RELIGION USA

U.S. RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2008

http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious affiliation of the American public and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 Americans age 18 and older, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey finds that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%.

RELIGION AND SECULARISM: THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, December 3, 2007

http://pewforum.org/events/?EventID=161

Given the recent popularity of several high-profile books on atheism, the Pew Forum invited Wilfred McClay, a distinguished professor of intellectual history, to speak on the historical relationship between religion and secularism in America. McClay argued for a distinction between two types of secularism.


OVERVIEW: THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION AND EVOLUTION
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, February 4, 2009
http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=395
Almost 150 years after Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Americans are still fighting over evolution. If anything, the controversy has recently grown in both size and intensity. In the last five years alone, for example, debates over how evolution should be taught in public schools have been heard in school boards, town councils and legislatures in more than half the states.


A RELIGIOUS PORTRAIT OF AFRICAN AMERICANS
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, January 30, 2009
http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=389
Compared with other racial and ethnic groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation, with fully 87% of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2007 by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life. Latinos also report affiliating with a religion at a similarly high rate of 85%; among the public overall, 83% are affiliated with a religion.

FAITH ON THE HILL: THE RELIGIOUS AFFILIATIONS OF MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, December 19, 2008
http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=379
Members of Congress are often accused of being out of touch with average citizens, but an examination of the religious affiliations of U.S. senators and representatives shows that, on one very basic level, Congress looks much like the rest of the country. Although a majority of the members of the new, 111th Congress, which will be sworn in on Jan. 6, are Protestants, Congress, like the nation as a whole, is much more religiously diverse than it was 50 years ago. Religious Landscape Survey of over 35,000 American adults finds that some smaller religious groups, notably Catholics, Jews and Mormons, are better represented in Congress than they are in the population as a whole. However, certain other smaller religious groups, including Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus, still are somewhat underrepresented in Congress relative to their share of the U.S. population.

AMERICAN RELIGIOUS IDENTIFICATION SURVEY 2008

Trinity College, March 2009

http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/

The American population self-identifies as predominantly Christian but Americans are slowly becoming less Christian. The U. S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008.