Pew Research: How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020
- snitzoid
- Jun 13
- 2 min read
The Muslims are gaining market share along with people who don't identify as anything. Jews holding steady.
BTW: Lehrer's day job was being a Math Prof at MIT.
How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020
Muslims grew fastest; Christians lagged behind global population increase
By Conrad Hackett, Marcin Stonawski, Yunping Tong, Stephanie Kramer,Anne Shi and
Dalia Fahmy, Pew Research
June 9, 2025
The world’s population expanded from 2010 to 2020, and so did most religious groups, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of more than 2,700 censuses and surveys.
Christians remained the world’s biggest religious group. But Christians (of all denominations, counted as one group) did not keep pace with global population growth from 2010 to 2020.
The number of Christians rose by 122 million, reaching 2.3 billion.
Yet, as a share of the world’s population, Christians fell 1.8 percentage points, to 28.8%.
Muslims were the fastest-growing religious group over the decade.
The number of Muslims increased by 347 million – more than all other religions combined.
The share of the world’s population that is Muslim rose by 1.8 points, to 25.6%.
Bar chart showing Muslims were the fastest-growing religious group between 2010 and 2020
Buddhists were the only major religious group that had fewer people in 2020 than a decade earlier.
The number of Buddhists worldwide dropped by 19 million, declining to 324 million.
As a share of the global population, Buddhists slipped by 0.8 points, to 4.1%.
People with no religious affiliation – who are sometimes called “nones” – were the only category aside from Muslims that grew as a percentage of the world’s population.1
The number of religiously unaffiliated people rose by 270 million, reaching 1.9 billion.
The share of “nones” climbed nearly a full percentage point, to 24.2%.
Hindus grew at about the same rate as the world’s overall population.
The number of Hindus rose by 126 million, reaching 1.2 billion.
As a proportion of the global population, Hindus held steady at 14.9%.
Jews also held steady as a share of the world’s population.2
The number of Jews worldwide grew by nearly 1 million, reaching 14.8 million.
In percentage terms, Jews were the smallest group in the study, representing about 0.2% of the world’s population.
All other religions combined (including Baha’is, Daoists, Jains, Sikhs, adherents of folk religions and numerous other groups) expanded in tandem with the rest of the world. Their share of the global population held steady at 2.2%.
Collectively, 75.8% of the world’s people identified with a religion as of 2020. The remaining 24.2% did not identify with any religion, making people with no religious affiliation the third-largest group in this study, after Christians and Muslims.
Since 2010, the share of the global population that has any religious affiliation has declined by nearly 1 percentage point (from 76.7%) while the share without an affiliation has risen by the same amount (from 23.3%).
The growth of religious “nones” is striking because they are at a “demographic disadvantage” – their population is relatively old, on average, with relatively low fertility rates. However, unaffiliated people continued to grow as a share of the global population because many affiliated people around the world – primarily Christians – are “switching” out of religion.
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