Current Research
In a new study, researchers find that Republicans who view God as actively involved in the world tend to support more generous welfare policies, in opposition to their party’s platform. The study, conducted by Paul Froese and Robert Thomson and published in the journal Sociol
A new study, Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics, looks at a sample of former Catholics, aged 15 to 25, to shed light on the movement of young people exiting the church in recent years. The National Catholic Reporter (J
The Amish community is showing a unique continuity in fertility behaviors across the generations, according to a new study by Cory Anderson (Truman State University), Joseph Donnermeyer (Ohio State University), and Samson Wasao. The preliminary study, which was presented at the r
For all the talk about the growth of “nones,” a core of active young Christians has remained constant in American society, although such young believers are more ethnically diverse than in the past, according to research by Timothy Clydesdale. In a survey of 1880 young adults, th
A recent study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) reports a significant decline in whites claiming an evangelical identity—and also shows how difficult it is to measure such identity. The PRRI survey, based on 101,000 interviews, finds that there has been a six-poin
The new Baylor Religion Survey finds the emergence of “Trumpism,” a form of Christian influenced nationalism and a widespread fear of religious “others.” The survey, which is the fifth wave of the study and was conducted among 1,501 respondents earlier this year, found that belie
The election of Donald Trump may be a political after-effect of the steep decline of mainline Protestantism in American culture, writes Lyman Stone in the web magazine Vox (July 14). Stone, a population economist, looks at average change at county-level Republican share
Even though it has been considered a conservative religious rallying cry, a Public Religion Research Institute survey finds that 61 percent of Americans oppose allowing businesses to deny services to gays and lesbians. The issue became headline news when the Supreme Court conside
Are the number of atheists drastically undercounted in the U.S.? That is the claim of social psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle, who conducted an experiment on the role of stigma in identifying as an atheist and found that the national percentage could be as high as 26 p