Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project Phase VI

Over the past 10 years, the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures (GRF) project has conducted surveys of religion in 98 countries, including most of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Central/Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Central Asia and South Asia. In Phase VI, we will turn to East Asia, beginning with nine countries in Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. All of these countries have either Buddhist or Muslim majorities. Also, in recent years, all have experienced some degree of entanglement of religion with nationalist political movements, such as popular demands for the state to protect the dominant religious group from minorities, secularizing trends or other perceived threats. In our survey, we will delve deeply into Asian religious beliefs and practices – working with local and international experts to develop culturally appropriate measures of religiosity – as well as investigating the relationship between national and religious identities, attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities, and views on religion’s role in public life. Meanwhile, our demographers will report on how patterns of religious identification are changing in countries that have relatively large unaffiliated populations, including China and the United States as well as either Japan or South Africa. We will continue to track levels of religious freedom in nearly 200 countries worldwide, with particular attention in Phase VI to government involvement in religious education in Asia. And our data scientists will push forward with methodological innovations, using web scraping and machine learning techniques to analyze a large dataset of U.S. sermons.