Faith Competition

When it comes to religious competition, population is a key asset. Especially with Islam and Christianity - - where both are locked in a worldwide quest to covet and convert as many souls as possible.

Eliza Griwold in her book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From The Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (2010), explains this best in the context of the line of latitude 700 miles north of the equator:

Growing population intensify these competitions. Due to the explosive growth of Christianity over the past fifty years, there are now 493 million Christians living south of the tenth parallel -- nearly a fourth of the world's Christian population of 2 billion To the north live the majority of the continent's [Africa] 367 million Muslims; they represent nearly one quarter of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. These figures are an effective reminder that four out of five Muslims live outside the Middle East. Indonesia, with 240 million people, is the most populous Muslim country in the world. Malaysia is its tiny, rich neighbor; the Philippines, its larger, poorer one. Together, the three countries have a population of 250 million Muslims and 110 million Christians. Indonesia and Malaysia are predominantly Muslim countries, with vocal Christian minorities. The Philippines - - with a powerful Catholic majority (population 92 million) mostly to the north of the tenth parallel and a Muslim minority (population 5 million) to the south - - is the opposite. It has been a strongly Christian country ever since Ferdinand Magellan planted a cross on an island hilltop there in 1521. Yet Islam, which arrived hundreds of years earlier, has remained a source of identity, and rebellion in the south for the past five hundred years.

Africa's and Asia's populations are expanding, on average, faster than those in the rest of the world. While the global population of 6.8 billion people increases by 1.2 percent every year, in Asia the rate is 1.4 percent and in Africa it doubles to 2.4 percent. In this fragile zone where the two religions meet, the pressures wrought by growing numbers of people and an increasingly vulnerable environment are sharpening the tensions between Christians and Muslims over land, food, oil, and water, over practices and hardening worldviews.