Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Search results for: “religion”

  • report

    Leaving Catholicism

    Revised February 2011* While the ranks of the unaffiliated have grown the most due to changes in religious affiliation, the Catholic Church has lost the most members in the same process; this is the case even though Catholicism’s retention rate of childhood members (68%) is far greater than the retention rate of the unaffiliated and […]

  • feature

    The Religious Dimensions of the Torture Debate

    Updated May 7, 2009 Amid intense public debate over the use of torture against suspected terrorists, an analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life of a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press illustrates differences in the views of four major religious traditions in […]

  • transcript

    Event Transcript: Faith in Flux

    The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life held a conference call with journalists to discuss the release of a new Pew Forum survey that documents the fluidity of religious affiliation in the U.S. and describes the patterns and major reasons for change. “Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.” […]

  • fact sheet

    The Lemon Test

    Just three years after Allen, the Supreme Court addressed two such aid packages in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). One was a Rhode Island plan that paid 15 percent of the salaries of private school teachers who taught exclusively secular courses. The other was a Pennsylvania plan that reimbursed private schools for teaching secular subjects, and, […]

  • fact sheet

    Significant Supreme Court Rulings

    Bradfield v. Roberts (1899) Upheld the federal government’s funding of a hospital because even though the hospital was owned and staffed by a religious order, its primary function was to provide secular health care services. Everson v. Board of Education (1947) Applied the Establishment Clause to state and local governments and announced that the clause […]

  • feature

    Religion in South Africa 15 Years After the End of Apartheid

    On April 27, 1994, South Africa held its first democratic elections after the fall of the apartheid system of racial segregation. Religion played an important role in bringing about this change: Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his outspoken opposition to apartheid, and many of South Africa’s churches were […]

  • feature

    Catholic Opinion on Notre Dame Controversy Differs by Church Attendance

    A recent survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life found that about half of American Catholics have heard at least a little about the controversy over the University of Notre Dame’s decision to invite President Barack Obama to speak at the university’s May 17 commencement and receive an honorary degree. […]

  • report

    Religious Groups’ Views on Global Warming

    The unaffiliated (58%) are the most likely to say there is solid evidence the earth is warming because of human activity while white evangelical Protestants (34%) are the least likely to believe in man-made global warming.