Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Based on religious affiliation (or lack thereof), the groups that display the highest levels of religious knowledge on this survey include Jews (who get an average of 18.7 out of 32 questions correct), self-described atheists (17.9) and self-described agnostics (17.0). Looked at another way, seven-in-ten Jewish respondents (69%) answer at least half of the questions […]
General sources and archives Demographic and Health Surveys. Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Implemented by ICF. http://www.dhsprogram.com/. European Social Survey. Led by the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys. City University, (London) in partnership with the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), GESIS (Germany), NSD (Norway), and SCP and the University of Amsterdam […]
More than 5 billion people – or three-quarters of the world’s population – live in the planet’s 25 most populous countries, including China, India and the United States. Looking at restrictions in these countries can give insight into how large segments of the world’s population are affected by government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion, […]
Data sources and analytical approaches used in the report are described in this section. First, this appendix provides shares of the populations that are represented in the study and details on the underlying source data. It goes on to explain how household types were categorized based on relationships in household rosters and how household sizes […]
Before you read the report Test your religious knowledge by taking an interactive quiz. The short quiz includes some questions recently asked in the nationally representative survey that forms the basis of this report. After completing the quiz, you can see how you did in comparison with the general public and with people like yourself. […]
About three-quarters of the world’s people (more than 5 billion) live in the 25 most populous countries in the world. Examining the religious restrictions in these countries can show how government restrictions and social hostilities impact large portions of the world’s population – although not all who reside in these countries are affected equally, as […]
Countries with the most extensive government restrictions on religion Most countries around the world have some form of restrictions on religion – whether it is through laws that limit actions like public preaching or conversion, or actions that can include detaining, displacing or assaulting members of religious groups. A subset of countries, however, has particularly […]
The wide collection of cross-national Pew Research Center surveys analyzed in this report on age gaps in religious commitment can also be used to look at the ways religious observance varies among all adults – defined as people ages 18 and older – in different parts of the world. The four standard measures of religious […]
Orthodox Christians around the world display widely varying levels of religious observance. For example, while just 6% of Orthodox Christians in Russia say they attend church on a weekly basis, a large majority of Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia (78%) say they do this. Indeed, by several standard measures of religious observance, Orthodox Christians living in […]
While the worldwide population of all non-Orthodox Christians has virtually quadrupled since 1910, the Orthodox population has merely doubled, from approximately 124 million to 260 million. And as the geographical center of the overall Christian population has shifted since 1910 from its centuries-old European base into developing nations in the Southern Hemisphere, most Orthodox Christians […]