Becka A. Alper is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center. She contributes to the Center’s domestic religion polls and is an expert on the views and demographic profile of U.S. Jews. Alper is an author of Pew Research Center reports such as “Jewish Americans in 2020,” “A Portrait of American Orthodox Jews,” “The Religious Typology,” “What Americans Know about Religion,” and “What Americans Know about the Holocaust.” Before joining the Center, she was a postdoctoral research associate working on the Youth Activism Project at the University of Arizona. Alper received doctorate and master’s degrees in sociology from Purdue University.
Most U.S. adults – including a solid majority of Christians and large numbers of people who identify with other religious traditions – consider the Earth sacred and believe God gave humans a duty to care for it. But highly religious Americans are far less likely than other U.S. adults to express concern about warming temperatures around the globe.
In recent years, U.S. public opinion has become modestly more positive toward both sides in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
Why is there so much suffering and evil in the world? This question can be particularly confounding for those who believe in a good and all-powerful God, as is often described in the Abrahamic religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For centuries, philosophers and theologians have grappled with this “problem of evil.”
Many Americans say that religion is very important in their lives. But how much do people in the U.S. actually know about their faith tradition – or about religions besides their own? A new report from Pew Research Center tries to answer this question by asking U.S. adults 32 fact-based questions about a variety of […]
Nearly six-in-ten Americans participate in some type of community group or organization, including 11% who say they take part in at least four such groups.
Most American adults identify with a religion, describing themselves as Protestants, Catholics or Jews, to name just a few examples. But a new Pew Research Center analysis looks at beliefs and behaviors that cut across many religious identities, producing a new and revealing classification, or typology, of religion in America that sorts U.S. adults into seven cohesive groups.
