Religious Demographics

The share of Americans who do not identify with a religious group is surely growing, but there are differing ideas about the factors driving this trend.

The U.S. religious landscape is already in the midst of some dramatic changes when it comes to the growth or decline of people with certain religious identities. And while it is impossible to predict exactly how that landscape will shift in the future, some key demographic factors — particularly age — can provide a clue as to how things might unfold in the coming decades.

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 Of the 198 countries included in the study, 24% had high or very high levels of government restrictions in […]

Women are more likely than men to say they attend worship services regularly. But this gap in church attendance has been narrowing in recent decades, as the share of women attending weekly has declined.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, who make up just less than 1% of U.S. adults, are known for their door-to-door proselytism. But members of this denomination, which has its origins in 19th-century America, are also unique in many other ways.

Many countries have laws that ban or limit women from wearing religious attire in public places. By comparison, far fewer countries require women to wear particular types of attire for religious reasons.

While Christian women are on the whole more religious than Christian men, Muslim women and Muslim men have similar levels of religious commitment. And when it comes to attendance at worship services, Muslim men are more active than Muslim women.

A discussion with David Voas of the Department of Social Science at University College London on the gender gap in religion around the world.

Generally, women are more likely than men to be affiliated with a religious organization; women also pray more, and are more inclined to say religion is “very important” in their lives.

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.