Religion

79 countries and territories out of the 198 studied around the world (40%) had laws or policies in 2019 banning blasphemy.

Highly religious Americans are much more likely to see society in those terms, while nonreligious people tend to see more ambiguity.

Disagreements among Americans across the religious spectrum extend to personal issues, such as life priorities and gender roles in the family.

Self-identified Christians make up 63% of the U.S. population in 2021, down from 75% a decade ago.

To highlight some of India’s religious, cultural and demographic differences, here are key facts about its states.

Immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa tend to be more religious than U.S.-born Black adults or immigrants from the Caribbean.

As democratic nations have wrestled with economic, social and geopolitical upheaval in recent years, the future of liberal democracy has come into question. Our international surveys reveal key insights into how citizens think about democratic governance.

A majority of Republicans along with a smaller but substantial majority of Democrats believe in heaven, hell or some other form of afterlife.

In the new survey, the Center attempted for the first time to pose some of these philosophical questions to a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, finding that Americans largely blame random chance – along with people’s own actions and the way society is structured – for human suffering, while relatively few believers blame God or voice doubts about the existence of God for this reason.

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.”