Claims to be the fastest-growing religion

Most major religions sometimes make claims to be the fastest-growing religion. As such, the title is hotly contested. Even the best method of determining which religion is the fastest-growing is a matter of contention. Several variables are brought into play, such as absolute number vs. percentage, conversions only or also births, etc., how broadly a religion is defined (e.g., Christianity as a whole, or a particular denomination), when the growth period is considered to begin, and the geographic region in question.
By careful selection of these parameters, most religions can make some claim to being the fastest-growing in some place and over some period of time.
Definition
Religions can grow in numbers because of conversion or because of higher birth rates in a religious group or both. Measures counting absolute numbers tend to favour the larger religions (Islam, Christianity, Hinduism for example which have at least 1 billion followers and more). Measures counting percentage growth tend to favour smaller ones such as Wicca, Falun Gong and other minority religions.
The fastest growing religion could refer to:

* The religion whose absolute number of adherents is growing the fastest.
* The religion that is growing fastest in terms of percentage growth per year.
* The religion that is gaining the greatest number of converts in the world.
Data collection
Statistics on religious adherence are difficult to gather and often contradictory; statistics for the change of religious adherence are even more so, requiring multiple surveys separated by many years using the same data gathering rules. This has only been achieved in rare cases, and then only for a particular country, such as the American Religious Identification Survey in the USA, or census data from Australia (which has included a voluntary religious question since 1911).
Statistics
What follows details some of the claims made by major religions (and atheists) to be the fastest-growing religion (or non-religion, in the case of atheism).
Buddhism
Buddhism is being recognized as the fastest growing religion in Western societies both in terms of new converts and more so in terms of friends of Buddhism, who seek to study and practice various aspects of Buddhism.
One estimate ranks Buddhism among the fastest growing religions in the United States and in many Western European countries. The Australian Bureau of Statistics through statistical analysis held Buddhism to be the fastest growing spiritual tradition/religion in Australia in terms of percentage gain with a growth of 79.1% for the period 1996 to 2001 (200,000→358,000). Buddhism is the fastest-growing religion in England's jails, with the number of followers rising eightfold over the past decade. A traditional belief among its majority Chinese population, Buddhism is the fastest growing religion in Macau.
Christianity
According to a 2005 paper submitted to a meeting of the American Political Science Association, most of this growth has occurred in non-Western countries and concludes the Pentecostalism movement is the fastest growing religion worldwide.
In Vietnam, the US Department of State estimates that Protestants in Vietnam may have grown 600% over the last decade. In Nigeria, the numbers of Christians has grown from 21.4% in 1953 to 50.8% in 2010. In South Korea, Christianity has grown from 20.7% in 1985 to 29.3% in 2010. In China, a recent boom in the Christian population has been called one of the "greatest revivals in Christian history". Mainland China now has about 67 million Christians, or about 5% of the total population, despite considerable persecution under Chairman Mao. In fact, the Christian population is growing so fast, it is expected to reach over 400 million people by 2040, which will make China the largest Christian country on Earth.
Evangelical Christian denominations are among the fastest growing denominations in some Catholic Christian countries, such as Brazil and France. In Brazil, the total number of Protestants jumped from 16.2% in 2000 to 22.2% in 2010 (For the first time the percentage of Catholics in Brazil is less than 70%).
Mormonism
The records of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints show membership growth every decade since its beginning in the 1830s. Following initial growth rates that averaged 10% to 25% per year in the 1830s through 1850s, it grew at about 4% per year through the last four decades of the 19th century. After a steady slowing of growth in the first four decades of the 20th century to a rate of about 2% per year in the 1930s (the Great Depression years), growth boomed to an average of 6% per year for the decade around 1960, staying around 4% to 5% through 1990. After 1990, average annual growth again slowed steadily to a rate around 2.5% for the first decade of the 21st century, still double the world population growth rate of 1.2% for the same period. Rodney Stark predicts that it could become a major world religion by the end of the 21st century if the current growth trend of between 30% and 50% per decade continues. Currently its growth rate, not internationally but in the United States, is at 1.6%, about the rate of the growth of the rest of the U.S. population, which is still the largest growth of the top ten largest Christian denominations, with many other churches having negative growth.
Deism
The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) survey, which involved 50,000 participants, reported that the number of participants in the survey identifying themselves as deists grew at the rate of 717% between 1990 and 2001. If this were generalized to the US population as a whole, it would make deism the fastest-growing religious classification in the US for that period, with the reported total of 49,000 self-identified adherents representing about 0.02% of the US population at the time. However, the percentage of Hindus in the population of India has decreased by 3 percentage points since 1961, dropping from 83.5% in 1961 to 80.5% in 2001.
Islam
Islam began in Arabia and from 633AD until the late 10th century it was spread after Arab armies began overtaking Christian lands from Syria to North Africa and Spain, as well as Buddhist/Hindu lands in Central Asia, parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia via military invasions, and conquering wars. Many converted for a whole host of reasons, the main of which was evangelisation by Muslims, though there were some instances where some were pressured to convert owing to internal conflict and friction between the Christian and Muslim communities, according to historian Philip Jenkins. However John L. Esposito, a scholar on the subject of Islam in "The Oxford History of Islam" states that the spread of Islam "was often peaceful and sometimes even received favourably by Christians". Yale University's The MacMillan Center Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Society states that forced conversions played little part in the history of the spread of the faith. However, the poll tax known Jizyah may have played a part in converting people over to Islam but as Britannica notes "The rate of taxation and methods of collection varied greatly from province to province and were greatly influenced by local pre-Islamic customs" and there were even cases when Muslims had the tax levied against them, on top of Zakat. The MacMillan Center has also discussed the Jizyah issue and stated that Muslim governments discouraged conversion but were unable to prevent it.
In 1990, 935 million people were Muslims. According to the BBC, a comprehensive American study concluded in 2009 the number stood at approximately 23% of the world population with 60% of Muslims living in Asia. From 1990 to 2010, the global Muslim population increased at an average annual rate of 2.2%. By 2030 Muslims are projected to represent about 26.4% of the global population (out of a total of 7.9 billion people). Several sources believe that this increase is due primarily to high birth rates. However according to others including the Guinness Book of World Records, Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion by number of conversions each year: "Although the religion began in Arabia, by 2002 80% of all believers in Islam lived outside the Arab world. In the period 1990-2000, approximately 12.5 million more people converted to Islam than to Christianity".On the other hand in 2010 the Pew Forum stated "Statistical data on conversion to and from Islam are scarce. What little information is available suggests that there is no substantial net gain or loss in the number of Muslims through conversion globally; the number of people who become Muslims through conversion seems to be roughly equal to the number of Muslims who leave the faith. As a result, this report does not include any estimated future rate of conversions as a direct factor in the projections of Muslim population growth" The growth of Islam from 2010 to 2020 has been estimated at 1.70%
Wicca
The American Religious Identification Survey gives Wicca an average annual growth of 143% for the period 1990 to 2001 (from 8,000 to 134,000 - U.S. data / similar for Canada & Australia). The "Free Press Release Distribution Service" claims Wicca is one of the fastest growing religions in the United States as well. Wicca which is largely a Pagan religion is primarily attracting the followers of nature based religions in the Southern United States which is contributing towards its growth.
Nonreligious
In terms of absolute numbers, irreligion appears to be increasing (along with secularization generally)ï»¿. Even so, it is decreasing as a percentage of the world population, due primarily to population increases in more religious developing countries outpacing population growth (or decline) in less religious developed countries. (See the geographic distribution of atheism.)
The American Religious Identification Survey gave nonreligious groups the largest gain in terms of absolute numbers: 14.3 million (8.4% of the population) to 29.4 million (14.1% of the population) for the period 1990-2001 in the U.S. A 2012 study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reports, "The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public - and a third of adults under 30 - are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling." A similar pattern has been found in other countries such as Australia, Canada, and Mexico. According to statistics in Canada, the number of "Nones" increased by about 60% between 1985 and 2004. In Australia, census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics give "no religion" the largest gains in absolute numbers over the 15 years from 1991 to 2006, from 2,948,888 (18.2% of the population that answered the question) to 3,706,555 (21.0% of the population that answered the question). According to INEGI, in Mexico, the number of atheists grows annually by 5.2%, while the number of Catholics grows by 1.7%. In New Zealand, over 34% of the population are irreligious making it largest percentage of total population in Oceania region.

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