Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
An examination of the main themes, or ongoing storylines, in coverage of religion during the presidential race suggests that faith was often viewed through the lens of politics. Throughout the 2012 campaign, major media routinely examined which candidate was winning or losing ground among various religious groups as well as how the candidates and their […]
Why the disparity between print and other sectors? One possible explanation is that the relative lack of major events or controversies tied to religion may have dampened interest among cable television and talk radio outlets. Web and network television coverage also tended to be somewhat more event-driven. Many of the newspaper stories, by contrast, tended […]
The 113th Congress welcomes the first Buddhist in the Senate and first Hindu in either chamber.
An estimated 405 million people – or about 6% of the world’s total population – are adherents of folk or traditional religions. These are faiths that are closely associated with a particular group of people, ethnicity or tribe. They often have no formal creeds or sacred texts. Examples of folk religions include African traditional religions, […]
A country-by-country analysis of data from more than 2,500 censuses, surveys and population registers finds that 84% of adults and children around the globe are religiously affiliated. The study also finds that the median age of two major groups – Muslims (23 years) and Hindus (26) – is younger than the world’s overall population (28), while Jews have the highest median age (36).
Three years ago the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life launched an effort to generate up-to-date and fully sourced estimates of the current size and projected growth of the world’s major religious groups. As part of this multi-phase project, the Pew Forum has assembled data on the size and geographic distribution of […]
Eight-in-ten Americans say they learned little or nothing about the Mormon religion during the 2012 presidential campaign, according to a new Pew Research Center poll. At the same time, poll findings suggest some warming of attitudes toward Mormonism, especially among religious groups that voted heavily for Mitt Romney.