There are more Christians, Muslims and unbelievers in the world
Christianity remains the largest denomination in the world, but the ranks of Christians are thinning. As the study by the Pew Research Center shows, the followers of Islam are still fewer than Christians, but over the past ten years, the Muslims have become the fastest growing religious group in the world. The second groups are people who are not followers of any religions: almost 25% of the world’s population and there are more of them.
The number of Christians in the world from 2010 to 2020 increased by 121.6 million and reached 2.3 billion people, which makes this faith the most numerous in the world. Nevertheless, such growth is not comparable at the rate of increase in the world population, so Christians in ten years decreased by 1.8 percentage points, to 28.8% (see schedule). Such data are given in their report by the PEW Research Center, whose experts analyzed more than 2.7 thousand research and surveys to identify changes in the “global religious landscape” from 2010 to 2020.
The number of Muslims during this time increased by 346.8 million, and this is more than all other faiths taken together added
The number of followers of Hinduism, Judaism and fewer denominations have not changed much, but Buddhists have become smaller both numerically and in size of a share among world religions. This is the only denomination with such a picture.
Given all these reductions and increments, the share of followers of any religion in the world is now 75.8%. The remaining 24.2% are non -religious people, and in ten years there are more by 0.9%. The Pew Research Center calls the fact of the growth of the number of non -religious people “amazing”, given that this is a “demographically vulnerable” group of people: most often these are people who rarely give birth to children. But their number, according to researchers, grows due to the fact that believers (and most often Christians) abandon religion.
Most non -religious people live in China – 1.3 billion, or 67% of all the non -religious population of the world.
With a significant margin in the top 3 countries with the non-religious population, the United States includes-101 million people do not belong to any faith-and Japan-73 million people.
The study by Pew Research Center has shown that in recent years, Europe has ceased to be a region with the largest number of Christians: now in the leaders of the country of Africa south of Sahara. And among individual countries, the largest Christian population is in the USA, 217 million people.
In the TOP-5, in the number of followers of Christianity, Russia also entered, where in 2020 a little more than 102 million people called themselves Christians. True, the global trends in the reduction in the number of followers of Christianity did not bypass Russia: in 2010 they were 8.6 million more than in 2020. The same happens with a decrease in the level of religiosity: the number of non -religious Russians over ten years increased by 10.8 million and exceeded 29.6 million people. Earlier VTsIOM (See “Kommersant” from June 10) published the annual monitoring of the religiosity of Russians: in 2025 11% consider themselves unbelievers, this is 4 percentage points more than in 2017.
