Turn on the news and you’ll hear about war, famine, political chaos, and ecological collapse. Scroll your feed and it’s worse. The overwhelming message from every direction, secular and Christian alike, is that the world is falling apart.

It isn’t.

By nearly every measurable indicator of human well-being, we are living in the best era in human history. Not perfect. Not without real suffering. But dramatically, overwhelmingly better than any previous generation could have imagined. The data isn’t ambiguous. It isn’t debatable. And most people have no idea.

Here are ten trends that should change how you think about the world, and maybe about God’s purposes in it.

1. Extreme Poverty Is Disappearing

In 1820, more than three-quarters of the human race lived in what we’d now call extreme poverty.1 Three out of four people. Let that sink in for a moment.

Today that number is under 10%. The World Bank estimates that about 800 million people still live in extreme poverty (which is 800 million too many), but that’s out of eight billion.2 Two centuries ago, it was nearly everyone.

This is the greatest material improvement in the history of our species, and it happened so gradually that almost nobody noticed.

2. Life Expectancy Has More Than Doubled

In 1800, no region on earth had an average life expectancy above 40. Global average was about 29.3 A world where burying your parents at 35 was normal and burying your children was expected.

Today the global average is 73.3 years.4 In many countries it’s over 80. We didn’t just nudge the number up. We more than doubled it in two centuries. Better nutrition, sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines. The sheer accumulation of human knowledge applied to the problem of death.

3. Child Mortality Has Plummeted

This one is personal for any parent. For most of human history, roughly half of all children died before reaching adulthood.5 In many countries in 1800, more than four in ten children didn’t survive to their fifth birthday. Imagine having four kids and expecting to lose two. That was normal. That was every family’s normal.

Today the global under-5 mortality rate is about 1 in 27.6 Still heartbreaking where it happens. Still too high in sub-Saharan Africa. But the trajectory is staggering, and the pace of improvement accelerated dramatically in the last thirty years.

Since 1990 alone, the world has gone from 12.8 million child deaths per year to 4.9 million.6 Nearly eight million more children surviving every single year.

4. The Literacy Miracle

Two hundred years ago, only about one in ten humans could read.7 Today it’s 88%.8 Youth literacy (ages 15 to 24) is at 93% and climbing.8

Think about what that means. For most of human history, the written word was inaccessible to the vast majority of people. Scripture, literature, science, law, philosophy: all locked behind a gate that almost no one could pass through. Now nearly nine out of ten adults on the planet can read.

This is arguably the most dramatic cognitive transformation in human history. And it happened in about six generations.

5. Hunger Is in Retreat

In the early 1990s, nearly 19% of the global population was undernourished. Today it’s about 8.2%, and falling again after a brief COVID-era increase.9 The absolute number of hungry people has dropped even as the world population has grown by billions.

This is not to minimize the 673 million people who are still hungry.9 It’s to recognize that we’ve cut the rate by more than half in one generation, something that would have seemed impossible to anyone alive in 1950.

6. Violence Is at Historic Lows

This is the one people push back on the hardest, because it feels wrong. But the data is overwhelming.

In prehistoric and pre-state societies, roughly 15% of people died from violence.10 In medieval Europe, the homicide rate was about 50 per 100,000.11 Today the global rate is under 6 per 100,000, and in much of Western Europe it’s below 1.12

War deaths tell a similar story. Despite the headlines, we live in the most peaceful era in recorded human history by virtually every metric: battle deaths per capita, duration of conflicts, number of interstate wars. The twentieth century, for all its horrors, killed about 3% of the world’s population in war-related deaths. Pre-state societies averaged 15%.10

We have not eliminated violence. But we have reduced it by an order of magnitude.

7. Clean Water Is Reaching More People Than Ever

In 2015, 68% of the global population had access to safely managed drinking water. By 2024, that number had risen to 74%, meaning 961 million more people gained access in less than a decade.13

Sanitation has seen even more dramatic gains, rising from 48% to 58% coverage in the same period.13 These aren’t glamorous numbers. They don’t make headlines. But clean water and basic sanitation are the foundation of public health, and the trendline is moving in the right direction faster than at any point in history.

8. Diseases Are Being Conquered

Smallpox killed roughly 300 million people in the twentieth century alone. It has been completely eradicated.14 Wild polio, which once paralyzed hundreds of thousands of children annually, is now confined to two countries with fewer than 100 cases per year.15 Guinea worm, which afflicted 3.5 million people in 1986, had just 15 confirmed cases in 2024.16

Malaria deaths have fallen by more than 50% since 2000.17 HIV/AIDS, once a death sentence, is now a manageable chronic condition for millions. The pace of medical progress is breathtaking when you step back far enough to see the full picture.

9. Access to Education Is Expanding

In 1900, fewer than half the world’s children attended primary school.18 Today, primary school enrollment is above 90% globally.18 Secondary and tertiary education are expanding even faster.

More people are being educated, to higher levels, in more countries, than at any point in human history. The average person alive today has access to more knowledge (through schools, libraries, and the internet) than the wealthiest king could have dreamed of three centuries ago.

10. The Church Is Growing

This is the one you won’t find in the secular optimism literature, but it might be the most important trend on this list.

There are 2.64 billion Christians in the world today, and the number is growing faster than the global population.19 Christianity in Africa is growing at 2.59% per year; the continent is now home to 750 million believers and passed Latin America in 2018 as the most Christian continent on earth.19 Christianity in Asia is growing at 1.6% per year, with 416 million believers projected to reach 600 million by 2050.19

In Iran (Iran), an estimated 1 to 3 million people have converted from Islam to Christianity, making it home to one of the fastest-growing evangelical movements on the planet.20 Exact numbers are inherently uncertain for underground movements, but the trajectory is unmistakable. This despite Bibles being banned, pastors imprisoned, and converts facing criminal prosecution.

The center of gravity of global Christianity has shifted decisively to the Global South. 69% of all Christians now live in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. By 2050, that will be 78%.19

The Great Commission is not failing. It is succeeding at a pace that should take your breath away.

So What?

You can look at all of this and draw purely secular conclusions. Steven Pinker does, and he does it well. Hans Rosling did the same. The data is the data, and it’s good news regardless of your theological commitments.

But I’m a Christian, and I think the data points somewhere specific.

Jesus told two parables back to back in Matthew 13: one about a mustard seed that becomes a great tree, and one about leaven that works through an entire lump of dough. Both describe something small becoming something that transforms everything. Both describe a process, not an event. Both describe the Kingdom of Heaven.

Two thousand years ago, Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father. He sat down on a throne. And Paul tells us plainly what He is doing there: “He must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (1 Cor. 15:25). Not will reign. Not shall reign someday. He must reign. Present tense, ongoing, non-negotiable.

The postmillennial conviction, the one that animates this whole project, is that this reign is not decorative. It is operative. Christ’s Kingdom has been advancing for two thousand years, and the ten trends above are what that advance looks like on the ground. Not through coercion. Not through political power. Through the slow, steady, often invisible work of the Gospel transforming people, families, communities, institutions, and civilizations.

I’m not saying there’s no suffering. I’m not saying there’s no sin. I’m saying the King is on His throne, and the evidence is all around us if we have eyes to see it.

The world is getting better. The data proves it.

His Kingdom advances on all fronts.