This week’s news from Pew on the decline of institutional Christianity, with its trove of data on the “unaffiliated” and the decline of the mainstream, has stolen the stage from last month’s release of Pew’s report on the Future of World Religions—a study that concluded that while atheists, agnostics and the unchurched are on the rise in the U.S. their numbers are projected to decline globally. But while Pew’s prediction that Islam will overtake Christianity made headlines, the authors of the study were quick to remind us that their findings are not the direct results of polling but projections.
It would seem hard enough to project something as simple as population growth, but what of the mercurial nature of religious faith itself? It might well be impossible to predict the “turn of the soul” for one individual, let alone that of an entire community.
As a type of thought experiment let’s imagine a hypothetical “Court Demographer” working under the Tudor King Henry VIII in 1515. What sort of conclusions might he draw from an overview of the European situation at the time?