Religious Commitment

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.

Southern states are among the most highly religious states in the U.S., while those in New England are among the least devout.

We sat down with Michael Hout, a professor of sociology at New York University, to examine possible reasons.

Americans place less importance on religion in their lives than do people in a number of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia -- but more than residents of many other Western and European countries.

Our new report finds that whether U.S. adults are becoming more or less religious depends, in part, on how religious observance is measured.