Globally the worldviews of atheism and non-religious (agnostic) are declining while global Christianity is exploding in adherents

In recent times, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (GCTS) has been publishing statistics on the growth and decline of adherents for various worldviews/religions and they publish their findings in January of each year. Various Christian groups disseminate their research findings such as the International Bulletin of Missionary Research (IBMR).

In February of 2011, the American Spectator noted concerning a International Bulletin of Missionary Research (IBMR) report:

The report estimates about 80,000 new Christians every day, 79,000 new Muslims every day, and 300 fewer atheists every day. These atheists are presumably disproportionately represented in the West, while religion is thriving in the Global South, where charismatic Christianity is exploding. Over 600 million Christians, including millions of Roman Catholics, are charismatic or Pentecostal.

(As a theologically conservative Protestant, I do understand that not everyone who proclaims themselves a Christian is a bona fide Christian in God's eyes and there are people who are deluded and/or false teachers. See: Matthew 7:23, Matthew 7: 14-15)

In 2012 it was reported there are 800 less atheists each day in the world

In 2012, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (GCTS) reported that every day there are 800 less atheists per day, 1,100 less non-religious (agnostic) people per day and 83,000 more people professing to be Christians per day (see: Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary - status of Global Mission report).

In 2012 an article entitled  Atheism in decline by Nigel Tomes declared:

The IBMR publishes yearly figures for religions (and non religions) around the globe. Their latest numbers, hot off the press (Jan. 2012) show some interesting trends.

1. Atheism is in Decline

In 1970 atheists (those avowing there is no God) numbered 166 million worldwide; that was almost one-in-twenty—4.5% of the globe’s population. By 2012 atheists’ number is estimated at 137 million. That’s a decline of almost 30 million. Since world population is growing, atheists’ share declined to less than one-in-fifty—under 2% in 2012. Put differently, every 24 hours there are 800 fewer atheists in the world! Atheism is in decline.

2. Agnosticism is in Decline

In 2000 agnostics (those who “don’t know” if there is a God) numbered 666 million, 10.9% of the world’s people. By 2012 agnostic’s number is estimated at 661 million--a decline of 5 million. In relative terms by 2012 agnostics represent less than one tenth (9.4%) of world population. Every 24 hours there are 1,100 less agnostics in the world. Agnostics are also in decline.

Added together these two groups make up a declining share of global population. In 1970 atheists and agnostics accounted for one-in-five (19.2%) of the world’s people. Based on current trends by 2025 they will represent less than one-in-ten (9.7%). Their population share will fall by half in 50+ years.

We encourage you to examine the entire 2012 article by Nigel Tomes entitled
Atheism in decline as it has some encouraging news about the growth of global Christianity.

Also, please see our previous post on Christian theological conservatism and religious conservatism growing in the world while the decline of global atheism is expected to accelerate: Why are 2012 and 2020 key years for Christian creationists and pro-lifers?

Global market share declining and atheistic societies and birth rates

The Birkbeck College, University of London professor Eric Kaufmann using a multitude of demographic studies argues in an academic paper entitled Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century the decline of atheism in terms of its global adherents is an established trend that will persist for the foreseeable future and the rate of decline will accelerate and affect the Western World. See: Why are the years 2012 and 2020 key years for Christian creationists and pro-lifers?

Also, for those who are interested in knowing more about Professor Eric Kaufmann's work on this matter, he also published a book titled Shall the righteous inherit the earth

In 2009, the book A sceptics guide to atheism indicated: "A worldwide poll taken in 1991 put the global figure for atheists at just 4.4% of the population. By 2006 it was estimated that only 2% of the world population were atheists."

Michael Blume, a researcher at the University of Jena in Germany, wrote "Most societies or communities that have espoused atheistic beliefs have not survived more than a century." Blume also indicated concerning concerning his research on this matter: "What I found was the complete lack of a single case of a secular population, community or movement that would just manage to retain replacement level."

Investigator Magazine had an interesting article published in 1990 entitled 2,000 years of Christian Increase which indicated that historically the percentage of the world population professing Christianity has been increasing.

Comprehensive look at the decline of evolutionism, atheism and agnosticism

Comprehensive look at the decline of evolutionism, atheism and agnosticism

New Atheism reported to have little to no effect on atheism evangelism

New Atheism is a new form of militant atheism which started in the period between 2004 and 2007. The New Atheism movement has not had much of an impact in terms of gaining new adherents to atheism. In a March 10, 2008 USA Today article Stephen Prothero wrote:

Numbers lie, but they also tell tales untrustworthy and otherwise. So the key question stirring around the much discussed U.S Religious Landscape Survey released in late February by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life is what tale does it state about the state of the union.

For some, the story of this survey, based on interviews in multiple languages with more than 35,000 adults, is the strength of American Religion.

Not too long ago, I wrote that American atheism was going the way of the freak show. As books by Christopher Hitchens and other "new atheists" climbed the best seller lists, I caught a lot of flak for that prophecy. But atheist make up only 1.6% of respondents to this survey....

Decline of internet atheism

Data relating to leading atheism websites:

Decline of internet atheism


Articles on global Christianity

Faith and Conflict: The Global Rise of Christianity by Pew Research Center

Christianity taking over planet?

Evangelical Christianity and creationism growing in the world

Rapid growth of Chinese Christianity

The stunning growth of Christianity in China

The African apostles: How Christianity exploded in 20th-century Africa

Methodological flaws in some religious and atheism surveys

Research shows a significant amount of American nondenominational church members are checking "unaffiliated" or "no religion" on surveys

Methodological flaws in 2012 WIN/Gallup survey on global atheism and global religiousity


Decline of atheism videos






Eric Kaufmann: Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? from Australian Broadcasting Corporation on FORA.tv

Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?



Eric Kaufmann - Demography and religion/secularism



Peter Berger on Secularism and Relativism




Global Christianity videos

Pew Forum: Is there a global resurgence of religion?

Global desecularization will happen faster and faster in the 21st century. Buckle up, Mr. Militant Atheist!

Eric Kaufmann is a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and author. His academic research specialty is how demographic changes affect religion/irreligion and politics. He was a Fellow in the Religion in International Affairs Program, Belfer Center, Kennedy School, Harvard University, 2008-9. In 2008, he won the Richard Rose Prize of the Political Studies Association for a scholar under 40 years old. He is an agnostic. 

Eric Kaufmann, a professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, using a wealth of demographic studies, argues that there will be a significant decline of global atheism in the 21st century which will impact the Western World. See: Acceleration of 21st century desecularization

Desecularization is the process by which religion reasserts its societal influence though religious values, institutions, sectors of society and symbols in reaction to previous and/or co-occurring secularization processes.

On December 23, 2012, Kaufmann wrote about global desecularization. 

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.

Most atheists in the world are East Asians (see:Asian atheism). In China, Christianity is experiencing explosive growth (see: Growth of Christianity in China).

In 2011, Kaufmann declared concerning the population of secular Europe:

If we go to Europe, if we take the population of Europe including Russia, it's expected to decline by 25,000,000 in the next 20 years. And then between 2030 to 2050 by another 55,000,000. So you see there is an acceleration of population decline because total fertility rates, that is the number of children of woman will bear in her lifetime have been below replacement for 30 or 40 years... 

As populations shrink, there are fewer mothers begetting fewer children and so forth so you get a compounding effect.

Buckle up, Mr. Militant Atheist! The collapse of atheism is going to occur faster and faster. The 21st century is going to be an autobahn of tears for militant atheists. For more information, please see: Acceleration of 21st century desecularization

American atheism suffers major beatings for 7 years

In June 2016, American Interest reported:

First of all, religious belief is still very powerful and widespread, and there is nothing inevitable about its decline. In fact, the proportion of people who say they believe in God actually ticked modestly upward, from 86 percent to 89 percent, since Gallup last asked the question in 2014.

Post Elevatorgate (a July 2011 controversy in which atheist Richard Dawkins was accused of misogny), there has been a lot of friction with the atheist movement (see: Atheist factions).

At the American Atheists 2018 convention, David Silverman, ex-president of the American Atheists organization, gave a speech entitled, "How the mighty get back up". The speech alluded to the pro-religious rights agenda of the Trump administration (See: Donald Trump and American atheists). During the speech Silverman said regarding American atheists, "We are suffering a level of defeatism that I have never seen before". (See: Decline of the atheist movement). Later in 2018, Silverman was fired due to allegations of financial conflicts and sexual assault (see also: Atheism and sexism)

At the 2018 American Atheists convention, the ex-president of the American Atheist organization David Silverman declared:

It is a hard time to be an atheist activist. This has affected us. And it has affected our community... 

...it has really affected us. We are suffering a level of defeatism that I have never seen before... 

We feel the loss. And we feel like we have lost. We feel like we lost the election... We see this cascade of attack coming down at us over and over from all different directions and we feel like it's over. I have heard so many times it makes me sick. It makes me sad. It feels like we lost. 

The apathy that follows. It doesn't matter. We can't win anyways. It's useless to fight. This apathy is infecting us. It's hurting us. 

And people are reacting to each other now. And so that is causing a division. Lots and lots of division in our movement. Hard, bad division... And that has resulted in a splintering and factioning of the movement that I have never seen before and none of us have. 

In other words, we're in a bad situation and it's getting worse.

RationalWiki is a wiki run by atheists/agnostics who are politically left leaning. It is predominantly run by "social justice warriors" (SJWs).

A RationalWiki editor who goes by the username ikanreed wrote on October 31, 2018 in relation to the declining editing of their wiki and the decline of the atheist/skeptic movement:

I think it's the massive reputation blow skepticism and rationalism itself has taken over the coarse of the last... I don't know, let's say 4 years...  The intellectual clout of rationalism has suffered dramatically, look at the way people talk about skeptics today versus 5 years ago.

Numerous atheists have declared that the "atheist movement is dead" or that it is dying (see: Decline of the atheist movement)

Facebook post at the Freedom For Atheism Foundation page about this article: 

Why 2019 is going to be a HORRIBLE YEAR for militant atheists

As you might have guessed, 2019 is going to be a HORRIBLE YEAR for militant atheists. Why you might ask?

Consider:

1.  France

France has the 8th highest rate of atheism in the world with 43–54% of the population being atheists/agnostics/non-believers in God. France is the country where atheism first made inroads into the Western World (see: French atheism ).

According to The Economist:

France adheres to a strict form of secularism, known as laïcité, which is designed to keep religion out of public life. This principle was entrenched by law in 1905, after fierce anti-clerical struggles with the Roman Catholic church. Today, the lines are in some ways blurred. The French maintain, for instance, certain Catholic public holidays, such as Ascension. But on the whole, secular rules prevail. It would be unthinkable in France, for example, to stage a nativity play in a state primary school, or for a president to be sworn in on a Bible.

Right now, France has demonstrations in the streets throughout due to economic conditions and other grievances (see video below)  In addition, both evangelical Christianity and Islam are very rapidly spreading in France due to growing immigrant populations (see video below).

On July 12, 2012, the Christian Science Monitor reported:

French scholars say, evangelicalism is likely the fastest-growing religion in France – defying all stereotypes about Europe’s most secular nation... 

Daniel Liechti, vice-president of the French National Evangelical Council, found that since 1970, a new evangelical church has opened in France every 10 days. The number of churches increased from 769 to 2,068 last year.

Traditionally, evangelical Christianity often grows rapidly during times of economic/social instability.

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. 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.

 2.  China

The New York Times recently published a news article entitled China’s Economy Slows Sharply, in Challenge for Xi Jinping

Most atheists in the world live in East Asia, particularly communist China. Currently, China/Asia is seeing an explosive growth of evangelical Christianity in its midst (see: New report shows growth of Christianity in Asia and Growth of Christianity in China and East Asia and global desecularization).

And remember, evangelical Christianity grows rapidly during times of economic/social instability and China is faced with: a high debt load, an economic slowdown, a current trade war with the USA and potential challenges to its political leaders should a full blow economic crisis occur. If China does economically reform itself and avoid a trade war, this would still be a win for Christianity as the communist state would have less control over the populace.

PZ Myers, the atheist/humanist movements are most certainly dead

Dear Dr. Myers, 

I just saw your 2016 blog post relating to the issue of whether or not "atheism is in trouble". I am referring to this blog post of yours I get email — theistic tears edition

First, if Richard Dawkins is your example of a charismatic atheist, then atheism is most certainly in trouble. If you doubt me, just ask his 3 ex-wives and his detractor Rebecca Watson (see: Elevatorgate). Dawkins' popularity has plummeted and his now anemic web traffic is testimony to this matter (see: Alexa ranking for RichardDawkins.net ).  Whether you want to admit it or not, atheists are well-known for having poor social skills (antisocial, nerds, neckbeards, etc.).  For more information about this matter, please see: Atheism and social intelligence

In 2017, quoting fellow leftist Alex Nichols, you wrote:  

...the growing popularity of jibes associating outspoken atheists with fedoras, neckbeards, and virginity, led to an exodus of liberals and leftists from the “atheist” tent. Those who remained for the most part lacked in social skills and self-awareness, and the results were disastrous.  

In addition, you previously declared:

 If we're going to expand our base and we're going to draw in more people to recognize the virtues of living in a secular world, we need to appeal to more than just that geek and nerd subset of the population. We need to have a wider base. ...I seriously believe that we're on the cusp of a crisis. We're not there yet but it's looming in front of us. Will we adapt and thrive and change the world? Or will we remain an avocation for a prosperous and largely irrelevant subset of the population? Will we become something more than a scattered society of internet nerds? That's what we have to do.

Second, as per Discovery Magazine, most atheists are East Asians. And China is seeing an explosive growth of evangelical Christianity. See: East Asia and global desecularization

Third, the secularization rate has flattened to zero in Britain, France and Protestant Europe (see: Professor Eric Kaufmann - Shall the religious inherit the earth and Has Britain hit peak secular - The Guardian ). In Eastern/Central Europe, desecularization is occurring (see: Central and Eastern Europe and desecularization).

Fourth, as far as the United States, the American atheist Aron Ra recently said that the atheist movement is dead and he is not alone in his opinion among American atheists (see: Decline of atheist movement ). 

At the 2018 American Atheists convention, the ex-president of the American Atheists organization David Silverman declared:  

It is a hard time to be an atheist activist. This has affected us. And it has affected our community... 

...it has really affected us. We are suffering a level of defeatism that I have never seen before... 

We feel the loss. And we feel like we have lost. We feel like we lost the election... We see this cascade of attack coming down at us over and over from all different directions and we feel like it's over. I have heard so many times it makes me sick. It makes me sad. It feels like we lost.

The apathy that follows. It doesn't matter. We can't win anyways. It's useless to fight. This apathy is infecting us. It's hurting us.

And people are reacting to each other now. And so that is causing a division. Lots and lots of division in our movement. Hard, bad division... And that has resulted in a splintering and factioning of the movement that I have never seen before and none of us have.

In other words, we're in a bad situation and it's getting worse."

Dr. Myers, the atheist/humanist movements are lost causes! Abandon all hope now! Jesus still sits on the throne! 

By the way, have you read this essay: Christianity and its margin of victory over atheism ?

Related article:

Apparently, the atheist PZ Myers recognizes that the New Atheism movement failed and that the 21st century is going to be a century of desecularization

Photo credits:

source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PZ_Myers_at_Skepticon_7.jpg

Description English: PZ Myers speaking at Skepticon 7 Date 22 November 2014, 22:04:30 Source Own work Author Mark Schierbecker

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The atheist website RationalWiki is losing global market share. Rationalwikians are also seeing declining editing of their website

RationalWiki is a wiki run by atheists/agnostics who are politically left leaning. It is predominantly run by "social justice warriors" (SJWs).

A RationalWiki editor who goes by the username ikanreed wrote on October 31, 2018 in relation to the declining editing of their wiki and the decline of the atheist/skeptic movement:

I think it's the massive reputation blow skepticism and rationalism itself has taken over the coarse of the last... I don't know, let's say 4 years...  The intellectual clout of rationalism has suffered dramatically, look at the way people talk about skeptics today versus 5 years ago.

According to the web traffic tracking company Alexa, the Rationalwiki has lost global market share since July of 2018.  In July 1, 2018, the Rationalwiki website was the 16,000th most popular website in the world. On November 2, 2018, according to Alexa, the Rationalwiki website was the 17,248th most popular website in the world.

Examining Atheism broke the 100,000 page view barrier

As of this blog post, the Examining Atheism blog has received 100,831 page views according to Blogger.com.

Many thanks to Facebook religious believers who accounted for over 50% of this blogs traffic via sharing this blogs posts.

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