Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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Today, 61% of U.S. adults say religion is losing influence in American life, while 37% say it is gaining influence. There are sharp partisan divides on whether religion’s influence is good or bad and how far that influence should go.
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Across predominantly Muslim nations, there is little enthusiasm for the extremist Islamic organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, although there are pockets of support for both groups, especially in the Middle East.
Note: For a more recent overview of the Census Bureau’s history of asking about religion, read this April 2023 article. The U.S. Census Bureau has not asked questions about religion since the 1950s, but the federal government did gather some information about religion for about a century before that. Starting in 1850, census takers began […]
Members of the post-communist generation offer much more positive evaluations of the political and economic changes their countries have undergone over the past two decades than do those who were adults when communism collapsed.
One-in-four American adults believe in astrology, including 23% of Christians.
Global Restrictions on Religion, a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, finds that 64 nations – about one-third of the countries in the world – have high or very high restrictions on religion.
Recent events have raised questions about the threat of homegrown terrorism in the U.S., but survey results show that Muslim Americans overwhelmingly reject extremism.
Singapore is the world’s most religiously diverse country overall as of 2020, while Yemen is the least diverse. But the U.S. ranks first among nations with very large populations, followed by Nigeria and Russia.
The Catholic share of the population in several Latin American countries has shrunk over the last 10 years, while a growing percentage of Latin American adults are religiously unaffiliated.
The Christian share of the population, after years of decline, has been relatively stable since 2019. And the religiously unaffiliated population, after rising rapidly for decades, has leveled off – at least temporarily.
The Global Religious Futures (GRF) project is jointly funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and The John Templeton Foundation. Here are some big-picture findings from the GRF, together with context from other Pew Research Center studies.
