There are several different religions claiming to be the “fastest growing religion”. Such claims vary due to different definitions of “fastest growing”, and whether the claim is worldwide or regional. There are also many unreliable claims and rumors, especially for conversion rates, that often spread as urban legends.
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Religions can grow in numbers due to conversion or due to higher birth rates in a religious group (assuming that children take on the religion of their parents). Religions in particular countries can grow due to immigration. So the fastest growing religion could refer to:
Measures counting absolute numbers tend to favour the larger religions; measures counting percentage growth the smaller ones. For example, if a religion had only 10 followers, a single addition would be a 10% increase, and would therefore dwarf the percentage growth rates of the larger religions.
Statistics on religious adherence are difficult to gather and often contradictory; statistics for the change of religious adherence are even more so, requiring multiple surveys separated by many years using the same data gathering rules. This has only been achieved in rare cases, and then only for a particular country, such as the American Religious Identification Survey[1] in the USA, or census data from Australia[2] (which has included a voluntary religious question since 1911). Worldwide data are more difficult to gather than data on a particular country.
Statistics for rates of conversion are the most difficult to gather and the least reliable: they are often distorted by social taboos such as the ban on apostasy in Islam, or the reporting of commitments where the individual does not persist. This means that a lot of the data on growth of religions is derived from birth and immigration rates.
There are a large number of people who self-identify themselves as associated to a specific religion, but who are not religiously active. If, for example, asked to choose between Christianity and other religions they would say they were Christians; if asked to choose between Christianity, other religions and "Not religious", they would say "Not religious". This may make categorization difficult.
In countries with mandatory religions, official statistics will only reflect the official position of the government.
Note that it would be an argumentum ad populum to claim that being the “fastest growing religion” has any logical consequences about the truth of that religion.
Whilst it is possible to find claims that almost any religion is the fastest growing, it is much harder to find ones backed up by scientific data. A selection of the more credible claims are given below, but even these are often contradictory, and most of them only cover a limited period time or a single region of the world.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics through statistical analysis held Buddhism to be the fastest growing spiritual tradition/religion in Australia in terms of percentage gain with a growth of 79.1% for the period 1996 to 2001 (200,000→358,000).[3]
The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) survey, which involved 50,000 participants, reported that the number of participants in the survey identifying themselves as deists grew at the rate of 717 percent between 1990 and 2001. If this were generalized to the US population as a whole, it would make deism the fastest-growing religious classification in the US for that period, with the reported total of 49,000 self-identified adherents representing about 0.02% of the US population at the time. [10] [11]
No reliable data are available for the number of adherents of Falun Gong but as this religion was only established in 1992 most of the growth must have been by conversion. Estimates for the number of adherents for 1999 range from 2 million[12] to 100 million.[13]
Some 80% of the population of the Republic of India are Hindus, accounting for about 90% of Hindus worldwide. Their 10-year growth rate is estimated at 20% (based on the period 1991 to 2001), corresponding to a yearly growth close to 2% or a doubling time of about 38 years.[14]
Data for Islam reveal that the growing number of Muslims is due primarily to immigration (which means less in the country of there origin) (in the West) and higher birth rates (worldwide).[15]
The World Christian Database (WCD) and its predecessor the World Christian Encyclopedia contains large amounts of data on numbers and growths of religions. The following is a tabulation of their results: (Note: The annual growth in the world population over the same period is 1.41%.)
| 1970-1985[23] | 1990-2000[24][25] | 2000-2005[26] |
|---|---|---|
| 3.65% - Bahá'í Faith | 2.65% - Zoroastrianism | 1.84% - Islam |
| 2.74% - Islam | 2.28% - Bahá'í Faith | 1.70% - Bahá'í Faith |
| 2.34% - Hinduism | 2.13% - Islam | 1.62% - Sikhism |
| 1.67% - Buddhism | 1.87% - Sikhism | 1.57% - Hinduism |
| 1.64% - Christianity | 1.69% - Hinduism | 1.32% - Christianity |
| 1.09% - Judaism | 1.36% - Christianity | |
| 1.09% - Buddhism |
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace using the 2000-2005 edition of the World Christian Database, concluded that high birth rates were the reason for the growth in all six; however, the growth of Christianity was also attributed to conversions.[26] Although the World Christian Database does not cite sources, a review examining the reliability and bias of the WCD found it "highly correlated with other sources of data" but "consistently gave a higher estimate for percent Christian." In conclusion, they found that "on the whole we find that the WCD is reliable.[27]