Religion & Government

The share of U.S. adults who describe themselves as Christians has been declining for decades, but the U.S. Congress is about as Christian today as it was in the early 1960s.

The U.S. public expresses a clear consensus on the contentious question of whether employers who have religious objections to contraception should be required to provide it in health insurance plans for their employees.

All states prosecute parents whose children come to severe harm through neglect. But in thirty-four states (as well as the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico), there are exemptions in the civil child abuse statutes when medical treatment for a child conflicts with the religious beliefs of parents.

Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia and Turkey had some of the highest levels of religious restrictions in 2014.

Worldwide, both government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion decreased modestly from 2013 to 2014 despite a rise in religion-related terrorism, according to Pew Research Center’s latest annual study on global restrictions on religion.1 Of the 198 countries included in the study, 24% had high or very high levels of government restrictions in […]

Government restrictions on religion and social hostilities related to religion decreased somewhat between 2013 and 2014, the second consecutive year of such declines.

For the National Day of Prayer, we rounded up survey data on Americans’ prayer habits, as well as historical instances of prayer intersecting with the government.

There are striking differences in the extent to which people think the Quran should influence their nation’s laws, according to surveys across 10 countries with significant Muslim populations.

Many countries have laws that ban or limit women from wearing religious attire in public places. By comparison, far fewer countries require women to wear particular types of attire for religious reasons.

Half of Americans say the next president should be careful not to criticize Islam as a whole when speaking about Islamic extremists, while four-in-ten want the next president to speak bluntly about Islamic extremists even if the statements are critical of Islam as a whole.