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Research

Key Findings From the Global Religious Futures Project

Pew Research Center, Washington DC

Research Summary

The Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, on contemporary global trends in religion, investigates religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Since 2006, it has included:

  • Surveys in more than 95 countries asking nearly 200,000 people about their religious identities, beliefs and practices.
  • Demographic studies using censuses and other data sources to estimate the size of religious groups, project how fast they are growing or shrinking, and analyze mechanisms of religious change.
  • Annual tracking of restrictions on religion in 198 countries and territories.

This is a report of its December 2022 bulletin.

Researchers

Pew Research Center, Washington DC

Research Institution

Pew Research Center, Washington DC

What is this about?

This is about large-scale trends across the world in religious identities, beliefs and practices; the size of religious groups, their rates of growth or shrinkage, and the drivers of changes in the global religious picture; and also figures concerned with restrictions on religion in different countries and territories.

What was done?

Global Religious Futures generates and uses a very large quantitative data set in order to establish its findings: surveys, analysis of censuses and tracking of policy across different countries. The December 2022 bulletin presents a set of headline findings and also incorporates links to related outputs where themes are covered in more detail.

Main findings and outputs

  • People are becoming less religious in the US and many other countries (in 2021, 29% of US citizens were religiously unaffiliated, compared to 16% in 2007). At the same time, Western Europeans are generally less religious than Americans.
  • Population growth is faster in highly religious countries. In Africa and the Middle East, for example, the average woman has more children than in Europe, North America or East Asia – and much larger shares of the population, both young and old, in these parts of the world say religion is very important to them (e.g. 98% in Ethiopia compared to 10% in the UK).
  • The vast majority of the world’s population is projected to have a religion, including about six-in-ten who will be either Christian (31%) or Muslim (30%) in 2050. 13% are projected to have no religion. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the fastest population growth. Its high birth rates are a major contributor to the increasing size of the world’s Christian and Muslim populations.
  • Is religion gaining or losing influence? It depends: in most countries surveyed, more people said the role of religion had decreased than said it had increased. But there were plenty of exceptions, including such countries as Indonesia, Kenya, Brazil and Israel, where the balance of public opinion was that religion’s role had increased.
  • Overall, government restrictions on religion have been rising globally. As of 2020, 57 countries now have “very high” levels of government restrictions on religion, up from 40 in 2007.

These are some examples of significant key findings, and readers are encouraged to access and use the full bulletin, freely accessible from the link below.

Relevance to RE

The bulletin provides excellent background material for policy and curriculum.  Its report of increased global restriction on religion whilst the religious population of the world continues to grow, for example, underlines the importance of freedom of religion and belief, an education in religion and worldviews and the alignment of such education with democratic social values in the UK. The individual data offer valuable resources for classroom teaching, when a social science approach to religion and worldviews is being used.

Generalisability and potential limitations

The generalisability of the data is high; reliable, broad and produced by expert researchers. The key focus is on the US, but the international comparisons mean that this is not done in an isolated way. There is also a series of links embedded in the bulletin through which headline findings can be explored in more detail.

Find out more

The full text of the bulletin can be accessed at https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/12/21/key-findings-from-the-global-religious-futures-project/

 

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