Religions 1910-2010

The May/June issue of New World Outlook, the mission magazine of The United Methodist Church, had a fascinating brief article comparing religious affiliation around the world in 1910 and 2010. In that one hundred year period, the percentage of the world’s population that proclaims they are Christian has remained about the same 34.8% in 1910 compared to 33.2% in 2010. I know from other sources that there has been a shift in where Christians are to be found, but the relative number of Christians has remained about the same. Islam, on the other hand, has grown tremendously as a percentage of the world’s population in the past one hundred years, from 12.6% in 1910 to 22.4% in 2010. I know some people who seem to equate numerical growth with what God is “blessing” in the world. By that thinking, Islam would seem to be the religion God is blessing most. To my mind, such thinking represents neither good theology nor good sociology. As a pastor, I pay attention to numbers. They matter, but I also know that the factors that influence one’s religious journey are complex. We need a more complex theology, sociology and psychology to dig more deeply into why people become religious adherents and stay or leave their respective religion. What seems even more ironic, for those who might claim in some simple way that numbers represent what God is blessing, by sheer exponential mathematics, the group that has grown the most is agnostics. Just .2% of the population in 1910, they are now 9.3% of the population – 46.5 times as many agnostics in 2010 as in 1910!
But those numbers are not what grabbed my attention most. Notice from the above figures that between Christianity (33.2%) and Islam (22.4%), over half of human kind considers itself either Christian or Muslim. So why is our world such a mess? Why so much war, such deep injustice? Why so many hungry and homeless? Some Christians may say that we are only a third of the population, and if only we grew the world would be better. Some Muslims might say something similar about Islam. Rather than compete with each other, though, might we do better to find those parts of our respective traditions which encourage mutual respect (even while offering witness to our own faith), which enjoin us to build a better world with whomever might join us on this journey? If we fail to do this, we may find the number of agnostics growing even more in the next one hundred years.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David