Faith on the Hill
While there has been a decades-long decline in the Christian share of U.S. adults, 88% of the voting members in the new 118th Congress identify as Christian. That is only a few points lower than their share in the late 1970s.
About half of U.S. adults have looked for a new religious congregation at some point in their lives, most commonly because they have moved.
There are deep divisions in Israeli society over political values and religion’s role in public life — not only between Jews and the Arab minority, but also among the religious subgroups that make up Israeli Jewry.
There has been a modest drop in overall rates of belief in God and participation in religious practices. But religiously affiliated Americans are as observant as before.
Nearly 40% of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America, but many people in the region have converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, while some have left organized religion altogether.
The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.
According to a survey of professional prison chaplains, America’s state penitentiaries are a bustle of religious activity. Chaplains say that efforts by inmates to convert other inmates are common and that at least some religious switching occurs. And chaplains overwhelmingly consider religion-based programming an important aspect of rehabilitating prisoners.
As of 1900, both Muslims and Christians were relatively small minorities in the region. Since then, however, the number of Muslims living between the Sahara Desert and the Cape of Good Hope has increased more than 20-fold, rising from an estimated 11 million in 1900 to approximately 234 million in 2010.
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