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Becka A. Alper

Senior Researcher

Expertise:Religion and Public Life

Becka A. Alper is a Senior Researcher at Pew Research Center where she leads surveys exploring American religious identities, beliefs and practices, including the views and demographic profile of Jewish Americans and the religiously unaffiliated. Her work is instrumental in shaping the Center’s U.S. religion polls and offering insights into the role of religion in American public life. She has authored major reports analyzing America’s changing religious landscape, the experiences and views of Jewish Americans, spiritual beliefs and practices, what Americans know about religion, a new way of understanding religious identities in America, how religion intersects with Americans’ view on the environment, among many others. Becka holds a doctorate in sociology from Purdue University.

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reportMar 21, 2024

Majority in U.S. Say Israel Has Valid Reasons for Fighting; Fewer Say the Same About Hamas

57% of Americans express some sympathy with both Israelis and Palestinians, including 26% who say their sympathies lie equally with both groups.
reportJan 24, 2024

Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe

28% of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated, describing themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religion.
reportDec 7, 2023

Spirituality Among Americans

Overall, 70% of U.S. adults describe themselves as spiritual in some way, including 22% who are spiritual but not religious. An overwhelming majority of U.S. adults (83%) say they believe that people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body. And 81% say there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it.
short readsDec 7, 2022

Younger evangelicals in the U.S. are more concerned than their elders about climate change

Evangelical Protestant adults under 40 are more likely than older evangelicals to say climate change is an extremely or very serious problem.
reportNov 17, 2022

How Religion Intersects With Americans’ Views on the Environment

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.
reportMay 26, 2022

Modest Warming in U.S. Views on Israel and Palestinians

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.
featureNov 19, 2021

In their own words, how Americans explain why bad things happen

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.”
short readsJul 28, 2021

Religious Americans less likely to believe intelligent life exists on other planets

In the U.S., highly religious adults are much more skeptical about the possibility of extraterrestrial life than those who are less religious.
short readsMay 11, 2021

10 key findings about Jewish Americans

A new Pew Research Center report takes a closer look at Jewish Americans. Here are 10 of our key findings.
short readsMar 17, 2020

When Americans think about a specific religion, here are some of the first people who come to mind

More than half of U.S. adults name the pope (47%) or a specific pope (7%) when asked who comes to mind when they think of Catholicism.