Source: Christian Today, March 16, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The number of people identifying as Buddhist worldwide fell over the past decade, with researchers pointing to an aging population and a growing trend of people abandoning the religion in adulthood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A major new analysis by the Pew Research Center<\/a> found that Buddhism was the only major world faith to record a decline between 2010 and 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During that period, the number of Buddhists worldwide dropped from around 343 million to 324 million\u2014a fall of about 5%\u2014even as the global population expanded by roughly 12%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Researchers say the change reflects a combination of demographic pressures and religious switching, with more people leaving Buddhism than adopting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Buddhism continues to attract converts, it loses a greater proportion of those raised within the tradition than any other major faith examined in the study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read the full story<\/a>. Looks like the study, published in 2025<\/a>, reported that Muslims grew the fastest while Christians lagged behind population growth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Source: Christian Today, March 16, 2026 The number of people identifying as Buddhist worldwide fell over the past decade, with researchers pointing to an aging population and a growing trend of people abandoning the religion in adulthood. A major new analysis by the Pew Research Center found that Buddhism was the only major world faith … Continue reading Pew Study Shows Buddhism in a Worldwide Decline<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14598"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14599,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14598\/revisions\/14599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/missionscatalyst.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}