Pew Research Center is the world’s leading organization when it comes to statistics on social and religious demographics. I have personally utilized many of their reports in some of my previous articles. Pew recently published (26 March 2025) a survey on trends in people changing or abandoning their religion, titled “Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions.” As it outlines in the introduction, it questioned “nearly 80,000 people in 36 countries.” It also informs us as to why they chose the term “religious switching” rather than “conversion,” the reason being that many do not end up choosing another religion but instead become unaffiliated (likely atheists or agnostics). They also highlight the following in the introduction:

Christianity and Buddhism have experienced especially large losses from this “religious switching”

Christianity: Forever Surrendering to Caesar

Unexpectedly, Christianity has taken the biggest hit when it comes to “religious disaffiliation” or what we might generally refer to as “apostasy.” It only appears to be having some relative success in South Korea, where 9% say they were previously religiously unaffiliated but are now religious, with most of them (6%) being self-identified Christians. Everywhere else, however, the situation looks extremely bleak for Christians:

These numbers are quite staggering.

Spain finds itself at the very top of the chart, with 35% of adults revealing that they were raised as Christians but are now religiously unaffiliated (atheists or agnostics). It is followed mainly by other Western countries, where the numbers stand between 20–30%. Italy, one of the European countries that are supposedly “still religious,” sees itself at 20%. In fact, we learn from another graph that Italy actually has a very interesting record. For each individual that has become Christian, 28.4 others have left the religion. Poland, another supposedly “still religious” European country, is also very high up on the chart, with 12.4 people having left Christianity for every 1 gained:

The report also highlights certain demographic trends:

Such “religious switching” tends more often to affect those that are under the age of 35 and those that are more educated, i.e., formatted through secular education. You’ll also notice that some of the most affected countries are those that are traditionally considered to be religious, particularly the Catholic areas, both in Europe and in Latin America. We read the following in chapter 2 of the report:

Italy, Colombia and Greece have the highest levels of “accession,” or entrance, into their religiously unaffiliated populations, with roughly nine-in-ten unaffiliated adults in these countries saying they were raised in a religious tradition. Currently, 23% of Italian and Colombian adults, along with 14% of Greeks, identify as unaffiliated.

 

[…]

 

Most religiously unaffiliated adults surveyed were raised in some religious tradition as children.

 

In Italy, Colombia and Greece, roughly nine-in-ten adults who now have no religion say they were brought up with some religious affiliation, meaning that the religiously unaffiliated population in those places has a very high “accession” (or entrance) rate.

 

In these three countries, as well as many others in Europe and the Americas, a large share of religiously unaffiliated adults were raised Christian.

Also linked to the above, I would recommend reading the following relevant article by our dear brother, Daniel Haqiqatjou, which he had written back in 2022:

Christianity Is Losing the Most Followers BY FAR: What Are Apologists Doing About It?

Christians are thus experiencing an “avalanche of apostasy.” Rather than having “rendered unto Caesar” (i.e., the secular-temporal authority), they’ve completely surrendered to Caesar. Also, unlike all of the relentless social engineering projects that have been employed in the Muslim world for almost two centuries (the imposition of liberalism, feminism, etc.), this kind of brutal onslaught against Christianity is virtually never carried out by self-identified Muslims.

Islam: “Tired of Winning Yet?”

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the “religious switching” affecting several Muslim-majority societies. We read:

Across the 13 countries with sufficient sample sizes to analyze religious switching for Muslims, 3% or fewer of all adults have left or entered Islam, resulting in very little change between childhood and current religion from religious switching.

 

For instance, in Indonesia, the share of adults who currently identify as Muslim is equal to the share who say they were raised Muslim (93%). Fewer than 1% of all adults surveyed in Indonesia say they have left or entered Islam.

When I was a teenager growing up in the 2000s, I remember constantly hearing Christian missionaries (mostly Evangelical) claiming that millions (yes, millions!) of Indonesian Muslims were becoming Christians every year (yes, again, you heard right…)! Even back then, I had ample reasons to be extremely skeptical regarding such claims. For instance, this would mean that more than 1% of the total population was becoming Christian each year, a drastic shift that would surely have been reflected in the national statistics.

But it seems that we now can bury this fake news with absolute certainty. The reality is that it has mostly been a sort of coping mechanism from Christians—”look, we might be losing terribly in the West, but hey, look at Asia and countries like China!” Of course, the “Christianization of China” is another myth that has recently been debunked, (you may refer to this research article for details).

We also find the following graph:

We can see that Türkiye is the country that has the highest net apostasy rate of Muslims. Yet, when compared to the Christian numbers that had been detailed earlier (even those in the so-called “still religious Christian countries”) such numbers (3%) pail in comparison. We also have to keep in mind that Türkiye is the most secularized large Muslim-majority society, thanks to the Kemalist institutions, and it also hosts minorities such as Alevis. For more details on this issue, as well as current trends, you may consult the following Muslim Skeptic article which is based on an academic report:

New Faith Survey in Türkiye: Strong Religious Devotion Despite Decades of Secularism

In countries like Kenya, Nigeria, and Singapore, the loss is matched equally by the gain (1%), while in the specific case of Malaysia, there is no loss at all but rather only a net gain (2%). This is a very rare phenomenon to be witnessing in a secularized world, especially within an “advanced economy” such as that of Malaysia. I would recommend checking out the following Muslim Skeptic article, where I had discussed the religiosity rates among the youth of the Nusantara (Indonesia and Malaysia) region:

Muslim Youth in South-East Asia Are More Religious Than Their Parents

I would also recommend perusing some other Muslim Skeptic articles in order to get an understanding of statistics for various geographical zones not covered by Pew:

Arab Barometer Director: “Political Islam” on the Upswing, Particularly Among the Youth!

Pakistan’s Youth Yearn for an “Islamic Dictatorship”

Analyzing the Claim That “50% of Iranians Are Atheists”

Other Religions: Not Worthy of Consideration?

Aside from Christianity and Islam, there are other “world religions” that have also been surveyed. Other than Christianity, another religion that has been hit pretty badly is Buddhism. But, is Buddhism’s rise or fall even really worth analyzing considering how it evolves mostly into a secular context with no impact on the domestic politics of these countries, let alone world geopolitics?

Then you have the likes of Judaism and Hinduism, which in the practical sense evolve more as cultures than they do as religions.

Judaism has a high retention rate. However, Pew also shows that there’s a significant movement towards secularization among the Jews of Israel. In February 2025, another Pew report demonstrated that some 26% of self-identified American Jews don’t even believe in God. The point being, Judaism is an ethnoreligion. For most Jews today, it is more of a question of ethnicity rather than a religion. As such, an atheist Jew wouldn’t declare themself to be an “ex-Jew.” It therefore wouldn’t be reflected in the statistics pertaining to religious switching.

Even when it comes to Hindus, there is a vital “cultural reading” of these statistics. This is because many Hindus consider Hinduism to be a culture rather than a set of spiritual beliefs. This is why there are a very large number of “Hindu atheists,” including the founding father of Hindu nationalism (or Hindutva), Savarkar.

RELATED: The Caste Quest–ion: Hindu Nationalism Destroys Traditional Hinduism

For the reasons mentioned above, I don’t consider it worthwhile comparing religious statistics about Islam with these other “word religions.” They are simply too secularized.

The way that Islam stands triumphant over all other religions when it comes to such religious statistics—not just in terms of sheer quantity but also the undeniably higher quality of its religious standards and adherents—is reminiscent of the following verse from the Qur’an:

He is the One who has sent His Messenger [Muhammad] with the guidance [of the Qur’an] and the religion of truth, that He may cause it to prevail [on its own merit] over every religion — even if the idolaters hate [it]. (Qur’an, 9:33)

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