Michael Lipka

Making up just 0.5% of U.S. adults, Seventh-day Adventists are extremely devout and are one of the country's most diverse religious groups by race and ethnicity.

Our new report finds that whether U.S. adults are becoming more or less religious depends, in part, on how religious observance is measured.

An even greater share – 29% – say they have felt in touch with someone who has already died.

62% of U.S. Catholics think the church should allow Catholics who have been divorced and remarried without an annulment to receive Communion.

Two-thirds of Americans say doctors should be allowed by law to assist patients who are terminally ill and living in severe pain to commit suicide.

Nearly nine-in-ten Hispanic Catholics (88%) say that undocumented immigrants who meet certain requirements should be able to stay in the U.S.

On his first papal trip to the U. S., Pope Francis will visit three Northeastern cities that are within a few hundred miles of each other. But while New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., may be geographically close, their Catholic populations look different from one another in several ways.

The face of Catholic America is changing. Today, immigrants make up a considerable share of Catholics, and many are Hispanic. At the same time, there has been a regional shift, from the Northeast (long home to a large percentage of the Catholic faithful) and Midwest to the Western and Southern parts of the U.S.

Pope Francis has announced major changes to the Roman Catholic Church’s procedures for marriage annulments. While the new changes are aimed at making annulments faster and less expensive, a recent Pew Research survey found that most divorced U.S. Catholics who did not seek annulments did not cite the complicated nature of the process as a reason.

The new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Catholics provides an opportunity to take stock of Americans’ Catholic identity – not just people who identify primarily as Catholics, but the entire spectrum of those whose lives have crossed paths with the Catholic Church in a meaningful way.