.8 percentage points, just behind Christianity, which dropped by 1.8 percentage points, and has the “highest ratios of people leaving to people joining – the largest net losses”, as per a separate Pew report.
Another intriguing aspect of the report was the sharp rise in the religiously unaffiliated, also called “nones”, who grew by 270 million, now occupying 24.2 per cent of the world’s population. The study labels them as “the only category aside from Muslims that grew as a percentage of the world’s population”.
The Jewish population and the Holocaust
The other two categories are the Jewish population as well as a combination of other religions in the world occupying 0.2 per cent and 2.2 per cent of the world’s population respectively.
According to Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola, nearly 80 years after the Holocaust (in 2020), the global Jewish population of 14.78 million had still not reached its pre-World War II level of roughly 16.6 million (in 1939), a Times of Israel article said.
He has also released post-2020 Israeli population figures, upto January 1, 2024, as per which the Jewish population had seen a general increase of about a 100,000 per year, coming up to 15.7 million.
“It will mark a historic moment,” he said, referring to when the Jewish population matches and/or overtakes pre-Holocaust levels. However, he has also pointed out that his classification of a “Jew” differed from that used by Pew.
Within the next decade, the demographer projects that half of the world’s Jewish population will reside in Israel.
