More houses of worship are returning to normal operations, but in-person attendance is unchanged since fall
Churches and other houses of worship increasingly are holding services the way they did before the COVID-19 outbreak began.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Churches and other houses of worship increasingly are holding services the way they did before the COVID-19 outbreak began.
Highly religious Americans are much more likely to see society in those terms, while nonreligious people tend to see more ambiguity.
Self-identified Christians make up 63% of the U.S. population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago.
Immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa tend to be more religious than U.S.-born Black adults or immigrants from the Caribbean.
75% of Black Americans say that opposing racism is essential to their faith or sense of morality, a view that extends across faith traditions.
Black Southerners diverge from other Black Americans – especially Northeasterners and Westerners – in other ways when it comes to religion.
63% of U.S adults have a “very” or “mostly” favorable opinion of Pope Francis, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March.
Among White Americans, worship service attendance remains highly correlated with presidential vote choice.
In the new survey, the Center attempted for the first time to pose some of these philosophical questions to a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, finding that Americans largely blame random chance – along with people’s own actions and the way society is structured – for human suffering, while relatively few believers blame God or voice doubts about the existence of God for this reason.
During the pandemic, a stable share of U.S. adults have been participating in religious services in some way – either virtually or in person – but in-person attendance is slightly lower than it was before COVID-19. Among Americans surveyed across several years, the vast majority described their attendance habits in roughly the same way in both 2019 and 2022.
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