The article here presents statistics from Pew Research.

Just according to pure numbers, Islam is the world's fastest growing religion. What accounts for that growth however isn't Islam's converting power, but rather the breeding rate of Muslim population coupled with the "death for apostasy" policy, which unnaturally keeps people who should leave in the Muslim faith. Check the table below:



The more important thing shown by this table is that apart from Islam and Christianity all the other religions will dwindle and see their share of the world's population and influence greatly reduced. By 2100, close to 70% of the world's population will be either Muslim or Christian, up from around 55% today.



Buddhism and atheism (the religiously unaffiliated) will both decline, largely, in both cases, due to failure to reproduce. It seems that the pessimism associated with both (although in different directions) leads to a significantly lowered natality rate. Natural selection will play in favour of the religious who are bringing more children onto the Earth, and will therefore also inherit it.

Atheism will convert more than any other religion, but to what use, its population will dwindle away. When hedonism and promiscuity reign supreme, children will not be brought into the world - and the price of extinction will be paid. Atheism's biggest gains will be in the Western world.

Buddhism on the other hand suffers both from lack of conversions - it literarily has no mechanism capable to bring millions upon millions of people to the religion - and low natality rates. This was somewhat surprising, I expected Buddhism to become more popular, but this is actually not the case. It is a dying religion.

Islam is expected to take over Christianity (just barely) by 2100 in terms of population.

The most interesting is this table, showing conversions and people leaving each religion:


This table seems to depict Christianity as the loser. In terms of purely conversions, Christianity nets a whopping loss of 66 million people in the next 40 years. Also in terms of pure conversions, Atheism is winning.

However - it must be noted that Christianity will be able to bring in more converts than all the other religions put together - close to 1 million new converts ever year (total of 40 million), compared to Islam + Folk Religions + Other Religions + Hindus + Jews + Buddhists which will bring in a combined total of only 25 million (approx. 625,000/year).

The Church has clearly set up a conversion mechanism like no other. And while Christianity is losing a whopping 2.5 million adherents every year, this is mostly due to losses in the West. Once Christianity manages to put an end to the Western leak, it will be on the path to dominate the next 500 years. And the leak will come to a close by itself. Atheists with their life denying philosophy - and it seems that their philosophy simply cannot be otherwise, for without the infinite hope of the afterlife, atheism has nothing much to offer - will not breed, and will willingly yield the earth over to those with infinite hope and faith. Not only this, but the Western world is currently rejoicing in relative material well-being - once the shit hits the fan, atheism, along with its permissiveness and licentiousness will come to an end.

So why do I think that the future belongs to Christianity, even though Islam is the fastest growing religion? Because Islam (1) doesn't have the conversion mechanism of Christianity (bringing in just 325K people vs 1000K for Christianity), (2) its severe punishments for apostasy artificially lower deconversions and it will not be possible to maintain this forever, (3) Islam does not have access to capital and resources as much as Christianity, (4) the fact that large portions of Islam exist in war-torn regions makes them more prone to be heavily impacted by pandemics, droughts, and other natural disasters, (5) other religions will dwindle, and maybe even disappear from the Earth in the next 600 years.

What do you think? What's the future of religions looking to be on the Earth? Which religions will be popular 100 years from now and why?