Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Beliefs & Practices


  • report

    Palin V.P. Nomination Puts Pentecostalism in the Spotlight

    From the time she was a teenager until 2002, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin attended a church affiliated with the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal Christian denomination in the U.S. Pentecostalism emphasizes such practices as speaking in tongues, prophesying, divine healing and other miraculous signs of the Holy Spirit, which it believes are […]

  • transcript

    Analyzing the Fall Campaign: Religion and the Presidential Election

    With less than two months before the presidential election in November, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life invited two senior researchers and a group of leading journalists to discuss recent findings on the role religion is playing in the presidential race. Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center, said […]

  • transcript

    Press Conference Transcript: U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

    Washington, D.C. In a noon conference call for journalists, Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, together with fellows John Green and Greg Smith, released the second report of the Forum’s path-breaking U.S. Religious Landscape Survey – along with new data added to the interactive website accompanying the project – […]

  • report

    U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Beliefs and Practices

    A major survey confirms the close link between Americans’ religious affiliation, beliefs and practices, on the one hand, and their social and political attitudes, on the other. The social and political fault lines in American society run through, as well as alongside, religious traditions.

  • transcript

    How Our Brains are Wired for Belief

    Key West, Florida Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2008 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Recent advances in neuroscience and brain-imaging technology have offered researchers a look into the physiology of religious experiences. In observing Buddhist monks as they […]

  • fact sheet

    Courts Not Silent on Moments of Silence

    In October 2007, the state of Illinois passed a law requiring its public schools to lead students each morning in a moment of silence for “reflection and student prayer.” Illinois already had a law on the books permitting schools to lead such moments of silence. But the Illinois General Assembly, overriding Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto, […]

  • report

    A Portrait of American Catholics on the Eve of Pope Benedict’s Visit to the U.S.

    When Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the United States on April 15, he will find a Catholic Church that is undergoing rapid ethnic and demographic changes, and whose flock is quite diverse both in their religious practices and levels of commitment, as well as in their social and political views. And, as this portrait of […]

  • transcript

    Between Relativism and Fundamentalism: Is There a Middle Ground?

    Washington, D.C. Peter Berger, an eminent sociologist of religion and a lifelong Lutheran, asked himself several years ago: “Would my moral convictions change if I woke up tomorrow as an atheist?” For Berger, this perplexing question led to a research project involving fellow Judeo-Christian religious thinkers, which will culminate in the publication of two books, […]