The Politics of Religion

The Changing World Population

Key findings from a study published by Pew Research,

• Muslims are the fastest-growing major religious group
• By 2050, the study projects India to be the country with the largest number of Muslims
• Muslims and Christians will be roughly equal in number around 2070
• Nearly four-in-ten Christians (38%) are projected to live in sub-Saharan Africa in 2050
• In the United States, Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in 2010 to two-thirds in 2050
• Buddhists will decline as a share of the world’s population

Pew Research group  is one of the few institutes funded by a charitable trust devoted to freely disseminating research data via internet. The charitable trust was set up by founder of US Sun Oil Company Joseph Pew. An entry from Wikipedia sums it up,

"Although today the Pew Charitable Trusts is non-partisan and non-ideological, Joseph Pew and his heirs were politically conservative. The mission of the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust, one of the seven funds, was to "acquaint the American people with the evils of bureaucracy and the values of a free market and to inform our people of the struggle, persecution, hardship, sacrifice and death by which freedom of the individual was won". Joseph N. Pew, Jr. called Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal "a gigantic scheme to raze U.S. businesses to a dead level and debase the citizenry into a mass of ballot-casting serfs"."

BTW, Roosevelt started the "Fire Side Chats" where he communicated with the US public directly via radio on government policies and social change. They were hugely popular and successful. That should put Narendra Modi's "Man Ki Baat" in context.