01: The third Faith Communities Today (FACT) survey, conducted in 2008, finds a “persistent downward drift in congregational vitality,” according to David Roozen of Hartford Seminary. Roozen, who directed the study in 2000, 2005 and 2008, said that across eight years, congregational health, including financial stability, has declined. Roozen, who presented his findings at the […]

01: Although more Americans are joining the ranks of the unchurched, most of the movement away from organized religion took place earlier than 1991, according to a study by Michael Hout and Claude Fischer presented at the meeting of American Sociological Association in San Francisco (held the same time as the ASR). Reports that the […]

01: American professors are more likely to be religious than nonreligious, according to a recent study by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons in the journal Sociology of Religion (Summer). In analyzing data from their new Politics of the American Professoriate survey (of 1,417 professors), Gross and Simmons find that academics were three times more likely […]

01: Economic shocks, both negative and positive, have significant effects on religious activity and involvement, according to economist David Beckworth. Presenting a paper at the conference of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture (ASREC), which met in Washington, DC, in April, Beckworth looked at quarterly figures of the Seventh Day Adventist […]

01: There is a noteworthy shift of Catholicism in the U.S. to the Southwest, as well as a continuing growth of non-affiliated Americans, according to the third American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). In a survey conducted between February and November of 2008, ARIS questioned 54,461 adults, asking them to self-identify themselves religiously. The study, led […]

01: Recent research of mosques in both southern California and northern England finds that the most successful tend to create social integration between members and their respective societies. The Christian Century (Jan. 13) cites the journal Muslim World as finding that the mosques in these two areas with the highest concentration of post-1965 immigrants who […]

01: Unlike many Protestant and Catholic churches, there are few sharp divisions over such issues as the ordination of women in Eastern Orthodox churches in the US, according to one of the first major studies of Orthodox laity. The survey, conducted by the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute of Berkeley, California and presented at the late […]

01: The widespread view that Christians, especially evangelicals, have among the highest divorce rates in the US may be rooted more in “moral fears” and culture wars among and between conservative Christians and non-believing critics than in actual fact, according to sociologists Bradley Wright, Christine Zozula and Bradford Wilcox. In recent years, both Christian leaders […]

01: Americans tend not to be dogmatic on doctrine, especially when it relates to judging the value of others religions, according to a new survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The recent survey is the second part of a comprehensive study of American religion that Pew Forum has conducted. The first […]

01: Holding to a “wrathful” image of God and a literal reading of the Bible tends to correlate with political intolerance, write Baylor University sociologists Christopher Bader, Paul Froese and Buster Smith in the journal Sociology of Religion (Spring). Past studies have long suggested that political intolerance is linked to religious affiliation or church attendance, […]