Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Religion

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    How the Media Have Handled Palin’s Faith

    Who is Sarah Palin? The question has dominated campaign coverage in the weeks since her nomination as John McCain’s running mate. In the mainstream media at least, the answer has focused almost as much on her family life as on her public record. But despite that focus, and the debate over her beliefs, coverage of […]

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    Pastors To Protest IRS Rules on Political Advocacy

    On Sept. 28, pastors from 20 states will give politically based sermons from the pulpit as part of a protest organized by the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal-advocacy group. The protest will challenge an Internal Revenue Code restriction that limits the political activities of charitable organizations – including churches and other religious groups – […]

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    A Slight but Steady Majority Favors Keeping Abortion Legal

    Public opinion on the legality of abortion has remained relatively stable for well over a decade, with slight majorities of the public consistently saying they favor keeping abortion legal. Polling conducted between 1995 and 2008 reveals that support for keeping abortion legal in all or most cases has fluctuated between 49% and 61% over the […]

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    Palin V.P. Nomination Puts Pentecostalism in the Spotlight

    From the time she was a teenager until 2002, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin attended a church affiliated with the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal Christian denomination in the U.S. Pentecostalism emphasizes such practices as speaking in tongues, prophesying, divine healing and other miraculous signs of the Holy Spirit, which it believes are […]

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    Analyzing the Fall Campaign: Religion and the Presidential Election

    With less than two months before the presidential election in November, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life invited two senior researchers and a group of leading journalists to discuss recent findings on the role religion is playing in the presidential race. Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center, said […]

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    Survey Finds Alaskans Less Religious Than Other Americans

    GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is a self-described “Bible-believing Christian,” but statistics from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey show that compared with the nation as a whole, Alaska is home to a higher-than-average number of people who are unaffiliated with any particular religion. More than one-in-four Alaskans […]

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    On Ceremonial Occasions, May the Government Invoke a Deity?

    School children utter the phrase “one nation under God” as part of the Pledge of Allegiance. The national motto, “In God We Trust,” appears on U.S. currency. Congress and many state legislatures start their sessions with prayers, and the U.S. Supreme Court opens oral arguments with the invocation “God save the United States and this […]

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    More Americans Question Religion’s Role in Politics

    Conservatives’ views now more in line with the views of moderates and liberals on this issue Washington, D.C.—Some Americans are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics. A new national survey finds a narrow majority of the public saying that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters […]

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    More Americans Question Religion’s Role in Politics

    Some Americans are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics. A new survey finds a narrow majority of the public saying that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters. For a decade, majorities of Americans had […]