I have seen statistics about the number of people who follow certain religions, but I am interested to know if there are statistics regarding the rate of growth and/or decline of religious belief. In other words which ‘belief’ is growing the fastest and which is declining the fastest?
Well, here’s a link to the 2001 Canadian census (chauvinistic and proud of it!), in which the “No Religion” category is up 43.9% from 1991, second in population only to Roman Catholicism. Not a lot compared to some of the others (see the non-denominational Christian category), but then again many of the growth rates in the other religions are probably due to immigration (see the Serbian Orthodox category). It was surprising at the time (cite), though.
But it obviously depends on where you live. Anyone motivated enough to google the latest American census?
The fastest growing religions are virtually always “cults”. It’s not because they’re doing better than the more traditonal religions overall but because they are starting from a much smaller baseline. If I decided to form the Church of the Straight Dope and converted one person my first year, it’s a 100% expansion! If we get a third member next year and a fourth the year after that, we’ll still be growing at a respectable 50% and 33%. The Christians and Muslims would have to get tens of millions of converts to get those kind of numbers.
I don’t believe that the American census counts religion. I do know that in a cover story about Mormonism a couple years back, Newsweek reported that of all major world religions, Mormonisms was the fastest growing in both the United States and the world.
The Glenmary Research Center is generally acknowledged to produce the most thorough religious census in the U.S. Unfortunately, I found no comparisons to 1990 (or any 1990 information) on their current web site. It might provide a place to start, however.
For $55, you can order the Atlas of Religious Change, 1952 - 1990 (fourth down) from them
Is it still? I heard that some others had surpassed Mormonism’s growth rate. Some variety of pentecostalism, maybe? I don’t remember specifically…
Also, I wonder how the speedily-growing religious groups factor retention into their membership statistics. If a person joins, but then drops out six months later, are they still counted on the records? Because I’ve heard that many of the religions with high rates of conversion have relatively low rates of retention. This page, in the middle of trying to encourage church members to get people to go to church, has a lot of information on the low retention rates for Mormonism specifically.
I seem to recall that Pentecostalism and Seventh-day Adventism have both surpassed the LDS Church, at least in certain areas of the world.
As someone who recently tested out as 100% Unitarian and 95% Neo-Pagan I’d like to hear more about this. I might just be that first convert. 