Misidentifying the Birthplace of Jesus
A quarter of respondents in our 2010 religious knowledge survey incorrectly identified Jerusalem or Nazareth, instead of Bethlehem, as the birthplace of Jesus.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Download the Methodology as a PDF (180 KB, 17pages) This study provides comprehensive demographic estimates of the size and distribution of eight major religious groups in the 232 countries and territories for which the United Nations Population Division provides general population estimates as of 2010.16 It includes estimates for Christians, Muslims, the religiously unaffiliated, Hindus, […]
Eight-in-ten Americans say they learned little or nothing about the Mormon religion during the 2012 presidential campaign, according to a new Pew Research Center poll. At the same time, poll findings suggest some warming of attitudes toward Mormonism, especially among religious groups that voted heavily for Mitt Romney.
Three years ago the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life launched an effort to generate up-to-date and fully sourced estimates of the current size and projected growth of the world’s major religious groups. As part of this multi-phase project, the Pew Forum has assembled data on the size and geographic distribution of […]
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, […]
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 […]