Religions

Evangelical Protestant adults under 40 are more likely than older evangelicals to say climate change is an extremely or very serious problem.

Most U.S. adults – including a solid majority of Christians and large numbers of people who identify with other religious traditions – consider the Earth sacred and believe God gave humans a duty to care for it. But highly religious Americans are far less likely than other U.S. adults to express concern about warming temperatures around the globe.

But they hold differing opinions about what that phrase means, and two-thirds of U.S. adults say churches should keep out of politics.

With Diwali celebrations underway, here are some facts about Hindus around the world.

Whether the U.S. will continue to have a Christian majority in 2070 will depend on many factors, including religious “switching.”

Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” If recent trends in religious switching continue, Christians could make up less than half of the U.S. population within a few decades.

India’s artificially wide ratio of baby boys to baby girls – which arose in the 1970s from the use of prenatal diagnostic technology to facilitate sex-selective abortions – now appears to be narrowing. Son bias has declined sharply among Sikhs, while Christians continue to have a natural balance of sons and daughters.

While the largest Christian traditions and religious “nones” can be consistently analyzed, smaller groups produce a large margin of error.

About three-quarters of U.S. Catholics (76%) say abortion should be illegal in some cases but legal in others.

A majority of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, but many are open to restrictions; many opponents of legal abortion say it should be legal in some circumstances.