Actually, you are eloquent proof that Chesterton knew exactly what he was talking about. As to numbers, there are one billion Catholics and one billion other Christians in this world. Few of them live in Red China or India which have two billion or more people between them. There are a very substantial number of people, mostly Muslim, who inhabit much of the Middle East and parts of Asia and Africa. There is a substantial atheist and agnostic hangover in the former Soviet Union and its former satellites which also have substantial populations. There are pockets of continuing paganism in the Third World and some phonies and frauds who claim "Wicca" as a religion, as pointed out by this NR article. There are, of course, those poor souls who are so in love with their favorite sins that they choose those sins over the Way, the Truth and the Life, but God anticipated that and allowed them and us the gift of free will to choose Him or perdition. I think that about covers the question of whether and. if so, why many abandon Christianity (as many enter).
Any questions?
You mean here?
The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." . . . . I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? . . . . The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. . . . . If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. . . . Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has 'Hanwell' written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus."G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.