5.8 Christianity isn't Crazy (Jan 2017)

This time I thought I'd look at some metadata on religion to see what that could reveal about the current state of human knowledge and intuition. I thought metadata may be helpful as a different way of decision making because, if the right data could be found, then it includes the best ideas of everyone on the planet and aggregates them. It is group decision making in the widest sense, a huge neural network in the process of resolving a complicated question.

If I am able to do this though then I needed some data. My preferred way to get data is to look on Wikipedia first, and then swim upstream using the references to get back to the source, sometimes it's interesting and sometimes it's not. In this case I found a page called 'Growth of Religion' which includes a table showing how adherents to various worldviews changed between 1910 and 2010, the data links to a report by Wiley-Blackwell (Retrieved 10 January 2017), which is based on data from a book called The World's Religions in Figures: An Introduction to International Religious Demography by Johnson, Todd M.; Grim, Brian J. (2013).

My assumption in using this data is that everyone is thinking and doing what seems best to them, which I think is a fair assumption because, although there are some countries with high levels of religious compulsion, I expect most people are free enough to be able to change the worldview they officially report to suit their internal feelings on the matter.

The most widespread worldview

The first and easiest way to look at the data is to see which worldview has the highest number of adherents, and the graphic below shows this using the data from 2010.


 As you can see the most prevalent worldview is Christianity. More people support this idea than any other, so it can't be crazy. Even so, there is no consensus and the biggest chunk of the pie is still only just over 3 in every 10 people so there are some powerful competing ideas and grand narratives to explore.

Christianity's slice of the pie is shrinking

We can move on to ask if Christianity’s slice has got bigger or smaller between 1910 and 2010. The graph below presents this and shows how the overall picture changed - which worldviews were on the increase and which were losing out.


We can see that Christianity really isn't doing too well on this measure. In fact it’s the third worst performer, so although it's not crazy it's not as widespread as it has been in the past. Using this measure Islam is doing the best. It grew from 12.6% of the population to 22.5%. It looks like it’s doing pretty well at present. Perhaps it’s only less popular than Christianity because Christianity had a 600 year head start.

Islam started big

In 1910 Islam was already a major force on the worldview stage. Perhaps its size helped it grow, there were after all many adherents to proselytise others. Perhaps another worldview did much better, multiplying its own size much more rapidly than Islam has. Well, we can use the data to find this out too.


By this measure Atheism is the run-away winner, in 2010 it was over 140 times as big as it was in 1910, followed by Agnosticism which itself is over 50 times as large. As Christianity has shrunk it is less than 1 times its size today as it was in 1910.

The world’s largest tradition

Atheism started very small which is why the rate of growth is so big. In fact it’s still a relatively small movement although it’s much bigger if you combine it with its sister tradition Agnosticism (see the first graphic). But which is the world’s largest tradition. Again we can interrogate the data to find out, but only for selected traditions as my reference is not broken out for all (specifically for Atheism and Agnosticism).


Islam wins again on this measure, and specifically Sunni Islam. If you want to join the biggest worldwide tradition then Sunni Islam is it, followed by Christianity’s Catholicism.

Conclusions

So reviewing the data there is no worldwide consensus, and in fact most people would find it reasonably easy to select the statistic that they are most comfortable with and justify their own personal choice of worldview. This is especially true if you include the idea that we should “enter through the narrow gate, because the gate is wide and the way is spacious that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life, and there are few who find it!” (Matthew 7:13-14, NET). A concept I find pretty odd which sort of says the worst idea that doesn’t catch on is actually the right one.

By some measures Islam, and particularly Sunni Islam, could be described as the most buoyant religion, and perhaps worryingly it’s also the tradition that is currently giving the world its most high profile form of terrorism.

Finally, even though Christianity has the most adherents there are many forms of mutually exclusive Christianity. Some types of Christianity rely on 'Fear of God' and they are brutal and oppressive – those types need to wither and die out. While other types bask in and reflect the 'Love of God' and are a positive influence and could well have a place in the world for many years to come. Some Christianity is conservative and traditional and needs to be revised and updated, other types are more mystic and although I don’t feel them myself, I’d be unable to pinpoint exactly why they feel false to me.

next >

No comments:

Post a Comment