I snapped the above picture in Cairo, Egypt last year. To the left is a Coptic Orthodox Church and to the left is a fabric store with writing in Arabic. I was on a reconnaissance mission to figure out what it would take Muslims to become Christian and what it would take to get non-Catholic Christians to become Catholic. My findings were reflected in some recent secular studies:
The Pew Research Center recently reported: “Christians remained the world’s biggest religious group. But Christians (of all denominations, counted as one group) did not keep pace with global population growth from 2010 to 2020. The number of Christians rose by 122 million, reaching 2.3 billion. Yet, as a share of the world’s population, Christians fell 1.8 percentage points, to 28.8%.”
The Washington Post also covered the above stats: “Even as the overall number of Christians — counted as one group, across denominations — continued to climb to 2.3 billion, the religion’s share of the world’s population decreased by 1.8 percentage points to 28.8 percent, a falloff driven in large part by disaffiliation. The Muslim population, on the other hand, increased by 1.8 percentage points to 25.6 percent, according to the report, which examined changes in religious demographics through an analysis of more than 2,700 censuses and surveys.”
One of the main reasons for this is that Muslims are outbreeding Christians. So-called “Christian families” are contracepting themselves into a demographic winter. This is true not only in rich countries, but also poor countries. For example, both times I lived in urban areas in Mexico I noticed that most families had only two children. This is not the Catholic-Mexico of 100 years ago, even under the martyr-making Elías Calles. Back then, Catholics were Catholics, even under the persecutions.
There are other theological reasons as to why Islam is growing faster than Christianity. Africa had most their conversions before Vatican II as I proved in this article.
In that article, I showed stats and then I wrote: “The percentage of Catholics in Africa went up from 2% to 13% during 1900 to 1962 alone. But after Vatican II, that 13% of Catholics (continent-wide) went up to only 15% of the population. On the other hand, the percentage of Protestant believers in Africa went up after Vatican II from 15% to 29%. This means that pre-conciliar missionaries like Archbishop Lefebvre saw numbers practicing the faith going up 650% higher on the African continent before Vatican II in the 20th century alone.”
Now, however, Christians are only being baptized at their birth-rate. So also in the United States, everything tanked in the 1960s and 1970s. I proved here that the pre-Conciliar rate of conversion to the Catholic Church in the United States greatly outweighed every attempt from 1965 onwards. Our retention rate as American Catholics was also much higher before we began our own auto-destruction of dogma, liturgy and other sacraments.
Muslims never had a Vatican II to water-down their own teachings or worship. The fact is that men want a religion that has an air-tight system, not one of flaky loopholes like we see in the constant games around the new 1983 Code of Canon Law. Any religion that challenges men is going to grow rapidly, even if it’s a wicked religion like Islam.
Of course, it’s not for us to emulate Muslims, but rather to counter Satan’s “real-deal” (Islam) with God’s “real-deal”—Traditional Catholicism—which is the only real version of Catholicism. Catholicism can’t change, and the human heart seems to know this. People don’t want a half-baked religion.
Last week, my friend Raymond Ibraham (a Coptic Orthodox Christian American born in Egypt) was on Steve Bannon’s WarRoom with Ben Harnwell. In it, Mr. Ibraham observed: “Modern day Western Christianity is not appealing. It has become such an abstract idea, stripped of ritual and stripped of history… We need a more robust historic form of Christianity. That is what appealed to people. That is what men fought and died for… They’re not going to do it for what’s now being paraded as Christianity, which is just a mask for craven behavior.”
My article next week will be about how we can go forward (read: backwards) from here.