Outlook bad for atheism, not good for Christianity

Tuesday, April 14th, 2015

Religion, as certain members of the media never fail to remind us at this time of year, seems to be on the decline, and for disgruntled secularists, the end cannot come quickly enough.

But the death of God, at least in the hearts of most human beings, is a Western illusion.

New demographic projections suggest that it’s non-believers who are more likely to languish while the religious inherit the earth.

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Demographic Research just before Easter, Conrad Hackett, of the Pew Research Centre, and others acknowledge that the number of people who say they are atheists or agnostics or “nothing in particular” is growing in regions such as North America and Europe.

But they say the assumption that the whole world will go the same way ignores the impact of demographics. Putting it bluntly, religious people have more kids.

For a start, religious women are younger – by six years at median age (28 vs 34).

For the period 2010 and 2015 their average fertility (total fertility rate or TFR) is 2.59 children per woman, compared with 1.65 children per woman among the religiously unaffiliated, which is “nearly a full child less”.

High fertility (“more than two”) also lends momentum to population growth.

On this basis, and taking into account different religions, the age structure of populations and patterns of religious switching (disaffiliation or the reverse) the researchers project the size of the religious and non-religious population of the world in 2050.

They find that although the number of non-religious people will continue to increase, that growth will be outpaced by faster overall population growth driven disproportionately by religious women. In their main scenario, the researchers foresee a decline of the religiously unaffiliated share of the population from 16.4 percent in 2010 to 13.2 percent in 2050. Even in a scenario weighted in favour of disaffiliation, this share would be smaller than now at 14.3 percent. Continue reading

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