Countries with the most extensive government restrictions on religion Most countries in the world have some form of government restrictions on religion, but each year a few countries stand out as having particularly extensive restrictions. In 2014, 16 of the 198 countries included in the study had a “very high” level of government restrictions, down […]
About half of U.S. adults have looked for a new religious congregation at some point in their lives, most commonly because they have moved.
Worldwide, both government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion decreased modestly from 2013 to 2014 despite a rise in religion-related terrorism, according to Pew Research Center’s latest annual study on global restrictions on religion.[1. This is the fourth time Pew Research Center has analyzed restrictions on religion in a calendar year. Earlier reports […]
Another widely accepted indicator of religious commitment is daily prayer. Pew Research Center has collected data on frequency of prayer in 84 countries. In 40 of those countries, there is no significant difference in levels of daily prayer reported by men and women. But in 43 countries (just over 50% of the total), women report […]
Standard lists of history’s most influential religious leaders – among them Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) – tend to be predominantly, if not exclusively, male. Many religious groups, including Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews, allow only men to be clergy, while others, including some denominations in the evangelical Protestant tradition, have lifted that restriction only in recent decades. Yet it often appears that the ranks of the faithful are dominated by women.
Pew Research Center data on frequency of attendance at worship services are available in 81 countries, where an average of 48% of men and 42% of women report attending worship services at least once a week. However, the pattern of attendance varies considerably across these countries: In 23 of the 81 nations, men and women […]
