Covid-19 has impacted both individual religious practice and belief and congregational life, according to new surveys. One recent survey, conducted in late 2020 by Brandon Vaidyanathan of Catholic University, included 1,609 respondents rom Virginia, Maryland, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Although not a random sample, these respondents reflected the demographic traits found in a 2019 survey […]
The new, recently released Faith Communities Today (FACT) study shows continuing declines in congregational attendance, although about one-third of congregations report growth. The survey, which was conducted right before the pandemic and is issued every five years, was based on questions about congregational life sent to 15,278 congregations and their leaders from 80 denominations. The […]
While young people are commonly viewed as less religious than older Americans, a new study by Springtide Research Institute finds that 78 percent of people between the ages of 13 and 25 consider themselves at least slightly spiritual, including 60 percent of unaffiliated young people (atheists, agnostics and nones). The institute’s new study, State of […]
According to a survey, more than 60 percent of born-again Christians in the United States between the ages of 18 and 39 are inclined to believe that Buddha, Muhammad and Jesus all offer valid paths to Go. In Ecumenical News (Sept. 1), Peter Kenny summarizes some of the data collected last year in the survey by […]
The most recent data on Generation Z shows a higher rate of non-affiliation and secularism compared to Millennials and preceding generations, writes Ryan Burge in the blog Religion in Public (July 15). Burge analyzes the 2019 and 2020 waves of the Cooperative Election Study and finds that those belonging to Generation Z (born in 1996 or later) have secularized in significant ways as they have gotten older and moved into adulthood.
Increasing numbers of African American mosques are closing while the overall number of mosques in the United States continues to expand, according to a new report. “The American Mosque 2020: Growing and Evolving,” a study jointly published by the Islamic Society of North America, the Center on Muslim Philanthropy, and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding was conducted by Ihsan Bagby, who produced similar reports in 2001 and 2010.
A new survey of U.S. Jews finds that, while holding their own numerically, they are increasingly split between secularism and Orthodoxy, especially among the youngest adults. The survey by the Pew Research Center is a follow-up to its landmark 2013 study.
The case of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual abuse, and its cover-up by his fellow bishops and clerics reflects less a singular instance of clerical misbehavior than a vulnerable episcopal system in which “bad actors find it more or less easy to operate, survive, and thrive.” So write sociologist Stephen Bullivant and psychologist Giovanni Radhitio Putra Sadewo in the Catholic Herald (April 18), based on their study of episcopal networks surrounding McCarrick.
A new Gallup Poll finds that for the first time since it began collecting data on church membership in the late 1930s, fewer than half of Americans say they belong to a religious congregation. The new survey finds that 47 percent of Americans now say they belong to a house of worship, decreasing from 70 percent in the mid-1990s and 50 percent in 2019.
Pastoral care in churches has gradually shifted from specific religious teachings to a more ecumenical spirituality and from concerns about human nature and morality to an emphasis on personal narratives, according to a study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (online in February).
