Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Another way of looking at the media coverage is to assess which religious faith was featured in each story studied. The data underscore just how prominently evangelicalism featured in the media narrative about American faith and politics. Evangelical Protestants received more coverage in the campaign than did the religion of either candidate – Mormonism and […]
An estimated 405 million people – or about 6% of the world’s total population – are adherents of folk or traditional religions. These are faiths that are closely associated with a particular group of people, ethnicity or tribe. They often have no formal creeds or sacred texts. Examples of folk religions include African traditional religions, […]
On Nov. 20, a Pakistani court ordered blasphemy charges dropped against a Christian teenager who had been accused of burning pages from the Quran. A new Pew Forum analysis finds that as of 2011 nearly half the countries and territories in the world have laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation.
In additional to the main analysis, researchers also examined two alternative streams of information: social media and niche publications directed at the Mormon community. Each revealed a tenor quite different from the mainstream media as well as from each other. An additional analysis of the conversation about religion and the two major candidates between August […]
Gregory A. Smith is a Senior Associate Director of Research at Pew Research Center, where he studies religion’s role in American public life, including religious change in the U.S., the intersection of religion and politics, American Catholicism, religiously unaffiliated Americans, and many other topics. He has led major public opinion studies, including the Center’s three Religious […]
Conrad Hackett is associate director of research and senior demographer at Pew Research Center. His expertise is in international religious demography, sociology of religion, and how religion relates to characteristics including gender, fertility and education. Hackett received his doctorate from Princeton University’s Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research and was a Postdoctoral Research […]