Evangelical churches see growth during economic downturns and times of crises. Atheism faces a longstanding trend of global market share loss

 According to the Economist :

Last year David Beckworth, an assistant professor of Economics at Texas State University, examined historic patterns in the size of evangelical congregations and found that, during each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, membership of evangelical churches jumped by 50%.

In 2008, David Gibson wrote in Commonweal:

A recent spot check of some large Roman Catholic parishes and mainline Protestant churches around the nation indicated attendance increases there, too. But they were nowhere near as striking as those reported by congregations describing themselves as evangelical, a term generally applied to churches that stress the literal authority of Scripture and the importance of personal conversion, or being born again.Part of the evangelicals new excitement is rooted in a communal belief that the big Christian revivals of the 19th century, known as the second and third Great Awakenings, were touched off by economic panics. Historians of religion do not buy it, but the notion has always lived in the lore of evangelism, said Tony Carnes, a sociologist who studies religion.A study last year may lend some credence to the legend. In Praying for Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the United States, David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Texas State University, looked at long-established trend lines showing the growth of evangelical congregations and the decline of mainline churches and found a more telling detail: During each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, the rate of growth in evangelical churches jumped by 50 percent. By comparison, mainline Protestant churches continued their decline during recessions, though a bit more slowly.The little-noticed study began receiving attention from some preachers in September, when the stock market began its free fall. With the swelling attendance they were seeing, and a sense that worldwide calamities come along only once in an evangelists lifetime, the study has encouraged some to think big.

“When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors.” - Rev. A. R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York’s largest evangelical congregation as quoted in the New York Times article Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches

Excerpt from the academic paper entitled The Changing Face of Global Christianity by Dr. Todd Johnson & Sandra S. Kim:

As Latourette’s Great Century was coming to a close, churches outside of Europe and the Americas that took root in the 19th century grew rapidly in the 20th century.10 Africa, in particular, led this transformation growing from only 10 million Christians in 1900 to 360 million by AD 2000. Given current trends, there could be over 600 million Christians in Africa by 2025. Shortly after 1980, Christians in the South outnumbered those in the North for the first time in 1,000 years. In 1900 over 80% of all Christians lived in Europe and Northern America, however, by 2005 this proportion had fallen to under 40% and will likely fall below 30% before 2050. Projections for the future show that the Christian churches of the Global South (Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania) will likely continue to acquire an increasing percentage of global Christianity...

Another daily reality for Southern Christians is poverty. Much of the global South deals with serious issues of poverty and a lack of access to proper health care. Countries that have been hardest hit by AIDS, such as Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Swaziland, are also countries where Christianity is flourishing. Without access to the necessary medical care, accounts of healing and exorcism found in the Bible are taken more seriously. The work of the Holy Spirit exhibited in the ministry of signs and miracles of healing and deliverance from demonic powers has exploded in the ministry of Pentecostal/Charismatic churches in the global South. David Smith describes these churches as “overwhelmingly charismatic and conservative in character, reading the New Testament in ways that seem puzzlingly literal to their friends in the North,” and as “largely made up of poor people who in many cases live on the very edge of existence.”  Thus the growth of Christianity in poorer regions implies not only an alternative reading of the Bible, but a different experience of the Bible.

The atheist author and advocate David Madison, PhD wrote in March of 2019:

I remain haunted—and terrified—by what I read on a Christian website, not long after the turn of this century: that by 2025, there will be one billion (yes, that’s with a “b”) Pentecostals in the world. That should scare us as much as global warming.

The American sociologist and author Peter L. Berger introduced the concept of desecularization in 1999. According to Berger, "One can say with some confidence that modern Pentecostalism must be the fastest growing religion in human history."

Professor Phillip Jenkins published the book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

Chuck Colson, citing the work of Jenkins, writes:

As Penn State professor Philip Jenkins writes in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, predictions like Huntingtons betray an ignorance of the explosive growth of Christianity outside of the West. 

For instance, in 1900, there were approximately 10 million Christians in Africa. By 2000, there were 360 million. By 2025, conservative estimates see that number rising to 633 million. Those same estimates put the number of Christians in Latin America in 2025 at 640 million and in Asia at 460 million. 

According to Jenkins, the percentage of the worlds population that is, at least by name, Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.

Professor Eric Kaufmann, who teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London, specializes in the academic area of how demographic changes affect religion/irreligion and politics. Kaufmann is an agnostic. Kaufmann said of religious demographic projections concerning the 21st century and the future growth of religious fundamentalism:

Part of the reason I think demography is very important, at least if we are going to speak about the future, is that it is the most predictable of the social sciences. 

...if you look at a population and its age structure now. You can tell a lot about the future. ...So by looking at the relative age structure of different populations you can already say a lot about the future... 

...Religious fundamentalism is going to be on the increase in the future and not just out there in the developing world..., but in the developed world as well.

The prominent historian Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, indicates that he believes Christianity faces a "bright future" worldwide. According to MacCulloch, "Christianity, the world's largest religion, is rapidly expanding – by all indications, its future is very bright."

On July 24, 2013, CNS News reported:

Atheism is in decline worldwide, with the number of atheists falling from 4.5% of the world’s population in 1970 to 2.0% in 2010 and projected to drop to 1.8% by 2020, according to a new report by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (GCTS) in South Hamilton, Mass."

On December 23, 2012, Kaufmann wrote:

I argue that 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious. 

On the other hand, the secular West and East Asia has very low fertility and a rapidly aging population... 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. Ergo, we can expect significant immigration to the secular West which will import religious revival on the back of ethnic change. In addition, those with religious beliefs tend to have higher birth rates than the secular population, with fundamentalists having far larger families. The epicentre of these trends will be in immigration gateway cities like New York (a third white), Amsterdam (half Dutch), Los Angeles (28% white), and London, 45% white British.

The website Science 2.0 declared on July 14, 2015:

Atheism as a belief system has peaked and its share of humanity is shrinking, demographic studies indicate. Win/Gallup’s 2012 global poll on religion and atheism put atheists at 13%, while its 2015 poll saw that category fall to 11%. Other figures suggest the changes have deep, broad roots. 

First, a community’s possession of atheistic world-views—for whatever reason—correlates with low or negative birth rates. The most significant examples are East Asian and European countries, which are at “below replacement” rates of birth, shrinking at speed. 

Second, “forced” atheism has been disappearing steadily over the past 40 years and we see a corresponding surge of people towards spiritual clusters. In percentage terms, 1970 may be considered the high point for global atheism and agnosticism. As communism weakened, and eventually collapsed in 1989, there was a significant resurgence of religious belief (see chart below). The same thing is now happening in China. 

Third, the surge of popularity for a novel type of “evangelical atheism” which began about a decade ago appears to be losing some of its steam. The movement’s celebrity leaders have fallen out of the bestseller lists, and are often now criticized by their former cheerleaders in newspaper columns. After a high-publicity start in 2013, Sunday Assemblies have plummeted out of the limelight and growth has been glacial. 

And the near future? The latest global data also shows that young people, classified as those under 34, tend to be measurably more religious (66%) than older ones (60%). “With the trend of an increasingly religious youth globally, we can assume that the number of people who consider themselves religious will only continue to increase,” said Jean-Marc Leger, President of WIN/Gallup International Association. 

..the view that atheism will sweep the globe to produce a non-believing utopia is extremely unlikely. The shrinking of the skeptical share of humanity is inevitable, as Welsh geneticist Steve Jones has stated. 

..the data suggests that the global proportion of atheists will fall, while the number of pro-spiritual, pro-science middle group will grow.

Pew Research states: "By 2055 to 2060, just 9% of all babies will be born to religiously unaffiliated women, while more than seven-in-ten will be born to either Muslims (36%) or Christians (35%)."

In 2012, the W. Edwards Deming Institute published a report by the World Future Society which indicated:

In 2100, however, the world will likely be only 9% unaffiliated — more religious than in 2012. The peak of the unaffiliated was in 1970 at around 20%, largely due to the influence of European communism. Since communism’s collapse, religion has been experiencing resurgence that will likely continue beyond 2100. All the world’s religions are poised to have enormous numeric growth (with the exceptions of tribal religions and Chinese folk religion), as well as geographic spread with the continuation of migration trends. Adherents of the world’s religions—perhaps particularly Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists—will continue to settle in the formerly Christian and ever-expanding cities of Europe and North America, causing increases of religious pluralism in these areas. Christians and Muslims together will encompass two-thirds of the global population—more than 7 billion individuals. In 2100, the majority of the world’s 11.6 billion residents will be adherents of religious traditions.

Why the religious will inherit the earth (Part 1) by Eric Kaufmann



Why the religious will inherit the earth (Part 2) by Eric Kaufmann