01: More than eight in ten of the world’s people identify with a religious group, although the unaffiliated are the third largest religious group after Muslims and Christians, according to a study by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life. The report estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and […]

01: The diversifying of American religious landscape, especially consisting of minority Christians and the unaffiliated, provided fertile ground for the re-election of U.S. President Barack Obama, according to the 2012 Post-Election American Values Survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Almost 80 percent of Romney voters were white Christians, half of whom were […]

01: Lay leaders and other non-clergy are more influential than pastors in encouraging political involvement among congregations, according to a study by Lydia Bean and Brandon Martinez of Baylor University presented at the ASR meeting in Denver. Using the Baylor Religion Survey, the researchers find that lay leaders, such as Sunday school teachers, in evangelical, […]

01: Confidence in institutional religion is at an all-time low, according to a new Gallup poll. Today, confidence in American religion has dropped to 44 percent, compared to the 1973 high of 66 percent. Through 1985, organized religion ranked first in Gallup’s “confidence in institutions measure,” outranking the military and the Supreme Court. The Huffington […]

01: A new analysis of belief in God worldwide finds that the percentage of people saying they were atheists increased in 15 of the 18 nations studied from 1991 to 2008. The study, conducted by Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, was based on the International Social Survey. […]

01: The Millennial generation’s movement away from organized religion has recently accelerated, writes political scientist Robert Putnam in the journal Foreign Affairs (March/April). Between 2006 and 2011, the fraction of non-affiliates as a whole rose from 17 percent to 19 percent. Among younger Americans, however, the fraction increased approximately five times as much, according to […]

01: American Mormons feel discriminated against and misrepresented by non-Mormon society and yet are also increasingly optimistic about the prospects of greater acceptance, including the possibility of having a Mormon president, according to a new study by the Pew Forum. The survey found that 62 percent of Mormons believe that Americans are uninformed about their […]

01: The growth of non-denominational Christianity in the U.S. is often linked to the megachurches, but there are important differences between the two phenomena, according to Scott Thumma of Hartford Seminary, who presented research at the October conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) in Milwaukee. Thumma, a specialist on megachurches, […]

01: Religion is becoming “deinstitutionalized” among America’s working class, according to a paper presented by Bradford Wilcox at the meeting of the ASA in Las Vegas in August. In an analysis of the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Survey of Family Growth, researchers found demographic, economic and cultural factors influential in the downturn […]