VANCOUVER — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and other well-known atheists consider the decline of religion inevitable as the global population becomes more secular, more educated and more urban.

Last month, a Pew Research poll in the U.S., the world’s most-religious industrialized nation, revealed that three out of four Americans also agree religion appears to be in retreat.

But is it? While secularists are making some inroads in North America and Europe, the new atheists and others are missing a crucial demographic shift as the world’s population has swelled to seven billion.

Those who believe the world is inexorably becoming more secular are overlooking the rise in the developing world of Muslims, Hindus, Catholics and Pentecostals, as well as the phenomenally rapid expansion of sects such as the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews.

In a challenge to the secularizing proposition, Eric Kaufmann, a noted London-based demographer, projects that religious people, especially conservatives, will win the race against the non-religious in the 21st century.

Why? Basically because religious women are having far more babies than secular women.

I recently had the chance to talk in Vancouver and in Britain with Kaufmann, who is a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Born in Hong Kong and raised in West Vancouver, Kaufmann is a highly affable scholar who has emerged as one of the West’s major public intellectuals. Examining data most other scholars ignore, Kaufmann has, among other things, been advising the British government on religion, politics, migration and ethnicity.

While most Western commentators have dismissed the 1968 warnings of Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, Kaufmann does not. One of his charts shows the world’s population has multiplied by seven since the Industrial Revolution began around 1840.

While it’s partly correct to say many low-birth-rate Europeans and North Americans, and many ethnic Chinese, increasingly find religion unnecessary, the larger global trend is that religious people are proliferating because of high fertility in the Middle East, Africa and South-East Asia.

The main reason Islam, Catholicism and conservative Protestantism is expanding is not necessarily because they’re converting newcomers, Kaufman argues, but because their religions tend to be “pro-natal” and they have more children.

“What no one has noticed is that far from declining, the religious are expanding their share of the population: in fact, the more religious people are, the more children they have,” Kaufmann says in Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (Profile Books).

“The cumulative effect of immigration from religious countries, and religious fertility will be to reverse the secularization process in the West. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme in their beliefs who have the largest families.”

Even while some critics have suggested Kaufmann’s projections are too adventurous and that he ignores the existential benefits of being part of a religious community or having a transcendent world view, his long-range demographic study is powerful.

He particularly punctures one liberal, secular platitude. Kaufmann’s data shows that conservative religious people do not necessarily have fewer children as they become more educated and urban.