Key findings about religious restrictions around the world in 2021
The most common kinds of government restrictions on religion in 2021 included harassment of religious groups and interference in worship.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The most common kinds of government restrictions on religion in 2021 included harassment of religious groups and interference in worship.
Incidents against Jewish people in 2020 ranged from verbal and physical assaults to vandalism of cemeteries and scapegoating for the pandemic.
Among the 32 places surveyed, support for legal same-sex marriage is highest in Sweden, where 92% of adults favor it, and lowest in Nigeria, where only 2% back it.
Majorities in most of the 27 places around the world surveyed in 2023 and 2024 say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Muslim societies have gained a reputation in recent decades for failing to adequately educate women. But a new analysis of Pew Research Center data on educational attainment and religion suggests that economics, not religion, is the key factor limiting the education of Muslim women.
Ethiopia has 36 million Orthodox Christians, the world’s second-largest Orthodox population after Russia. By many measures, Orthodox Ethiopians have much higher levels of religious commitment than do Orthodox Christians in the faith’s heartland of Central and Eastern Europe.
By 2060, more than four-in-ten Christians and 27% of Muslims around the world will call sub-Saharan Africa home.
While many, especially in the U.S., may associate Islam with the Middle East or North Africa, nearly two-thirds of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region.
Melina Platas, an assistant professor of political science at New York University Abu Dhabi, explains the Muslim-Christian education gap in sub-Saharan Africa.
The three countries on the pope’s itinerary — Uganda, Kenya and the Central African Republic — all have sizable Catholic populations. But they also have seen violent clashes in recent years.
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