Religion: Statistics & Datasets

The American Religion Data Archive (ARDA) is an open source website that holds over 200 surveys on religion, including general population surveys, surveys of selected religious groups, surveys of religious professionals, and aggregate church, congregational and denominational data.

Percentage of population for major denominations by country. Current year only.

Very large survey file in SPSS and STATA formats with data on religious preference and specific denominations, attendance for religious services, belief in afterlife and spirituality. Surveys cover 1972-2018 and are continuously updated. An open source website via the University of Chicago.

Religion statistics in various categories.

Survey of voting behavior in the United States, conducted biennially since 1948. Basic questions on religious identification and attendance at religious services have been asked throughout the time series but the religion module was substantially widened and improved starting in 1990, making possible richer analyses of how religion affects political attitudes and behavior. Contains links to download all the data.

The American Religion Data Archive (ARDA) holds over 200 surveys on religion, including general population surveys, surveys of selected religious groups, surveys of religious professionals, and aggregate church, congregational and denominational data.

Very large survey file in SPSS and STATA formats with data on religious preference and specific denominations, attendance for religious services, belief in afterlife and spirituality. Surveys cover 1972-2018 and are continuously updated. An open source website via the University of Chicago.

Search for religion data at the ICPSR Data Archive, the world's largest archive of social science data. election data, opinion polls, and more. To download data, create a personal account using your ucsd.edu email address while accessing the database from a UC San Diego computer, UCSD-PROTECTED wireless, or the VPN.

A nationally representative study of congregations carried out via interviews with congregational informants, mostly clergy. Conducted in conjunction with the General Social Survey (GSS). surveys a representative sample of America's churches, synagogues, mosques, and other local places of worship. The current cumulative NCS dataset includes Waves I, II, and III data. Wave I was conducted in 1998, Wave II in 2006-07, and Wave III in 2012. Between all three waves of the NCS, the study now includes data from 4,071 congregations. Variables include clergy characteristics, social composition, worship services, community and political activities, and much more.

NSYR is a nationally representative telephone survey of English and Spanish-speaking teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 (in 2003, 2005, 2007-08), and their parents.

National Survey of Black Americans 1979-1980, 1987-1988, 1988-1989, 1992 (ICPSR)
The survey investigates neighborhood-community integration, services, crime and community contact, the role of religion and the church, physical and mental health, self-esteem, life satisfaction, employment, the effects of chronic unemployment, the effects of race on the job, interaction with family and friends, racial attitudes, race identity, group stereotypes, and race ideology.

The series is designed to enable a crossnational comparison of values and norms on a wide variety of topics and to monitor changes in values and attitudes across the globe. A variety of questions on religion and morality were included. This longitudinal survey currently covers the years 1981-2014 in seven waves.