Growth In Religion

Pew Research just completed an extremely interesting analysis of the growth and projections for different world religions.  It is fascinating reading, and a great recap is provided by the following:

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A couple of things that stand out:

• In the next 35 years, while Christians grow by shy of a billion people, Christianity is no longer the dominant religion as...
• Islam nearly doubles during the same period
• All other groups during the same period shrink as a percent of the overall population
• In an interesting estimate, atheists and "unaffiliated" - a group seeming growing by leaps and bounds as our society becomes more secular - actually shrinks as a percent of the total. 

Note that Unaffiliated are fairly flat throughout the world in this period, but not in the US:

Here we see a massive defection from Christianity to Unaffiliated.  It will be interesting to see how this manifests itself in our society.