Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The U.S. public expresses a clear consensus on the contentious question of whether employers who have religious objections to contraception should be required to provide it in health insurance plans for their employees.
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.
Highly religious people are distinctive in their day-to-day behaviors in several key ways: They are more engaged with their families, more involved in their communities and more likely to report being happy with the way things are going in their lives. In other ways, however, there is little discernible difference in the way highly religious […]
Another measure of religious commitment is how important people say religion is to them personally. In more than half of the 84 countries where data are available on this question (46), men and women are about equally likely to say religion is very important to them. In 36 other countries, or 43% of the total, […]
This report is based on the methodology used in the Pew Research Center’s ongoing study of government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion. The goal of the study was to devise quantifiable, objective and transparent measures of the extent to which governments and societal groups impinge on the practice of religion, and to […]
Women’s generally greater level of religiosity has been observed by scholars for decades; it has shown up in surveys going back as far as the 1930s.[34. numoffset=”34″ Gallup Jr., George H. Dec. 17, 2002. “Why Are Women More Religious?” Gallup. ] But not until the 1980s did academics begin a concerted effort to find an explanation […]