Religion

WHAT'S NEXT?: Huge growth is expected over the next several decades as the world's Muslim population grows faster than every other major religious demographic, and as urbanization and rising incomes in developing countries with large Muslim populations mean more will be buying, rather than producing their own food.

• The global Muslim population is expected to grow at a faster rate than the Christian population due primarily to the young age and high fertility rate of Muslims.
• The fastest growing religion worldwide is Islam, and Christianity will remain the most followed religion for the next several decades.
• Christianity's historical stance against gay sex may now mean that Christian churches will come to be considered hate groups in America.
• Facebook just emailed advertisers to inform them that ads targeted by politics, religion, ethnicity or social issues will have to be manually approved before they are sold and distributed.
• Koreans had better pray for world peace after building more Buddhist temples and Christian churches because it will become a strategic target of China and Russia.
• In 2017, Pew predicted, that sub-Saharan Africa would be the primary focal point for Christianity in 2050, in terms of numbers of believers.
• The American Civil Liberties Union, among others, has filed lawsuits against the US government alleging CVE/TP initiatives pose risks to the freedoms of speech and religion and are discriminatory against American Muslim communities.
• While China is currently the global center of atheism, Christianity is spreading there so quickly that China could have the largest Christian population in the world by 2025 and could be a majority-Christian country by 2050.
• Earlier this year, Pope Francis warned that if the Catholic Church did not acknowledge its history of male domination and sexual abuse it risked becoming a museum.
• In the year 2070 Islam is expected to level out with Christianity, and will comprise 10% of Europe's population.
• The results of two years of packing federal courts with conservative judges will show how the scope of politicized religion in the U.S. is expanding.
• Christian groups have joined alongside Mukwege's crusade against sexual and gender-based violence in the DRC, where violence has threatened the population for decades.
• Buddhism, whose adherents make up only 7 per cent of the global faithful, is the only major religion whose population is not expected to grow in absolute numbers over the next few decades.
• Political Islam remained a dominant factor in the global conflict patterns in 2018, as has been the case for the last decade and will likely be the case for the next year.
• While the birth rate for Muslims in Europe is expected to decline over the next two decades, it will remain slightly higher than in the non-Muslim population, except for Dutch - Turks, who have a lower birthrate than the native Dutch population.
• If the current trends continue then, Islam is estimated to be 30% of the world's population by 2030: The growth in the Muslim population will boost the demand for Halal foods rapidly.
• Analysts at the United Nations warned that the Supreme Court ruling signaled a dark future for religious freedom in Russia.
• Indonesia, whose Muslim population put it in first place on the 2015 list measuring Islam, is projected to fall behind India by 2060, although Muslims are a religious minority among Indians.
• Add in simmering strains between Russia and the Ukraine, sanctions on Iran and a US president perhaps under siege at home, not to mention an era-ending change of leadership for Germany's Christian Democrats, and 2019 could well be another tumultuous year.
• In the coming decades, the developed world's demand for workers to pay its pensions and work in its service sector will soar alongside the booming supply of young people in the third world.
• The coming decades will demand boatloads of empathy as more and more places like Tangier lose their battles to the sea.
• Rouhani's meetings with top political, military, community, and religious leaders clearly signaled that Iran's relationship with Iraq will remain strong despite U.S. concerns.
• The Trump administration created a religious freedom division within the Department of Health and Human Services that will focus on enforcing already existing laws that protect health care workers who object to performing abortions and other procedures on religious grounds.

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Last updated: 27 January 2020