The “Belief Business”

It’s pretty easy to see who dominates the car business, but much harder to see which religion (or lack thereof ) dominates the “Belief Business” as I like to call it. It’s hard to get reliable numbers and among those. 

I assume there are a huge percentage of so-called faithfuls who are as “good Catholics” as I am, having never set foot in a church, on my own, for of my lifetime, and the same probably holds true for millions of other “religious folks” counted in the world statistics. So we need to take that religious “world market share” with a huge grain of salt. 

Early this week my wife was asking me how many Muslims were in the world. Having no idea, I asked our smart-speaker who gave me a number and then we reviewed all the religions we could think of. In checking with other sources, I came up with a curated hit-parade of sorts of religions the world over, because the numbers claim vary a lot from sources to sources. 

Just remember that Christianity is still number one at the moment with about 2.2 billion, followed by 1.6 billion of Muslims, 1.6 of atheist or non affiliated, 1.2 Hindus. Buddhists only account for near 500 millions and the 1.1 billion balance is a catch-all category that includes folks and native religions as well as faiths like Baha’i, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca, and Zoroastrianism, among a multitude of others beliefs. 

I’m not even mentioning astrology or conspiracy theories... While Christianity is the most widespread religion at the moment, projections indicate that Islam might rival Christianity in terms of followers by 2050. It could also be both challenging and surprising if social media, as we know it, is not going to supplant all these beliefs, at least in that same 2050 horizon! 

Surprisingly, my Mormons friends that have made huge en-roads in poorly educated countries like in South America claim 17 million members, but do they eventually all stick to that dogma? Finally Jews only account for 15 million, but remain an extremely loud minority worldwide, so talk about the tail wagging the dog!