The Sunday Mail
BABIES born to Muslims will begin to outnumber Christian births by 2035 while people with no religion face a birth dearth.
According to the Pew Research Centre’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, more babies were born to Christian mothers than to members of any other religion in recent years, reflecting Christianity’s continued status as the world’s largest religious group.
But this is unlikely to be the case for much longer. Less than 20 years from now, the number of babies born to Muslims is expected to modestly exceed births to Christians, according to new Pew Research Centre demographic estimates.
Muslims are projected to be the world’s fastest-growing major religious group in the decades ahead, and signs of this rapid growth already are visible.
In the period between 2010 and 2015, births to Muslims made up an estimated 31 percent of all babies born around the world – far exceeding the Muslim share of people of all ages in 2015 (24 percent).
The world’s Christian population also has continued to grow, but more modestly.
In recent years, 33 percent of the world’s babies were born to Christians, which is slightly greater than the Christian share of the world’s population in 2015 (31 percent).
While the relatively young Christian population of a region like sub-Saharan Africa is projected to grow in the decades ahead, the same cannot be said for Christian populations everywhere.
Indeed, in recent years, Christians have had a disproportionately large share of the world’s deaths (37 percent) – in large part because of the relatively advanced age of Christian populations in some places.
This is especially true in Europe, where the number of deaths already is estimated to exceed the number of births among Christians..
Globally, the relatively young population and high fertility rates of Muslims lead to a projection that between 2030 and 2035, there will be slightly more babies born to Muslims (225 million) than to Christians (224 million), even though the total Christian population will still be larger.
By the 2055 to 2060 period, the birth gap between the two groups is expected to approach six million (232 million births among Muslims compared to 226 million births among Christians).
While religiously unaffiliated people currently make up 16 percent of the global population, only an estimated 10 percent of the world’s newborns between 2010 and 2015 were born to religiously unaffiliated mothers.
This dearth of newborns among the unaffiliated helps explain why religious ‘nones’ (including people who identity as atheist or agnostic, as well as those who have no particular religion) are projected to decline as a share of the world’s population in the coming decades.
By 2055 to 2060, just 9 percent of all babies will be born to religiously unaffiliated women, while more than seven-in-ten will be born to either Muslims (36 percent) or Christians (35 percent). — Source:pewforum.org.
