A new study examining the political behavior of people engaged in spiritual activities such as yoga, meditation, making art, and walking in nature, finds not much difference from the behavior of more conventional religious believers. The study, conducted by Evan Stewart and Jaime Kucinkis and published in the online magazine The Conversation (September 3), measured […]
A reported decline in claims of strong or intense religiosity over the last year may well be due to changes in survey methods because of the pandemic rather than an actual weakening of religious faith. In a paper presented at the recent meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in Los Angeles, Landon […]
The pandemic and other factors have led to dire forecasts about churches, not the least being the Episcopal Church. Writing in the blog Religion in Public (July 15), Ryan Burge notes that the Episcopal Church’s long decline in attendance seemed to have leveled off at about 550,000 shortly before the pandemic. Since then, however, the […]
Americans’ belief in God has dipped to a new low, according to Gallup poll results. While a large, 81 percent majority of Americans still say they believe in God, that number represents a six-point dip from the 87 percent rate of belief consistently reported from 2013 to 2017. Over 90 percent of Americans had said […]
Muslims are depicted more negatively in U.S. and Western media than members of other religions, a new study finds. Writing in the Conversation (May 29), political scientists Erik Bleich and A. Maurits van der Veen report that while newspapers tend to publish a balanced proportion of negative depictions of other minority religions, Muslims face negative […]
The American Bible Society’s annual State of the Bible report finds that approximately 26 million people have mostly or completely stopped reading the Bible in the last year. Christianity Today magazine (April 20) reports on the survey, which in 2021 had found about 50 percent of Americans saying they read the Bible on their own at least […]
The percentage of Americans returning to church since the lifting last year of public health restrictions addressing the pandemic may have plateaued, according to the latest statistics from the Pew Research Center. While people steadily returned to in-person services during the first half of 2021, the trend appears to have reached a plateau. Around two-thirds […]
A new study finds religious behavioral responses to the Covid pandemic, such as prayer, to be positively correlated with medically advised measures like mask-wearing and social distancing. The study, published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (online February) and conducted by West Virginia University researchers Katie E. Corcoran, Bernard DiGregorio, and Chris […]
A new survey shows a large segment of Americans no longer adhering to the “Protestant” label the way older generations did. When the weekly survey Nationscape, which is conducted by the Democracy Fund, asked respondents about their religion, it found a noticeable downturn in the use of the “Protestant” label. The survey, which offers the […]
Affiliation with Christianity and other forms of organized religion continues to decline in the U.S., according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center. The survey found the religiously unaffiliated share of the public to be 6 percentage points higher than it was five years ago and 10 points higher than a decade ago. […]
