Conrad Hackett

@conradhackett.bsky.social

29358 Followers 3587 Following

Demography nerd at Pew Research Center Global religious change, sociology

Four of the world’s five major geographic regions had overall increases on the Social Hostilities Index (SHI) in 2023: the Americas, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and the Middle East-North Africa region. Sub-Saharan Africa was the only region to register a decrease.
Models are 58% more likely to encourage users to leave the Jehovah’s Witness religion than the Catholic faith, and 67% less likely to encourage joining it. Atheism is 17% less likely to receive support for joining, and 103% more likely to receive support for leaving.
Academic and popular interest in nonreligion has risen in parallel with the growth of religiously unaffiliated populations. In many countries, census and survey questions used to measure religion have been modified to better capture nonreligious identities. Little attention has been given to how these changes in measures affect specific claims about the rise of the “nones.” Although there is no doubt that religiously unaffiliated populations have grown in many countries during the twentyfirst century, the degree of such growth has sometimes been exaggerated due to measurement effects. We review methodological issues that affect the estimates of the size of religiously unaffiliated populations.
In Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study surveys, atheists were 3% of US adults in 2014 and 5% in 2023-24. Agnostics were 4% in 2014 and 6% in 2023-24.
This is a flyer advertising the conference session I'm organizing on research at the intersection of religion and demography.
Another point of contention surrounding the Quiet Revival report is that, from its publication to its eventual retraction, YouGov refused to let anyone see the data it was built on. “In scientific work, there's this whole movement towards open science,” Voas explained. “If you publish a paper now in a social science journal, you will be expected to make your dataset available to other researchers so they can attempt to replicate your findings. And I think that's a good thing generally.” “Certainly, for something like what amounts to an opinion poll, that should be the case. Well, people like me have been asking YouGov for the last year to release the data, and they resolutely refused to do so.” Now this is not to imply that YouGov were doing anything underhanded with this survey, but the inability to check the claims made in the final report against the data should prompt caution. The Quiet Revival was not a peer reviewed study, and so there was no chance for independent, disinterested
And so, one fun project that we’ve been working on is to develop a mobile app, not to train your brain, but rather just to measure your current capacity. How are you doing right now in your working memory and attention focus? And we’ve developed a task that can be run in just like one or two minutes. And what we’re hoping is that if people were to use that regularly, they would then have a robust baseline to know what their typical cognitive performance is and when.
People who leave Catholicism tend to join Protestantism or disaffiliate from religion altogether. Disaffiliation is especially common in parts of Europe and Latin America. That includes Chile, where 19% of all adults are former Catholics who now identify as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”
Our team went through the data file and removed the most obviously false responses — the impossible or extremely improbable ages, the ethnic/racial mismatches, the people who gave AI-generated free-response answers. When it was all said and done, we removed 574 of the 1,174 current Orthodox (48.9%) and 422 of the 695 former Orthodox (70.8%). Combined, we removed 53.3% of the respondents we were sent — and remember, that’s after a bunch of bad respondents were already removed in the data cleaning process prior to our receipt of the data.
Across a wide range of issues, Americans express morally permissive views. Nearly all U.S. adults (96%) say that eating meat is either morally acceptable or not a moral issue, and 91% take similar positions on using contraceptives to prevent pregnancy. Also: 75% express no moral objection to spanking children. 63% have no moral problem with patients choosing to end their lives with the help of a doctor. 60% have no moral qualms about homosexuality. These are key new findings from two Pew Research Center surveys in spring 2025 about the morality of 15 behaviors. We asked about behaviors that are, at least in part, morally debated in society today. We did not focus on behaviors that nearly everyone would likely say are morally wrong (like murder or stealing) or that everyone presumably would find acceptable (like asking for directions or picking up litter).
Overall, 70% of U.S. adults now say Trump is not too or not at all religious, while 24% say he is somewhat religious and 5% say he is very religious. The survey was conducted April 6-12, 2026, just before Trump criticized Pope Leo XIV and posted an image on social media depicting himself as a Jesus-like figure. Trump later deleted the image and said he intended to show himself as a doctor. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to say Trump is not too or not at all religious (89% vs. 49%).
Over the last two decades, membership in the American Sociological Association has dropped from above 14k to below 10k.
Change 1: Making it easier to choose “no religion” As the share of religious “nones” grows, censuses that measure religion are increasingly making “no religion” the first response category in religious identity questions rather than the last. Some respondents may choose this option simply because it appears first, a primacy effect. In 2011, “no religion” was the last religion response category in Australia. In 2016, Australia made “no religion” the first option and the religiously unaffiliated share rose 9 percentage points from 24% to 33%. Reporting on Australia’s census results, CNN noted that the “nones” outnumbered Catholics for the first time. However, the report didn’t mention that there was a change in response categories that may have contributed to this shift (Berlinger 2017). During this period, the rise of religious “nones” was lower—about three points—on International Social Survey Programme surveys that kept their measure constant. Other questionnaire design decisions also have made it easiest to choose “no religion.” In 1991, Canada’s census introduced a write-in box for respondents to spell out their religious identity. However, identifying with “no religion” only required filling in a bubble. New Zealand and Poland introduced a similar change in recent censuses. The relative ease of choosing “no religion” may contribute, at least in part, to the rise of the “nones” in these countries.
Survey question "In the past 12 months, about how many books did you read either all or part of the way through? (Please include any print, electronic, or audiobooks you may have read or listened to.)" 25% said none, 14% said more than 20 books.
Just 17% of Americans now say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (15%). While trust in government has been low for decades, the current measure is one of the lowest in the nearly seven decades since the question was first asked by the National Election Study, and it is lower than it was in 2024 (22%).
In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of 25 countries, the U.S. stands out for having a relatively small share of adults (29%) who view gambling as morally wrong. In many other surveyed countries, about half of adults or more see gambling as immoral. This includes 89% in Indonesia, 83% in India, 71% in Italy and 61% in Brazil.
A rising share of Americans (56%) say they have stopped talking to someone about political or election news, whether in person or online, because of something they said. This is up from 45% who said the same in 2024.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/19/what-do-americans-consider-immoral/
55% of U.S. adults say they would prefer to live in a community where “houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away.” 44% would prefer a community where “houses are smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores and restaurants are within walking distance.”
There are six former Christians for every convert to Christianity in the United States. The balance is especially lopsided for Catholicism (which loses 8.4 people through religious switching for every convert to the religion). But Protestants also lose more people than they gain through switching, by a ratio of 1.8 to one.
Canadians aged 18–34 report attending religious services (other than weddings or funerals) more frequently than other age groups do. Sixteen percent of young adults attend at least once a week (“every day,” “a few times a week,” or “once a week or so”), compared to 10 percent of those aged 35–54 and 12 percent of those 55 and older.
There has been much discussion about whether more people are turning to the Bible and Christianity since the publication of Bible Society’s Quiet Revival report nearly a year ago. That report found that 12% of adults attended church at least once a month, up from just 8% in 2018. Among men aged 18-24, this rose to over a fifth. These figures were surpassed in another recent study by A Passion for Life and Whitestone in which 15% of adults said they attend church at least once a month, either in person or online, and nearly a third (30%) of young men aged 18 to 24. Some churches and church leaders have described seeing more people come to services and events. The Church of England said it had seen a surge in interest in the run-up to Christmas, following on from a strong turnout at Easter. A further poll by Savanta, conducted on behalf of Tearfund, found that 45 per cent of adults in Britain were planning on attending a church event or service last Christmas, up from 40 per cent
Preview image for three Buddhism reports posted today at pewresearch.org.
Buddhists are the world’s only major religious group whose population shrank between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis of religion in 201 countries and territories. In 2010, an estimated 343 million people around the world identified as Buddhists. By 2020, that figure had fallen to 324 million. That’s a decline of roughly 5%. During this period, the global population grew by 12%. The size of other religious groups we track at the global level also grew. As a result, Buddhists’ share of the global population dropped from 4.9% in 2010 to 4.1% in 2020.
Picture of a church and the words "the Quiet Revival"
39% of U.S. adults say homosexuality is morally wrong – far more than take that position in Germany or Sweden (5% each) but far fewer than in Indonesia (93%) or Nigeria (96%).
In nearly all countries surveyed, more people say that others in their country have somewhat or very good morals than say their compatriots display somewhat or very bad levels of morality. The United States is the only place we surveyed where more adults (ages 18 and older) describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%). Because we have never asked this question before, we don’t know whether a majority of Americans have long held a skeptical view of the ethics of fellow Americans, or if it’s something new – and if so, what’s driving it. But partisan politics appear to play a role.
Nearly everyone in Indonesia (99%), as well as the vast majority of people in Kenya (94%), India (85%) and South Africa (80%), say it’s necessary to believe in God to be moral. By contrast, in about a dozen countries, two-thirds of adults or more say it’s not necessary to believe in God to be moral. This includes the United States (68%), Poland (80%), Spain (84%) and Sweden (89%). In some countries – including the U.S. – declining shares of people say it’s necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values, according to the survey.
Young adults, both those with and those without a religious preference, are less likely to participate in religious services, with 25% reporting almost weekly or weekly attendance, 13% monthly attendance and 61% seldom or never going. In contrast, 37% of adults aged 65 and older say they attend almost weekly or weekly, 9% monthly and 51% seldom or never.
Why survey results based on opt-in samples differ from random samples Online opt-in surveys do not randomly recruit respondents. Rather, respondents are recruited through methods such as online advertising, self-enrollment and email lists. Survey firms try to make these samples reflect the general population by matching quotas for various characteristics or via statistical modeling. However, results from these surveys may be biased by “bogus respondents” who, instead of answering survey questions honestly, answer with the minimal effort required to complete surveys quickly and receive monetary rewards. Recently, political scientist Sean Westwood demonstrated that large language models can be easily programmed to take opt-in surveys, even using multiple personas that evade fraud detection methods employed by survey vendors. He describes this as an “existential threat” to the validity of results from online opt-in surveys. Pew Research Center studies have found that online opt-in surveys may produce especially misleading results for young adults. For example, a widely reported online opt-in poll finding about Holocaust denial among young Americans did not replicate when the Center included the measure in our American Trends Panel, which recruits a random sample of participants via mail. A Center study found that young, online opt-in respondents are much more likely to answer “Yes” in Yes/No questions, regardless of the truth. And another found 12% of young online, opt-in respondents claiming they are licensed to pilot a nuclear submarine (versus 1% of those ages 65 and older).
Online opt-in surveys also find recent religious resurgence among U.S. young adults While this analysis focuses on claims of religious revival among young adults in the U.K., some opt-in surveys have pointed to a similar trend in the United States. Barna Group, a research organization serving Christian leaders, has used online opt-in survey data to make claims of rising churchgoing among young adults in the U.S. According to Barna, “Since 2019, both Gen Z and Millennials were the least likely generation to frequently attend church. Today, they are the most engaged.” However, surveys from Pew Research Center using random samples show no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults. Nor is there clear evidence of religious revival in two other surveys based on random samples conducted by other organizations: the General Social Survey and the American Time Use Survey.
Full datasets are not publicly available for any of these online opt-in surveys. However, full datasets are publicly available for all of the surveys based on random samples described here. It’s also important to note that the methodological statements for the opt-in surveys mentioned in this analysis do not typically make clear their samples start with people who have “opted in” to take surveys rather than with random samples of the population.
In 173 countries and territories, at least 90% of the population falls into just two of the seven religious categories we analyzed, sometimes resulting in a fairly even split. We calculated a “religious divide” score for each place to analyze just how evenly these populations are divided. Among the 10 countries with the most evenly divided religious composition, six have a Christian-Muslim split. In the remaining four, the split is between Christians and the unaffiliated (Uruguay and Estonia) or between Buddhists and the unaffiliated (Mongolia and Japan).
In a 2025 survey, we asked people in 25 nations to say – in their own words – what makes them proud of their country. In several ways, Americans’ answers stand out from those of people in other countries. Americans are among the most likely to emphasize freedom as a source of pride. They are also more likely than people in many other surveyed nations to offer a negative sentiment when asked what makes them proud. And Republicans and Democrats tend to highlight different sources of pride – a partisan divide that is not as pronounced in most other countries.
Hindus and Jews are much more likely to have a four-year college degree than Americans in other religious groups, according to Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study (RLS). Seven-in-ten Hindus and 65% of Jews have a bachelor’s degree or more education. That compares with 35% of U.S. adults overall. On the other end of the spectrum, lower shares of evangelical Protestants (29%) and members of historically Black Protestant denominations (24%) hold college degrees. The shares of college graduates for several other religious groups range from 35% to 45%.
Expressed as a ratio, these figures mean that there are six former Christians for every convert to Christianity in the United States. The balance is especially lopsided for Catholicism (which loses 8.4 people through religious switching for every convert to the religion). But Protestants also lose more people than they gain through switching, by a ratio of 1.8 to one.
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
David Voas, emeritus professor of social science at University College London, who thinks the YouGov figures are not representative, says if the quiet revival was real, "we'd be looking for literally millions of new churchgoers, and they'd have to be very quiet indeed, not to say invisible, to have escaped our notice". Other sources - including different surveys and statistics from churches themselves - also tell a different story to the YouGov data. Official figures from the Catholic Church of England and Wales and the Church of England show long-term declines in attendance. According to the CofE's latest report, it fell between 2018 and 2024 "by almost every measure, in almost every diocese". Voas also points to the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen)'s British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey - considered the "gold standard" in its field - which found data almost exactly the opposite to that of the Bible Society.
A line chart showing that Christian identity in Britain is steadily declining.
Chart showing YouTube stands out for being used by nearly all teens. Roughly nine-in-ten report ever using it. About six-in-ten or more say they use TikTok and Instagram. A somewhat smaller share say they go on Snapchat (55%). Fewer use Facebook (31%) and WhatsApp (24%). And no more than about one-in-five say the same of Reddit or X (formerly Twitter). WhatsApp is one platform that stands out for its growth in recent years. Today, roughly a quarter of teens say they use WhatsApp, up from 17% in 2022. X and Facebook have declined in use over the past decade. Today, 16% of teens use X, down from 23% in 2022 and 33% in 2014-15. And Facebook, once the go-to platform for teens, is used today by about three-in-ten teens. This is far lower than the 71% in 2014-15, though on par with 2022. The shares of teens who use other sites or apps, like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, have stayed relatively stable in recent years.
Found this article from the National Catholic Reporter reflecting on the disagreements around The Quiet Revival interesting. Obviously we respectfully disagree with some of the criticisms of YouGov, but there are a few very misguided arguments which I wanted to nip in the bud: 1️⃣ The claim that the rise in Bible sales - up 88% from 2022-2025 and 139% since 2019 - is down to "clever marketing efforts" feels very speculative. At Bible Society we have excellent marketing and publishing teams, and I have spoken to both about this precise issue, but even they have been focusing on promoting the (brilliant) Bible Course and Romans Course over the past few years. I'm not sure I've seen any intentional marketing around the Bible in that time? Certainly none which would explain a sector-leading increase. 2️⃣ The idea that it is down to mass purchases by 'evangelical organisations' is not only again speculative but a fundamental misunderstanding of the data. The figures come from NielsenIQ BookScan point-of-sales data from (mostly) high street shops and major online retailers, and excludes wholesale and bulk purchases. 3️⃣ There is a call for data on whether people are actually reading their (new) Bibles - and fortunately we have that in The Quiet Revival! Even with the rise in churchgoing, among churchgoers weekly Bible reading is up from 54% to 67% - including 80% of 18-34 year old churchgoers. 4️⃣ Finally, I'm sure church administrators will appreciate the idea that a rise in baptisms is down to better admin, but again this is nothing but dubious speculation and clashes with on-the-ground accounts from church leaders across the country. It can be tempting to believe that the most cynical or dismissive voice is the closest to what is 'really happening', but it is not always the case - especially when they show such desperation to dismiss any and all data which may show change. As Prof Linda Woodhead - one of the foremost sociologists of religion in Britain today - says…
A majority of Americans (57%) express low confidence in journalists to act in the best interests of the public, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis from the Pew-Knight Initiative. This includes 40% who say they have not too much confidence and 17% who say they have none at all. By comparison, 43% of adults say they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in journalists.
Image shows our article about Christianity in China is the most read among articles published in Socius journal.
Academic and popular interest in nonreligion has risen in parallel with the growth of religiously unaffiliated populations. In many countries, census and survey questions used to measure religion have been modified to better capture nonreligious identities. Little attention has been given to how these changes in measures affect specific claims about the rise of the “nones.” Although there is no doubt that religiously unaffiliated populations have grown in many countries during the twentyfirst century, the degree of such growth has sometimes been exaggerated due to measurement effects. We review methodological issues that affect the estimates of the size of religiously unaffiliated populations and
Nearly eight-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (79%) have a favorable view of Trump, while 20% have an unfavorable view. (These ratings largely parallel his job approval rating.) By wide margins, Republicans also view the other administration officials in our survey more positively than negatively. Similar to Americans overall, Republicans are more familiar with some of them (Vance, Kennedy) than others (Rubio, Hegseth). Large majorities of Democrats say they have unfavorable views of Trump and the other administration officials asked about in the survey.
To encourage reuse of our data, Pew Research Center, with support from the John Templeton Foundation, invites researchers to submit proposals for new research publications that use one or more of the following datasets (collectively, Datasets) from the Global Religious Futures (GRF) project: Global Restrictions on Religion 2007-2022 dataset. This cumulative dataset includes measures of government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion in nearly 200 countries and territories. Spring 2024 Survey. This dataset includes measures of religion and spirituality in 35 countries. (Comparable data was also collected in 2023 and 2024 for the United States. The downloadable materials which accompany the international dataset include additional information about U.S. data.) Dataset of Global Religious Composition Estimates for 2010 and 2020. This dataset includes estimates of the size of seven major religious groups in more than 200 countries and territories. We encourag
Bar chart showing that in nearly all countries, a single religious group makes up a majority In 194 countries and territories, 50% or more of the population falls into just one religious category. This includes 43 places where at least 95% of the population belongs to the same religious group; these places are predominantly Muslim (25), Christian (17) or Buddhist (1). While some places around the world have a diverse mix of religious groups, it is more common for national populations to primarily consist of a single religious category. In addition, many countries have a second religious category that accounts for most of the rest of the population. Only 49 countries have three or more religious categories that each make up 5% or more of the population. This includes seven places (Guinea-Bissau, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Taiwan and Togo) with at least four religious categories that each make up at least 5% of the population.3 There are seven countries in which no gro
Myanmar, also called Burma (30), Bangladesh (29) and Sri Lanka (25) are among the countries with the most national public holidays in 2026. Myanmar and Sri Lanka are predominantly Buddhist, with many holidays that are tied to lunar calendars. Myanmar’s holiday schedule includes multiple days off for Lunar New Year and Buddhist New Year (Thingyan), as well as certain full moon days commemorating events in the life of Buddha. In Sri Lanka, all full moon days are public holidays, known there as Poya days. Bangladesh’s population is mostly Muslim, with a large Hindu minority and smaller shares of Buddhists and Christians. Its public holiday calendar includes certain observances from all four religions: several days off for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, a public holiday for Janmashtami (celebrating the birth of Krishna), one for Vesak (sometimes called Buddha Day or Buddha Purnima) and one for Christmas. This year, Bangladeshis will also get two public holidays for their national elections
Few terms have the ability to fire up conversations among sociologists of religion like secularization. Despite the amount of research produced on the topic of religious change, no consensus has been reached on the trajectory of religion facing modernity. In this study, we test whether the secularization controversy stems not only from disagreements over empirical evidence on religious decline but also from different religious and secular beliefs of researchers involved in the debate. We find that religiosity has a significant negative impact on both believing in the validity of the secularization thesis and finding evidence for it in published work. This effect size is non-trivial: researchers with the highest level of religiosity are 24.0 percentage points less likely to believe in secularization and 19.2 percentage points less likely to find evidence of secularization in their published work than their secular colleagues. This result cannot be explained by differences in methods used (whether qualitative, quantitative, or non-empirical), study impact, or by differences in the religious traditions or geographical areas under study. Importantly, we cannot determine who is responsible for the bias, whether religious scholars, secular scholars, or both. Nor can we assess to what extent this bias is explicit, intentional, and how much of it is implicit and unwanted. The precise mechanisms through which such biases emerge remain unclear as well. Is it the case that researchers make certain methodological choices to come up with a desired study outcome that is consistent with prior beliefs and orientations? Or is it the case that results that align with authors’ ideological views are evaluated less critically than results disregarding their own personal beliefs? In our view, there is likely a confirmation bias at work: people tend to seek, favor, recall, and value evidence confirming their pre-existing beliefs while ignoring or downgrading disconfirming evidence
Compared with a year ago, White Protestants and religiously unaffiliated adults now have significantly less confidence that Trump acts ethically in office. For example, 26% of White nonevangelical Protestants are extremely or very confident Trump acts ethically in office, down from 38%. And the share of religious “nones” who have a lot of confidence in Trump’s ethics now stands at 10%, down from 16%. Confidence in Trump’s ethics has remained low among Black Protestants.
The number of card-carrying members has fallen by almost 20 per cent in the last five years, according to figures released before the General Synod, the Church of England’s legislative meeting in London this week. The Church is struggling to appeal to younger generations in an increasingly secular society, with Synod members warning of a “serious decline”.
The ASA's website says the location of the 2028 conference is "TBA."