I just happened upon this thought-provoking article from Pew Research summarizing the demographic trends: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/ . I thought I would share it here for those interested.

From the article:

"The religious profile of the world is rapidly changing, driven primarily by differences in fertility rates and the size of youth populations among the world’s major religions, as well as by people switching faiths. Over the next four decades, Christians will remain the largest religious group, but Islam will grow faster than any other major religion.

"If current trends continue, by 2050:

"The number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world.

"Atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion – though increasing in countries such as the United States and France – will make up a declining share of the world’s total population.

"The global Buddhist population will be about the same size it was in 2010, while the Hindu and Jewish populations will be larger than they are today.

"In Europe, Muslims will make up 10% of the overall population.

"India will retain a Hindu majority but also will have the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, surpassing Indonesia.

"In the United States, Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in 2010 to two-thirds in 2050, and Judaism will no longer be the largest non-Christian religion. Muslims will be more numerous in the U.S. than people who identify as Jewish on the basis of religion.

"Four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Very very interesting Tal,because I can also see a few reasons to be a little bit scared.

In 1998 Rodney Stark published a paper that projected 256 million Mormons by 2080.
https://rsc.byu.edu/archived/latter-day-saint-social-life-social-research-lds-church-and-its-members/1-rise-new-world


Though he put a lot of effort, verbiage and assumptions in his theory we now know that it’s just not going to happen.
You see, Rodney left out the unknowns, or at least what was unknown to him. Why would he do that?

Because it’s easy to grab low hanging fruit to make predictions. Yet somehow the ignorant never get rich doing that. Those that can see deeper and pay attention to the details of what is happening underneath the waves are the ones who prosper long term.

The internet has changed everything. Everything.
As information becomes more and more available internal dissent grows unabated because the old guard can’t see. As the internal dissent groups gain popularity with the young and informed and the old guard dies off the religion of barbarism is tossed to the gutter. It’s happening now. Just look on the net at all the religious dissent sites.

3 to four billion more humans are to come online within the next five years in Africa. All are ignorant until they get a cell phone. They have a hunger for knowledge and they get the fact that they have been starved of it. But soon they will devour information that will shatter the worldviews taught to them by their parents.

More and more examples of leaving the religion of our forefathers are spreading through the net providing real-world examples that life without religion can be done, provides freedom of the mind and leads to a better moral foundation. They are the pioneers of the human exodus out of religious nonsense.

So you see I have hope for the future of humanity at the same time I fear it. I have hope because I think for many reasons the internet will eventually win the war of religious barbarism. But I do fear that the sheer number of the religious ignorant may very well doom us all.

Don't look now, but governments, including the one in the U.S., have figured out ways to control the availability of Internet information in their own countries, especially to the less technically savvy. While the People's Republic of China is leading the way in this regard, a lot of other countries are not far behind. And you may wish to google the effects of the just-negotiated TPP agreement on copyrights should it pass the U.S. Congress, which seems likely.

There is another downside to the Internet not often discussed. Most people, including yours truly, were hopeful that with the free flow of information, Internet users would read articles that challenged their views. As it turned out, the skeptic in me was right--most Internet users flock to news and other sites whose slants favor the views they already had. So while the Internet has not been good for the Mormon church (the Mormons are not good at public relations), it has helped many other groups, including radical Islamists, to recruit and retain new members.

It is rather interesting that most of the current Mormon church growth appears to be occurring where internet access is minimal or non-existent. Where will "one of the fastest growing churches" be when that is no longer the case?.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2016 12:54PM by Templar.

April last year is the "latest" data?

"If current trends continue, by 2050..."

That's a big IF. Especially given another quote from the article, "The religious profile of the world is rapidly changing..." In other words, "projections" they might have made in 2010, for example, for 2015 were wrong. Don't see any reason to have any more confidence for their 2050 "projections."

ificouldhietokolob Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> April last year is the "latest" data?
>
> "If current trends continue, by 2050..."
>
> That's a big IF. Especially given another quote
> from the article, "The religious profile of the
> world is rapidly changing..." In other words,
> "projections" they might have made in 2010, for
> example, for 2015 were wrong. Don't see any
> reason to have any more confidence for their 2050
> "projections."

Actually, the predictions make a great deal of sense, especially when one realizes what groups are reproducing the most offspring. We humans have always been a superstitious lot by and large and I don't see that changing time in the near or far future.

blindguy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Actually, the predictions make a great deal of
> sense, especially when one realizes what groups
> are reproducing the most offspring. We humans have
> always been a superstitious lot by and large and I
> don't see that changing time in the near or far
> future.

Given rapid change, no -- they don't make "sense."
It should be noted that the OP himself "predicted" that the high mormon birthrate would keep the % of mormons growing rapidly. Yet the church's own numbers suggest a 1% or so growth rate in 2016 -- far below the nation's growth rate as a whole, meaning they will lose % share this year.

High birthrates aren't sustainable, and they fall rapidly as regions stabilize politically. Saudi Arabia, for example has a birth rate of 2.7, Qatar, 2.0, Dubai 1.8 -- lower than the US's 1.88.

ificouldhietokolob Wrote in part:
>
> High birthrates aren't sustainable, and they fall
> rapidly as regions stabilize politically. Saudi
> Arabia, for example has a birth rate of 2.7,
> Qatar, 2.0, Dubai 1.8 -- lower than the US's 1.88.

Actually, it is not the stability of governments but rather access to birth control, particularly for women, that slows down fertility rates. And by access, I'm referring not only to physical access but to the permission to use the available birth control as well. Islam is notorious for denying permission to use birth control as are many Christian groups. And while Mormonism has in the recent past denied permission for women to use birth control, it officially does not deny women that option today, despite the many firesides by Mormon church authorities encouraging people to marry young and start procreating right away.

Actually, birth rates fall as women become more educated. More educated women actively seek out and use birth control. Effective birth control depends on a quality health care system.

Education -- health care -- those depend on a stable government.

The Catholic Church still prohibits birth control, yet Catholics in this country have 2 or 3 kids. Wonder how that happens?

I well remember a day back in 2000 when Cisco stock was making new highs almost daily and one of the "expert" CNBC commentators declared that "Cisco has no top". Naturally, the stock topped out the very next day and suffered a huge loss shortly thereafter.

One of the biggest mistakes someone can make is to take an existing trend and project it indefinitely into the future. Subsequent events will almost always prove them wrong.

Current trends will not continue, just like LDS growth trends from the 1970s did not continue.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Current trends will not continue, just like LDS
> growth trends from the 1970s did not continue.

Bingo :)

The Pew Data research institute is not biased.

It's about as objective a survey as any scholarly institution can endow.

All it's saying is at the rate of population growith and demographics there's going to be growing numbers of Christians and Muslims though Christians be losing ground. And during the same time span the atheists numbers will shrink by comparison.

It's saying most of the world is not atheist or agnostic, and the trends are such that religious indigenous groups and others will continue to dominate. Growing in the US and France does not equate to global change in that direction.

In other words, the more things change the more they stay the same - historically and futuristically speaking.

"The accuracy of polls can be judged in different ways. One is the degree to which the sample of the public interviewed for the poll is representative of the whole population. For example, does the poll include the proper proportions of older and younger adults, of people of different races, or of men and women? Another standard for accuracy is whether the poll’s questions correctly measure the attitudes or relevant behaviors of the people who are interviewed. For both of these ways of judging accuracy, Pew Research’s polls do very well. We know that key characteristics of our samples conform closely to known population parameters from large government surveys such as the U.S. Census."

http://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-the-statistics-derived-from-pew-research-polls/



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2016 12:05PM by amyjo.

Their *survey* data is probably as reliable as possible.

Their *projections* based on "current trends," which they themselves say are "rapidly changing," not so much.

It wasn't their survey data that was being pooh-poohed -- it was their projections.

"Prior predictions about the future of religion have been criticized for ultimately being inaccurate. What makes the estimates in this report different?

There is a long history of people predicting the demise of religion, but religion has proven more resilient than many people anticipated. Prior predictions were rooted in theories about social change rather than demographic data. For instance, some social scientists argued that people would move away from religion as they encountered religions different from their own, or as they achieved economic security or as they became more educated.

Our projections are not based on a theory about how religious identity will change in the future. Instead, we apply the scientific tools of demography to understand how the world’s religious composition is expected to change in the future if current trends continue. Demographers have a strong track record of modeling population change. We used these tools to anticipate future change in the religious landscape. For example, we determined that Muslims have more children per woman than any other major religious group and they also have a younger population than any other group. Consequently, we project Muslims will grow faster than any other group in the coming decades."

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/08/qa-how-we-projected-the-future-of-world-religions/

"To be clear, the total number of religiously unaffiliated people (which includes atheists, agnostics and those who say they have no particular religion on censuses and surveys) is expected to rise, from 1.1 billion in 2010 to 1.2 billion in 2050. But this growth is projected to occur at the same time that other religious groups – and the global population overall – are growing faster.

These projections, which take into account demographic factors such as fertility, age composition and life expectancy, forecast that people with no religion will make up about 13% of the world’s population in 2050, down from roughly 16% as of 2010.

This is largely attributable to the fact that religious “nones” are, on average, older and have fewer children than people who are affiliated with a religion. In 2010, for instance, 28% of people who belong to any of the world’s religions were younger than 15 years old, compared with just 19% of the unaffiliated. And adherents of religions are estimated to give birth to an average of 2.6 children per woman, compared with an average of 1.7 children among the unaffiliated."

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/03/why-people-with-no-religion-are-projected-to-decline-as-a-share-of-the-worlds-population/

Yes, we know. They used the *exact same methods* for their previously-criticized-as-inaccurate predictions.

They're guessing. And their track record of guessing is horrible.

Where do they think that the "religious nones" came from?

Their predictions are based on the assumption that everyone who is born into a religion remains in that religion.

When I was in the mission field, conservative estimates had the church membership hitting 100,000,000 by 2000. Growing the missionary force equaled growing the church; since it was the last days, only the Valiant were being born, and they were waiting for us to knock on their doors!!

... I blame myself that it didn't happen...

Well, I'm very proud of your lack of contribution to that cause.

People:

One sociologist's failed predictions for Mormonism from thirty years ago do not mitigate present global demographic trends. Mormonism is a unique case, and always has been a unique case, not least because it makes very specific, very testable claims. The case against the Book of Abraham is open-and-shut. The case against the First Vision story, the historicity of the Book of Mormon, the ethnic identity of the Natives, etc., are all open-and-shut. One can know Joseph Smith was an unreliable source of information about his experiences in just a few minutes nowadays.

Neither general Christianity nor Islam carry such immediate, modern, easy test cases.

In other words, while the internet is causing a lot of defections from a few modern Christian denominations (Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnessism, etc.), it is not having (and almost certainly will not have) the same effect on Christianity overall.

Lastly, I have never expressed the opinion that Mormons as a percentage of the global population would continue to increase.

Noah's universal flood didn't happen.

The human race didn't begin with Adam and Eve.

And as for the Koran, horses don't fly.

Open and shut.

Tal Bachman Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Neither general Christianity nor Islam carry such
> immediate, modern, easy test cases.

Actually, as sonoma pointed out, they do.

> Lastly, I have never expressed the opinion that
> Mormons as a percentage of the global population
> would continue to increase.

Well, sort of:
(April 28, 2015)
" Give this planet a few centuries, and the difference between the fantastic breeding rates of conservative Christians and Muslims and the dwindling breeding rates of secularists breeding rates will be eminently manifest in all sorts of ways."

Mormons are part of "conservative Christians."

The interesting thing about that post: when it was made in April 2015, Pew had *just* come out with the article linked to in THIS thread. You had to go through the Wall St. Journal article to get to it, but that's where it led. At the time, it showed that the "nones" (non-affiliated with religion) were projected to have the biggest growth of any group, as I pointed out in that thread at the time.

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1570978,1571337#msg-1571337

Now, I can't find that article. This one, still dated April 2015, comes to different conclusions, and has different numbers -- and the old article is gone. Poofed off the internet as if it never existed.

Curiously, the change in their "projections" didn't come from new census data, either. Both were based off of 2010 census data from around the world -- the article specifically says so. So...no new census data, but different projections, biased towards "watch out for the muslims, they're outbreeding us!" Hmm. Makes me wonder if there isn't something politically-motivated going on.

At any rate, Pew's "projections" have been (rightly) criticized for being spectacularly wrong in the past, they ignore their own "retention rate" polls when they make them, and there's no new data to base the new projections on, it's still the same 2010 data. "Pew" is an appropriate word, their projections stink.

Here's an article from India that points out the numerous flaws in the "Muslims are growing so fast they're going to take over!" projections:

http://qz.com/379773/five-charts-that-puncture-the-bogey-of-muslim-population-growth/

The same flaws are in the Pew projections.

Here's a more realistic take:

"One fact that gets lost among distractions ... is that the birthrates of Muslim women in Europe — and around the world — have been falling significantly for some time.

Sharp reductions in fertility among Muslim immigrants reflect important cultural shifts, which include universal female education, rising living standards, the inculcation of local mores, and widespread availability of contraception. Broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two generations.

The decline of Muslim birthrates is a global phenomenon. Most analysts have focused on the remarkably high proportion of people under age 25 in the Arab countries, which has inspired some crude forecasts about what this implies for the future. Yet recent UN data suggest that Arab birthrates are falling fast, and that the number of births among women under the age of 20 is dropping even more sharply.

The falling fertility rates in large segments of the Islamic world have been matched by another significant shift: Across northern and western Europe, women have suddenly started having more babies ... Immigrant mothers account for part of the fertility increase throughout Europe, but only part. And, significantly, many of the immigrants are arrivals from elsewhere in Europe, especially the eastern European countries admitted to the European Union in recent years.

The human habit is simply to project current trends into the future. Demographic realities are seldom kind to the predictions that result. The decision to have a child depends on innumerable personal considerations and large, unaccountable societal factors that are in constant flux. Yet even knowing this, demographers themselves are often flummoxed. Projections of birthrates and population totals are often embarrassingly at odds with eventual reality."

(Martin Walker, Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2009)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2016 07:34PM by ificouldhietokolob.

Lots of religious growth projections have failed. Up until the 1960s, Quebec had the highest birth rate in Canada. It now has the lowest. There were genuine fears that Francophone Catholics were going to swamp the nation eventually purely by dint of birth rate.

Things changed. Ditto Catholic birth rate in most other nations. Fastest growing religious group in US is "unaffiliated". That certainly would not have been a projection in the 1980s when the Moral Majority was a cresting wave. And the unaffiliated are not growing rapidly because of their high birth rate. People in the US are finally abandoning religion the way Canadians and Europeans did one to two generations ago.

Given the ubiquity of intercultural contact now because of the Internet, I fully expect the trend away from religion to accelerate, and spread, even to Islam. Give it two generations, maybe less. [edit] I don't think Islam will disappear in two generations, but I do expect there will be a large number of secular Muslims, just like the substantial number of secular Jews and Christians now.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2016 02:49PM by Brother Of Jerry.

Sonoma - Yes, you're correct, and I agree that those things definitively refute Biblical historical claims.

But as everyone should know on here, religious faith can be very stubborn. Moreover, merely because Bible claims purport to describe events occurring many millenia ago, they carry a "distance" - a sort of fuzziness - that Mormon claims don't carry, and which makes them more durable in the minds of mainstream believing Christians. And the "distance" of the Bible also makes it easier for believing Christians to simply begin thinking of all those claims as expressing "larger truths" as "allegories" or whatever. By contrast, Mormon claims - because they are quite modern, and because they are so clearly cut-and-dried - have an immediacy, a falsifiability, that Muslim or Christian claims do not have. And even then, notice how many Mormons are sticking with them, against the most blatant evidence.

A few other points: amyjo is correct: the Pew Research is about the best demographic research on religion we have. Rodney Stark has a long history of seemingly inexplicable Mormon cheerleading, and I really can't see how this one man's enthusiastic promotion of LDS growth propaganda from two or three decades ago in any way mitigates the volumes of demographic data conscientiously collected by literally hundreds of social scientists. Those projections have proven to be accurate to a remarkable degree.

That is not to say that unknown variables cannot affect projections. Of course they can. But there is a great, glacier-like weight and steadiness of movement to the growth of Islam and Christianity (with the more conservative elements growing faster than the others), such that the variables which have affected the growth of individual sects within them cannot reasonably be supposed to affect the whole. An undetected boulder might impede one stream within a broad glacier; but overall, the glacier's going to keep on moving along.

I find it odd that so many RFM posters seem to be as casually dismissive of any evidence which weighs against something they'd like to believe as any Mormon is. The fact is that religious belief and behaviour are essentially ubiquitous in our species, and the persistent discrepancy in reproductive rates between agnostics/atheists and religious believers is but one of many obvious explanations for that. That persistent discrepancy is again evident in the recent research referenced here.

No, I am not a religious believer. No, I have no dog in this hunt. I am merely posting the best social science data we have on the role of religion in human life over the next few decades. If you don't like the conclusion demographers come to, feel free to find a flaw in the methodology; but merely denying the conclusion on grounds some unknown variable might one day come into existence (a possibility which no one denies), in order to announce that "the jury's still out", is exactly what Dan Peterson does when asked about the ethnicity of Native Americans. That sort of thing really ought to be embarrassing to anyone who claims to value science over wishful thinking.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/04/2016 04:50PM by Tal Bachman.

The people with the least education and resources are the ones reproducing the quickest. This is true worldwide, though the degree varies from country to country.

In un/under-developed countries, children continue to be seen as an income generating resource. This is not as true today as it was in years past. These countries are also where religious growth is occurring.

However, this is a non-supportable trend. As a generalization, these countries have serious hunger and nutrition issues; serious income issues; and serious education issues. These are frequently the geography of the most serious predictions for the effects of climate change. Water shortages, population center flooding, crop failures and so on.

Looking at just the rates of population and religion growth without simultaneously considering the likely effects of economy, climate, and resource loss make the religious projections meaningless.

Yes, Africa will likely have the densest population of Christians. Yes, Islam will probably equal or outstrip Christianity. These populations will also be some of the most repressed, uneducated, impoverished and threatened.

They will probably be the most violent and dangerous locations on the planet fighting over just about everything. Religion, resources, food, water, political power...

Companies will not invest in countries that are unstable, no matter how attractive the labor and tax rates. To some degree, the volatility of US leadership makes investment in the US less desirable because companies have difficulty making long term predictions about tax and labor situations here.

The developed world also faces similar threats, but has a large arsenal of tools to work with as well as societies built on cooperation, not oppression.

If the singularity is to happen, it is projected to occur between 2030 and 2050 or not at all. This likely changes economics from allocating scarce resources to surplus in the developed world. Labor essentially becomes rare in the West except for what you do for fun and interest. The greatest asset of the low income countries is wiped out.

Even without the singularity, the divergence between the First World and the rest of the World will continue on just about every measurable axis including religion and population. But numbers is not real power anymore. Modern and projected Economic, Political and military power have far outstripped the individual and his masses.

In the modern world, you can be economically subjugated without physical violence. At the individual level, a low level criminal charge will suffice to bankrupt you against a government who needs to sugjugate you. In the modern world, the individual's value is essentially as a unit of Labor. However, that value is decreasing with time. There is a decreasing window of opportunity for large numbers of cheap humans to be valuable economically, politically or militarily.

If the most religious and populous parts of the world continue to squander their moment of opportunity, the world will have passed them by by 2050.

This study appears to leave out the entire 1.4 Billion population of China, which has recently rescinded their one-child policy. Anciently, China had a rich mix of folk religion with Buddhism, Taoism, and Cunfuscianism. While some of the folk religion still thrives, in more recent political history, China is considered to be an Athiest country.

I sure hope they overcome their preference for boy babies, otherwise they'll soon reach a point where they'll be shopping for brides in other countries.

I'm still not buying what you're selling, Tal. Their conclusion is predicated on "current trends continuing". Current trends have been changing for decades. I fully expect the rate of these changes will accelerate, rather than diminish.They (and you, apparently) think the changes are an aberration, and the world will go back to religions growing as usual.

There was a big cultural change in the world with the development of the printing press in Europe in the mid-1400s. Within 50 years, the Protestant Reformation started, Europeans started to colonize the Americas and the rest of the planet, and several centuries of religious wars were waged, basically destroying the Holy Roman Empire, and the creation of the modern nation-state.

OK, fine. that was largely triggered by a quantum leap in access to information thanks to the printing press. We are living through another quantum leap in access to information. I fully expect the changes to society to be even more profound than those enabled by the printing press. Just as the press destroyed Catholic hegemony in Europe, the internet will weaken all religions. There will be more interesting and useful tribes out there to join.

Religion is already fighting a rear-guard action. The Moral Majority was a reaction to the 1960s, and it is largely collapsing in on itself. Millennials just aren't interested. Islam is also fighting change. they will fail, because their adherents can see the rest of the world, and they are going to want more freedom than they have in the more repressive Moslem countries. They are not going to survive in their present form any more than the Holy Roman Empire did. Change was already in the air, and the internet is encouraging that change. The genie is out of the bottle.

The current trends, at least the ones the Pew researchers are considering, will not continue. They are already faltering. The Pew researchers are the new Rodney Stark.

Brother of Jerry, this is an outstanding analysis.
Encompassing, expansive, yet precise. No wasted word.

Love reading this kind of brilliant analysis. It's delicious. A delight.

Thanks.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/05/2016 02:28AM by zenjamin.

You can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forty percent of all people know that.

Homer Simpson

I agree.

Brother of Jerry knocks it out of the park.