report | Feb 17, 2010

Religion Among the Millennials

Introduction and Overview MILLENNIALS This is part of a Pew Research Center series of reports exploring the behaviors, values and opinions of the teens and twenty-somethings that make up the Millennial generation. By some key measures, Americans ages 18 to 29 are considerably less religious than older Americans. Fewer young adults belong to any particular […]

report | Jan 26, 2010

A Brief History of Religion and the U.S. Census

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 […]

report | Nov 9, 2009

Religious Landscape Survey Data Release

Data files from the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, including interviews with a representative sample of more than 35,000 U.S. adults, are now available to the public for further study and analysis.

report | Oct 7, 2009

Mapping the Global Muslim Population

A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 1.57 billion Muslims of all ages living in the world today, representing 23% of an estimated 2009 world population of 6.8 billion.

report | Jul 24, 2009

A Portrait of Mormons in the U.S.

In Utah, July 24 is Pioneer Day, a state holiday commemorating the day in 1847 when the first Mormon settlers, led by Brigham Young, entered the Salt Lake Valley. Today, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Mormon groups make up 58% of Utah’s population and 1.7% of the total […]

feature | Jun 18, 2009

About One-in-Six Americans Are Baptist

Two of the largest Baptist denominations in the U.S. — the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A. — will hold national meetings in late June. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, finds that Baptists represent the largest Protestant denominational […]

feature | Jan 30, 2009

Income Distribution Within U.S. Religious Groups

In his Jan. 20 inaugural address, President Barack Obama said, “The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity.” Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life find that income varies greatly within and […]

report | Aug 20, 2008

The Demographics of Faith

The United States is one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world. Indeed, with adherents from all of the world’s major religions, the United States is truly a nation of religious minorities. Although Protestantism remains the dominant strain of Christianity in the United States, the Protestant tradition is divided into dozens of major […]

report | Feb 1, 2008

U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious affiliation of the American public and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the […]

report | Jul 6, 2007

How Muslims Compare With Other Religious Americans

Although Muslims constitute a small minority in the United States, in many ways, they stand out not so much for their differences as for their similarities with other religious groups, especially evangelicals.

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