Key findings about restrictions on religion around the world in 2019
Social hostilities around the world involving religion declined in 2019 to the lowest level in five years.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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Highly religious Americans more skeptical of human enhancements such as brain implants, gene editing
Many Americans who are highly religious and identify with certain Christian traditions express discomfort with human enhancement.
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1. In 2019, decline in number of countries with ‘very high’ government restrictions, social hostilities involving religion
CORRECTION (Dec. 19, 2025): Two charts and some of the text in Chapter 1 have been corrected with updated SHI figures. Refer to the errata page for details. Countries with the most extensive government restrictions on religion Government restrictions on religion vary from country to country, and some countries have much higher scores on the Government Restrictions […]
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Women are becoming more involved in U.S. mosques
Women continue to be less involved than men in mosque life in the U.S., but the pattern appears to be changing.
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Methodology
This section describes the sources and variables used for the analyses in this report. It explains known limitations of the data. Next, it outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the map used, as well as possible alternatives and reasons why data is shown as missing in some areas. Finally, the multilevel mixed-effects modeling used in […]
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About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated
Self-identified Christians make up 63% of the U.S. population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago.
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How we designed a scale to measure Americans’ knowledge of international affairs
Pew Research Center recently sought to measure what U.S. adults know about geography, foreign leaders, institutions and other issues.
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1. Religious freedom, discrimination and communal relations
Indians generally see high levels of religious freedom in their country. Overwhelming majorities of people in each major religious group, as well as in the overall public, say they are “very free” to practice their religion. Smaller shares, though still majorities within each religious community, say people of other religions also are very free to […]
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5. Religious identity
The vast majority of Indians identify with six major religious groups: Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains. In this report, respondents are often categorized accordingly, based on their answers to a question about their religious identity. But the survey also finds that for most members of these six groups, these identities are not only […]
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9. Religious clothing and personal appearance
Definitions of terms in this chapter Bindi: A decorative mark on the forehead, worn by Hindu women (and members of some other religious groups), traditionally believed to be venerating an energy center of the human body or representing “the third eye,” but also worn as an adornment or a sign of marriage. Burqa: A loose-fitting […]