In one profoundly, maybe transcendently important respect, America and Europe seem destined to become ever more unlike most of the world around them — even as non-Western nations continue to catch up economically and technologically.
Devout agnostics, beware. The world is becoming more religious — and probably more ardently and conservatively religious.
This trend, shaped by global tides in belief and unbelief measured in "The Future of World Religions," a 2015 report from the Pew Research Center, is likely to be more pleasing to people of faith than to doubters. But then, many things are, it seems. In a brand-new survey this month, Pew reports that "highly religious Americans" are happier than the rest.
Four big belief groups account for nearly 9 in 10 of the world's people — Christians, Muslims, the "unaffiliated" and Hindus. Between now and 2050, Pew scholars project, each of these groups will grow along with global population — but only one will grow as a portion of the total.
That would be Muslims, who will expand from about 23 percent of world population in 2010 to about 30 percent by 2050 (the growth represents almost 1.2 billion additional Muslims).
Meanwhile, only one of the big four groups will noticeably shrink as a portion of the world's people in the decades ahead. That would be the unaffiliated — atheists, agnostics and those with no religious preference. Let's call them the "unreligious." Their proportion of world population will fall from about 16 percent today to about 13 percent in 2050, says Pew.
Curiously, though, and significantly, in the U.S. and Europe the unreligious population will surge in the next 30-odd years, right alongside swelling Muslim populations — surely adding to the West's cultural complexities, not to say its cultural contradictions.
In Europe, Pew researchers say, Muslims will make up fully 10 percent of the population by 2050 (up from less than 6 percent today), while the unreligious will by then constitute 23 percent.