Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation, is an effort by Pew Research Center to understand religious change and its impact on societies around the world. It includes three main lines of research: a series of international surveys on religion in various regions; an ongoing demographic study of religion around the world; and an annual coding project that examines restrictions on religion in 198 countries and territories.
Across three dozen countries, belief in life after death is widespread, as is the belief that spirits can reside in animals and in parts of nature such as mountains, rivers or trees.
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Young adults tend to be less religious than their elders by several measures; the opposite is rarely true. This pattern holds true across many countries that have different religious, economic and social profiles.
Even with no new migration, Muslims are projected to increase as a share of Europe’s population.
Concentrated in Europe, Orthodox Christians have declined as share of the global Christian population, from 20% in 1910 to 12% today. But the Ethiopian community is highly observant and growing.
Islam is the most common state religion, but many governments give privileges to Christianity.
Religion has reasserted itself as an important part of individual and national identity in a region that was once dominated by atheist communist regimes.
Government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion increased in 2015 for the first time in three years. Government harassment and use of force surged in Europe, as did social hostilities against Muslims.
More babies were born to Christian mothers than to members of any other religion in recent years. Less than 20 years from now, however, the number of babies born to Muslims is expected to modestly exceed births to Christians.
Jews are more highly educated than any other major religious group around the world, while Muslims and Hindus tend to have the fewest years of formal schooling. But all religious groups are making gains, particularly among women.
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. This is the fourth time Pew Research Center has analyzed restrictions on religion in a calendar year. Earlier reports […]
Standard lists of history’s most influential religious leaders – among them Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) – tend to be predominantly, if not exclusively, male. Many religious groups, including Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews, allow only men to be clergy, while others, including some denominations in the evangelical Protestant tradition, have lifted that restriction only in recent decades. Yet it often appears that the ranks of the faithful are dominated by women.
