That 600-Year Headstart

There have been predictions that Islam is on track to overtake Christianity as the leading, pre-eminent, number one religion worldwide.  Perhaps not so much through conversion, more in the stated fact that Muslim women have more children than their Christian counterparts.  That, in any event, is the commonly-circulated wisdom.  Researchers and demographers have looked at the situation and feel fairly well assured they have it right.

And then again, perhaps not.  Although Christianity is in decline in the West if church attendance is to be considered, the majority of people who have traditionally worshipped in the Christian tradition still harbour an affection and a tenuous affiliation with organized religion.  Many of them, though, simply honour their religion outside the organized and orthodox tradition.  In Africa, however, the worship of Christianity keeps growing with the population.  And the same could be said for China.

Almost one-third of the global population, amounting to 2.2-billion people, consider themselves Christian and describe themselves as such.  Whereas the world's Muslim population is put at 1.6-billion, so Christianity can count 600-million more adherents than Islam, and it can also boast 1.2-billion more followers than the world's Hindus which stands at one billion, representing the third-largest among the religious faiths.

"Islam used to represent ... Africa's main religion and there were 30 African languages that used to be written in Arabic script. The number of Muslims in Africa has diminished to 316-million, half of whom are Arabs in North Africa. So in the section of Africa that we are talking about, the non-Arab section, the number of Muslims does not exceed 150-million people. When we realize that the entire population of Africa is one billion people, we see that the number of Muslims had diminished greatly from what it was in the beginning of the last century.
"On the other hand, the number of Catholics has increased from one million in 1902 to ... 830-million in the year 2000.
"The Christian missionary octopus ...  As to how that happened, well there are now 1.5 million churches whose congregations account for 46-million people. In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every year, six million Muslims convert to Christianity."
Ahmad al-Qataani, Companions Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic Law in Libya

Those numbers are not reflected by results reported to researchers at polling bodies such as Pew.  Christianity has not gained at all at the expense of Islam, according to their numbers.  Conversos may seek to keep their new affiliations discreetly private, however, given the rather stark penalties in Islamic law against leaving Islam and converting to another religion.  It is forbidden to leave Islam, and those who do are considered to be treasonous apostates, deserving of death.  A compelling reason to remain discreet. Much as Jews did in the 15th Century under Catholic Spain during the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

Pew polling gives China a Christian population of 67-million, but other sources estimate that number to be between 100- and 300-million.  China likes to firmly control religious affiliation, permitting a state-approved version of Catholicism, while a vast network of underground Christian groups with necessarily covert affiliation to the Vatican exists, shielding a number count from scrutiny.  Pew also projects that Islam is growing faster than Christianity and will by 2030 increase its share of the world's religious population to 26.4% from the current 23.4%.

But another, little-recognized phenomenon has arisen whereby Muslim women now exhibit "childbearing patterns comparable to those contemporary affluent Western non-Muslim populations [despite] substantially lower levels of income, education, urbanization, modern contraception utilization and the like than those that characterize the more developed regions", defying conventional theory that brood size is predicated on wealth and education.

There has long been a social-political-economic stasis in the Islamic world.  Modernity and economic enterprise has been lacking.  But for the oil-rich emirates and kingdoms, there have been few advances in the Muslim world in art, science, inventiveness, diversified corporate interests resembling the advances that the Western world have made.  Whereas the Christian countries of the Western alliance continue to progress in economic and military affairs, the sciences and art.

Christianity seems set to continue its influence and its adherents and to represent a position of paramount presence in the world.  Islam, on the other hand, is regressing, reformulating itself in a steady march back to the past of its rude tribal beginnings, hoping to reinvent itself as a reflection of its former self in that pure form of Islamism, pulling itself from its hesitant approach to the modern era, back to its beginnings as a Bedouin-culture popular religious force relying on military persuasions and violence to convince the unwilling to surrender to Islam.