Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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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 […]
Four years ago, in the 2008 presidential election, media coverage of religion focused on a pivotal, defining moment for each candidate. In Romney’s case, the coverage peaked in December 2007 when he delivered a major speech about faith in public life in an effort to reduce public unease with Mormonism; many media reports likened Romney’s […]
The newly elected 113th Congress includes the first Buddhist to serve in the Senate, the first Hindu to serve in either chamber and the first member of Congress to describe her religion as “none.” While Congress remains majority Protestant, the institution is far less so today than it was 50 years ago.
Religiously unaffiliated Americans tend to be, almost by definition, less religious than Americans who belong to a religious tradition. In Pew Research Center surveys, the unaffiliated are less likely than the general public as a whole to say that religion is very important in their lives, to attend worship services regularly and to pray on […]