Christians remain by far the largest religious group in the United States, but the Christian share of the population has declined markedly. In the past seven years, the percentage of adults who describe themselves as Christians has dropped from 78.4% to 70.6%. Once an overwhelmingly Protestant nation, the U.S. no longer has a Protestant majority. […]
Like the 2007 Religious Landscape Study, the new survey shows a remarkable degree of churn in the U.S. religious landscape. If Protestantism is treated as a single religious group, then fully 34% of American adults currently have a religious identity different from the one in which they were raised, which is up six percentage points […]
This appendix details the methods used in this study to project changes in the population size and geographic distribution of eight major religious groups from 2010 to 2050. It is organized in five sections. The first section explains how the baseline (2010) religious composition estimates were derived. The second section describes how key input data […]
The number of Hindus around the world is projected to rise from slightly more than 1 billion in 2010 to nearly 1.4 billion in 2050. This increase will roughly keep pace with overall population growth. As a result, Hindus will remain fairly stable as a share of the world’s population over the next four decades, […]
This chapter uses standard demographic methods to project changes in the size of eight major religious groups from 2010-2050. The groups, presented in descending order of their 2010 size, are: Christians, Muslims, the religiously unaffiliated, Hindus, Buddhists, adherents of folk or traditional religions, members of “other religions” (consolidated into a single group) and Jews. Each […]
On an early January morning in 2013, Shehzad Luqman, a 27-year-old Pakistani Muslim living in Greece, was riding his bicycle to work in an Athens suburb when he was violently attacked. Two men suspected of being members of Greece’s neo-Nazi political party, Golden Dawn, were later convicted of stabbing Luqman to death.[1. numoffset=”30″ See U.S. […]
In addition to looking at the harassment of specific religious groups, this report, for the first time, looks at the prevalence of restrictions and hostilities that tend to target religious minorities. To measure the extent of these restrictions and hostilities, Pew Research identified three measures on the Government Restrictions Index and three on the Social […]
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 2013, 18 countries had a “very high” level of government restrictions, down from 24 countries in 2012. Most of […]
Media Contact: Katherine Ritchey, Communications Manager 202-419-4372, kritchey@pewresearch.org Washington, Feb. 26, 2015 — Worldwide, social hostilities involving religion declined somewhat in 2013 after reaching a six-year peak the previous year, but roughly a quarter of the world’s countries are still grappling with high levels of religious hostilities within their borders, according to the Pew […]
