Pew Research’s fourth major report on global restrictions on religion finds that the share of countries with high or very high restrictions on religion rose from 37% in 2010 to 40% in 2011. The Middle East and North Africa continued to have the highest levels of restrictions in the year when much of the Arab Spring uprisings occurred, with social hostilities involving religion increasing markedly and government restrictions remaining high.
The biggest religion stories of 2011 involved tensions over Islam and questions about faith in presidential politics, especially Mormonism, according to an annual review of religion in the news.
The public continues to express conflicted views of Islam. Favorable opinions of Islam have declined since 2005, but there has been virtually no change over the past year in the proportion of Americans saying that Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence. As was the case a year ago, slightly more people […]
George Mason University Professor Peter Mandaville, Dilwar Hussain of the Islamic Foundation, and Maha Azzam of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House discussed key findings of a Pew Forum study containing profiles of some of the oldest, largest and most influential Muslim groups – from the Muslim Brotherhood to mystical Sufi orders and networks of religious scholars.
Introduction Over the past two decades, the number of Muslims living in Western Europe has steadily grown, rising from less than 10 million in 1990 to approximately 17 million in 2010.[1. Figures are from a forthcoming Pew Forum report that estimates growth rates among Muslim populations worldwide and provides population projections for 2020 and 2030. […]
The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life held a conference call with journalists to discuss the findings of a new 19-country survey, “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa.” The study finds that the vast majority of people in many sub-Saharan African nations are deeply committed to Christianity or Islam, […]
More than half a century ago, the United Nations affirmed the principle of religious freedom in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, defining it as “the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” For just as long, journalists and human rights groups have reported on persecution of minority faiths, outbreaks of sectarian violence […]
This report is a special segment of A Year in the News, an analysis of the mainstream media in 2008 conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. This segment of the analysis was written in collaboration with the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. The biggest single religion […]
Catholic civic engagement plays a central role in American politics, and the question of how Catholic convictions translate to the public square is a matter of frequent discussion. In his recent book Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life (2008), the Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, archbishop of […]
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