Author: Staff Reporter

New York State Senator Kevin Thomas, an Indian-American Senator in the Empire State, is sponsoring a bill that establishes school holidays for people of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh faiths among others. The bill identifies Diwali, Vaisakhi, Onam, Eid al Fitr, Eid al-Adha, and Good Friday, and calls for amending the current list of cultural/religious school holidays for the whole state rather than the current restricted areas where Diwali is recognized.

However, it is not all encompassing, and allows school districts with population equal to or greater than seven and half percent of those cultural/religious groups to declare these days as holidays.

Currently, New York City schools recognize the Chinese Lunar new Year (Feb. 5, 2019), and Eid al-Fitr (June 4, 2019), but the demand for Diwali was not accepted despite a push by the Indian-American community last year, according to Suhag Shukla, executive director of Hindu American Foundation.

“It’s about time our diverse population gets the opportunity to celebrate its holidays,” Sen. Thomas told the media. Sen. Thomas however, wants these cultural and religious festivals to be recognized state-wide. How successful he will be is not clear, though the movement within the community for such school days has been growing. “Parents call and ask us what to do to get Diwali off for their kids,” Shukla said. “We advise them to work with the district to get it on the school calendar,” she added.

Senator Thomas introduced bill, S4038 which “Relates to establishing certain cultural and religious observances as school holidays,” on Feb. 26. and through it he wants to enable students from different religious and cultural backgrounds to celebrate their traditional festivities with their family and community, the text of the bill says.

Pope Francis ended a landmark Vatican meeting on clerical sexual abuse by calling “for an all-out battle against the abuse of minors” and insisting that the church needed to protect children “from ravenous wolves.”

But for all the vivid language and the vow “to combat this evil that strikes at the very heart of our mission,” the pope’s speech was short on the sort of detailed battle plan demanded by many Catholics around the world.

Francis had barely finished speaking before some abuse victims and other frustrated faithful began expressing outrage and disappointment at his failure to outline immediate and concrete steps to address the problem.

“Pope Francis’ talk today was a stunning letdown, a catastrophic misreading of the grief and outrage of the faithful,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, a leader of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks incidents of abuse in the church. “As the world’s Catholics cry out for concrete change, the pope instead provides tepid promises, all of which we’ve heard before.”

Pope Francis had raised expectations for a policy breakthrough in September when he summoned the presidents of the world’s local bishops conferences to participate in the meeting.

Abuse victims and their advocates held high hopes that Francis, who seemed in the last year to overcome his own blind spots on an issue on which he had repeatedly stumbled, would use his absolute authority to institute a church-wide law dismissing abusive priests and the bishops who cover up for them.

He did not. Instead, with the abuse scandals threatening the credibility of his papacy, the pope decided that the best way for the church to address the problem lay not in issuing an edict from Rome but in setting out to change the hearts and minds of church leaders at the local level around the world.

The pope used the meeting to try to persuade skeptical bishops to take strong action against abusive clerics and to hold themselves accountable for protecting the faithful in their dioceses, rather than simply changing church law himself.

The prelates who organized the summit argued that any papal edicts might fall flat or fade away with Francis’ papacy. In their view, what is required is a broad cultural shift and an acknowledgment of the problem, especially in Latin American, African and Asian countries, where the future of the church lies.

 “At the end of the day, it is the change of heart that is important,” Archbishop Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s leading sex-crimes investigator, said on Sunday afternoon.

The Rev. Hans Zollner, another leader in the church’s efforts to safeguard children, said the church had made a “leap” forward by getting at the “systemic roots” of the scandal. But he acknowledged that it would take more time and energy to “turn a big ship around.”

This focus on the spiritual evolution of bishops, and on the importance of getting them to work together to tackle sexual abuse, was a letdown to those who had hoped the pope would act boldly, drawing on his own authority.

“The pope is the sole legislator, so he could make this change whenever he wants,” said Nicholas P. Cafardi, a prominent canon lawyer in the United States. “Zero tolerance should be universal law, and the Holy Father can do it himself.”

After the pope’s speech, the Vatican did announce that some specific steps that would be taken soon. One was described by church officials as a toughening up of child-protection laws within the Vatican’s boundaries. They also spoke of a “very brief” handbook for bishops to understand their duties when it comes to abuse cases, and of new task forces of experts and canon lawyers to assist bishops in countries with less experience and resources. But those limited measures had already been developed before the summit, and were not shaped by the meeting, Vatican officials said.

The pope’s bishop-focused approach carries real risks both for him and the church he leads. While Vatican officials believe it is the right course, it is one in which change may come more slowly than the faithful in some countries ravaged by the abuse crisis have begun to demand.

The Roman Catholic Church has been devastated, and Francis’ legacy threatened, by a cascade of investigations by civil authorities into clerical sexual abuse. There have also been accusations from within his own hierarchy that he covered up the misconduct of a top prelate, Theodore McCarrick, a former cardinal and archbishop of Washington who has been defrocked.

Pope Francis has begun to be unsparing in the language he uses to describe the problem. On Sunday, he compared the abuse of minors to “sacrificing human beings, frequently children, in pagan rites.”

“Consecrated persons, chosen by God to guide souls to salvation, let themselves be dominated by their human frailty or sickness and thus become tools of Satan,” he said. “In abuse, we see the hand of the evil that does not spare even the innocence of children. No explanations suffice for these abuses involving children.”

But high-profile cases involving the negligence by bishops, the abuse of nuns and other misconduct added to the pressure on Francis to do more than just talk.

Francis had sought to tamp down expectations about the Vatican meeting, fostered by some of his own bishops, that the conference would deliver instant remedies to end the scourge. He said the meeting was intended to educate all the bishops on the gravity of the problem of sexual abuse. Still, at times, the four-day summit did seem like a significant turning point for the church.

Outside the Vatican walls, abuse survivors marched and held rolling news conferences. Inside, at sessions presided over by Pope Francis himself, the world’s top bishops, clad in their black cassocks and purple sashes, listened every day to the brutal testimony of abuse survivors — many of whom spoke about the indifference and complicity of church leaders like them. A Nigerian nun excoriated them for their hypocritical silence and lack of transparency.

In a bid to improve relations with the news media, the organizers invited a veteran Vatican reporter from Mexico to address the gathering. “If you do not decide in a radical way to be on the side of the children, mothers, families, civil society, you are right to be afraid of us,” said the reporter, Valentina Alazraki. And if they remain in denial, she said, honest reporters “will be your worst enemies.”

However frustrated many of the faithful were by the meeting, high-ranking church officials said it had achieved a positive outcome.

Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said on Saturday that he was “very pleased,” even if specific action still needed to be determined. At first, Cardinal DiNardo said, some countries did not want to admit that they had the same problems as the United States, Cardinal DiNardo said. But in the end, he said, he was impressed with the consensus that developed. “This went far better than I think some of us had hoped,” he said. “Now you have the bishops all saying it’s ubiquitous.”

Have living things always existed in their present form, or did they evolve? And if evolution occurred, was a divine hand at play?

Measuring public opinion on evolution has never been an easy task for survey researchers. With Americans’ views on the topic tapping into the highly charged realms of religious conviction and scientific knowledge, question wording becomes extremely important. For this reason, in recent years, Pew Research Center has experimented with different ways of asking about evolution and studied whether these variations affect the public’s responses. And because they do, the Center is moving toward a revised wording.

First, a bit of survey history: For a decade and a half, the Center asked Americans what they believe about the origins of humankind, most often in a two-step process. An initial question asked respondents whether they think humans and other living things have evolved over time – in line with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution – or whether they believe humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, as in the Book of Genesis’ creation story. Those who said they accept the idea of evolution then have been asked a second question: whether they think evolution has occurred due to natural processes such as natural selection, or due to processes that were guided or allowed by God.

Recently, however, the Center conducted a survey in which respondents were randomly assigned to be asked about evolution in one of two different ways. Half of the respondents were asked about evolution in a two-step process much like the one described above. The other half of respondents were asked a single question about their views on evolution and given three response options: “Humans have evolved over time due to processes such as natural selection; God or a higher power had no role in this process”; “Humans have evolved over time due to processes that were guided or allowed by God or a higher power”; or “Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”

The data show that respondents in the latter group (those who receive a single question with three options) are more likely than those in the former group to say evolution has occurred. Overall, eight-in-ten in the single-question group say humans have evolved over time (and just 18% say humans have always existed in their present form), while only two-thirds of those who receive the older, two-step approach say humans have evolved (and 31% express the creationist view).

Put more simply, our estimate of the share of Americans who reject evolution and express a creationist view drops considerably (from 31% to 18% of U.S. adults) when respondents are immediately given the opportunity to say God played a role in human evolution. The effect of the different question wording is especially pronounced among white evangelical Protestants and black Protestants.

The experimental findings illustrate why testing multiple ways of asking about evolution is necessary and important. For some people, views about the origins and development of human life are bound up with deeply held religious beliefs. Pew Research Center’s goal in designing questions on this topic is to allow respondents to share their thoughts about both the scientific theory of evolution and God’s role in the creation and development of life on Earth – and to do so in a way that does not force respondents to choose between science and religion. Indeed, the data show that many Americans believe that life on Earth has evolved over time AND that God or a supreme being played some role in the evolutionary process.

In the future, Pew Research Center intends to use this new, three-option approach to asking about evolution in much of its U.S.-based survey research – though the older, two-step approach may continue to work well in certain international contexts (for example, in countries where views about evolution are less closely bound up with religious beliefs than is the case in the U.S.) or for monitoring long-term trends in the United States. The results of the new experiment indicate that there are some people who do believe that humans have evolved over time, but who, for whatever reason, did not say so in our traditional method of asking about the topic. Perhaps without the opportunity to immediately connect evolution to God, some religious respondents may be concerned that expressing belief in evolution places them uncomfortably on the secular side of a cultural divide.

The results of the survey also show that devising survey questions that enable respondents to register nuance in their views about these subjects is very important – and very challenging. Prior to this most recent experiment, the Center tested various versions of the two-step process to asking about evolution. In one line of testing, we varied the survey context (that is, the questions that immediately precede the evolution questions). In another line of testing, we varied whether the questions asked about the evolution of “humans and other living things” or “animals and other living things.”

What follows below is a brief history of the way the Center has asked about evolution.

Testing the effect of asking about belief in God

The first time Pew Research Center asked about evolution, in 2005, the evolution questions were preceded with up to two questions about belief in God. Respondents were asked whether they believe in God, a higher power or universal spirit (but not God), or neither God nor a higher power or universal spirit. Those who said they believe in God or a higher power were asked if they believe that this entity “was responsible for the creation of life on Earth.”

Then, all respondents were asked the following question, which included the wording that would become our core language for evolution questions over the next decade: “Some people think that humans and other living things have evolved over time. Others think that humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. Which of these comes closest to your view?”

If respondents said humans and other livings things have evolved over time, they were asked another question: “And do you think that humans and other living things have evolved due to natural processes such as natural selection, or [do you think that] a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today?” The latter choice in this question provided what many view as middle ground in the evolution debate, a worldview encompassing both evolution and God, which to some degree aligns with what has been called “intelligent design.”

Why begin a survey module about evolution with questions about belief in God? Researchers were concerned that questions about evolution may have become so caught up in contentious debates about religion, culture and politics that simply asking about evolution outright might lead to erroneous results. Religious people who believe both that evolution has occurred and that God played a role in it might nevertheless – when asked cold – choose the creationist option simply as a way of registering their belief that God exists, and not because they truly reject evolution. Without having first been given the chance to stipulate that they believe God exists and played a role in the creation of life on Earth, some respondents may have seen it as socially undesirable to say they believe humans have evolved over time.

Overall, the 2005 survey found that roughly half of U.S. adults said humans have evolved over time, including 26% who said evolution was due to natural processes, and 18% who said it was guided by a supreme being. Four-in-ten said humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, and an additional 10% either were not sure or declined to answer the question.

The following year, the Center again explored people’s views on evolution. The 2006 survey included an experimental test of the premise that asking about belief in God would affect respondents’ answers to the ensuing questions on evolution. Half of the survey’s respondents were randomly assigned to receive the belief-in-God questions before the evolution questions, while the other half of respondents did not receive the belief-in-God questions.

Analysis of the data showed that respondents answered the evolution question series similarly, regardless of whether they were first asked about their belief in God. Since the experimental test showed that asking about belief in God had no impact on the way respondents answer questions about evolution, all Pew Research Center surveys conducted since 2006 have omitted the introductory questions measuring beliefs about God.

Hints of greater acceptance of evolution in 2009; subsequent surveys find stable views after 2009

The Center asked a very similar, two-step battery of evolution questions three years later. The survey results appeared to show an increase of 10 percentage points in the share of Americans who say they believe evolution has occurred, from 51% in 2006 to 61% in 2009. However, researchers were concerned that responses to the 2009 question may have been influenced by the fact that the entire 2009 survey was about scientific topics.

Specifically, people who are most interested in scientific topics may have been more likely to participate in the survey. Such individuals may also believe in evolution at higher rates than those who are not so interested in scientific topics, thus inflating the survey’s estimate of the share of the public that believes evolution has occurred.

It is also possible that a slight change to the wording of the question between 2006 and 2009 could have affected the results. In 2005 and 2006, the first question in the series read as follows: “Some people think that humans and other living things have evolved over time. Others think that humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. Which of these comes closest to your view?” Beginning in 2009, the question was simplified to ask “Which comes closer to your view? Humans and other living things have evolved over time, OR humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”1 The original wording may have lent equal legitimacy to both viewpoints by telling respondents that there are people on both sides of the debate; this may have nudged some to the creationist response.

As a result of the different survey context and the slight change in question wording, Pew Research Center did not report the 2009 results as the continuation of a trend that began in 2005. Instead, the earlier results were included alongside the 2009 findings only as a “trend for comparison” – as an indication that there may have been some change in sentiment between 2006 and 2009, but without making a direct, apples-to-apples estimate of the magnitude of the change.

Between 2013 and 2014, Pew Research Center asked the two-step evolution question series four more times. On all four occasions, the share of those who said they believe humans have evolved over time fell between 60% and 65%.

Belief in evolution among religious and demographic groups

In the 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study (the last telephone survey in which the Center asked the traditional, two-step series of questions about evolution), the data show that belief in evolution is more common among college graduates (73%) than among those with lower levels of educational attainment (62% among those with some college education, 53% among those with a high school diploma or less education). Belief in evolution is also more prevalent among young people (72% among adults under the age of 30) than among older adults (52% among those ages 65 and older), and somewhat more common among men than women (65% vs. 58%).

Among religious groups, belief in evolution peaks among self-described atheists (95% of whom say they believe humans and other living things have evolved over time) and agnostics (96%). Roughly eight-in-ten or more Buddhists (86%), Jews (81%) and Hindus (80%) also say they believe in evolution, as do smaller majorities of Catholics (66%) and mainline Protestants (65%) – though members of these Christian traditions are much more likely than religiously unaffiliated people and members of most non-Christian faiths to say they believe God played a role in guiding the evolutionary process.

Among members of evangelical Protestant denominations, the balance of opinion leans in the opposite direction – 57% of evangelicals said in the 2014 telephone survey that humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, compared with 38% who said they believe humans have evolved over time. And members of historically black Protestant denominations were divided about evenly between those who believe in evolution (50%) and those who do not (45%). Statistical analysis shows that evangelicals and people who belong to historically black Protestant denominations are less likely than those in many other religious groups to believe in evolution even after accounting for different levels of educational attainment.

As noted at the outset of this report, our recent experiment found that including an immediate option to link God to evolution makes a substantial difference in the responses given by white evangelicals and black Protestants. For details, see “How highly religious Americans view evolution depends on how they’re asked about it.”

Testing beliefs about the evolution of humans vs. the evolution of animals

In 2013, Pew Research Center experimented with the wording of the standard question about evolution. A random group of respondents was asked about the evolution of “humans and other living things,” while other respondents were asked about the evolution of “animals and other living things.”

The survey found that white evangelical Protestants were more likely to say animals and other living things have evolved over time (41%) than they were to say the same about humans (27%). Among white mainline Protestants, the opposite was true: More said humans evolved (78%) than animals (66%). The experiment found no significant differences in the way black Protestants, Catholics and religiously unaffiliated respondents answered the questions.

Concluding observations

Taken together, the findings presented here show that asking questions about the origin and development of life on Earth can be a complicated undertaking – perhaps especially in a country like the United States, where the public’s attitudes about the scientific theory of evolution often are bound up with their religious convictions. What may seem like small differences in question wording can have a major impact on survey estimates of the share of the public that believes in a naturalistic account of human development, a creationist view or something in between – an evolutionary process guided or at least allowed by God or a supreme being. Pew Research Center has been committed to innovation on these kinds of questions to try to capture public opinion in its full complexity, and the Center will continue to experiment and report the results transparently.

People who are active in religious congregations tend to be happier and more civically engaged than either religiously unaffiliated adults or inactive members of religious groups, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of survey data from the United States and more than two dozen other countries.

Religiously active people also tend to smoke and drink less, but they are not healthier in terms of exercise frequency and rates of obesity. Nor, in most countries, are highly religious people more likely to rate themselves as being in very good overall health – though the U.S. is among the possible exceptions.

Many previous studies have found positive associations between religion and health in the United States. Researchers have shown, for example, that Americans who regularly attend religious services tend to live longer.1 Other studies have focused on narrower health benefits, such as how religion may help breast cancer patients cope with stress. On the other hand, there are also studies that have not found a robust relationship between religion and better health in the U.S., and even some studies that have shown negative relationships, such as higher rates of obesity among highly religious Americans. (For more on previous studies of religion and health, see this sidebar.)

Taking a broad, international approach to this complicated topic, Pew Research Center researchers set out to determine whether religion has clearly positive, negative or mixed associations with eight different indicators of individual and societal well-being available from international surveys conducted over the past decade. Specifically, this report examines survey respondents’ self-assessed levels of happiness, as well as five measures of individual health and two measures of civic participation.2

By dividing people into three categories, the study also seeks to isolate whether religious affiliation or religious participation – or both, or neither – is associated with happiness, health and civic engagement. The three categories are: “Actively religious,” made up of people who identify with a religious group and say they attend services at least once a month (sometimes called “actives”); “inactively religious,” defined as those who claim a religious identity but attend services less often (also called “inactives”); and “religiously unaffiliated,” people who do not identify with any organized religion (sometimes called “nones”).3

This analysis finds that in the U.S. and many other countries around the world, regular participation in a religious community clearly is linked with higher levels of happiness and civic engagement (specifically, voting in elections and joining community groups or other voluntary organizations). This may suggest that societies with declining levels of religious engagement, like the U.S., could be at risk for declines in personal and societal well-being. But the analysis finds comparatively little evidence that religious affiliation, by itself, is associated with a greater likelihood of personal happiness or civic involvement.

Moreover, there is a mixed picture on the five health measures. In the U.S. and elsewhere, actively religious people are less likely than others to engage in certain behaviors that are sometimes viewed as sinful, such as smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol. But religious activity does not have a clear association with how often people exercise or whether they are obese. And, after adjusting for differences in age, education, income and other factors, there is no statistical link between being actively religious and being in better self-reported overall health in any of the 26 countries and territories studied except Taiwan, Mexico and the United States.4

Even in the U.S., the strength of the linkage between religion and health varies, depending on measures and datasets used. For example, in some years, the General Social Survey has shown that religiously affiliated people who go to church or other religious services at least once a month are particularly likely to report that they are in excellent overall health, while in other recent years this has not been the case. (See sidebar on the United States).

The exact nature of the connections between religious participation, happiness, civic engagement and health remains unclear and needs further study. While the data presented in this report indicate that there are links between religious activity and certain measures of well-being in many countries, the numbers do not prove that going to religious services is directly responsible for improving people’s lives. Rather, it could be that certain kinds of people tend to be active in multiple types of activities (secular as well as religious), many of which may provide physical or psychological benefits.5 Moreover, such people may be more active partly because they are happier and healthier, rather than the other way around. (For more information about what may be causing these links, see this sidebar.)

Whatever the explanation may be, more than one-third of actively religious U.S. adults (36%) describe themselves as very happy, compared with just a quarter of both inactive and unaffiliated Americans. Across 25 other countries for which data are available, actives report being happier than the unaffiliated by a statistically significant margin in almost half (12 countries), and happier than inactively religious adults in roughly one-third (nine) of the countries.

The gaps are often striking: In Australia, for example, 45% of actively religious adults say they are very happy, compared with 32% of inactives and 33% of the unaffiliated. And there is no country in which the data show that actives are significantly less happy than others (though in many countries, there is not much of a difference between the actives and everyone else).

When it comes to measuring civic participation, the results again follow a pattern: On balance, people who are actively religious are also more likely to be active in voluntary and community groups. This dovetails with previous studies in the United States.6

In the U.S., 58% of actively religious adults say they are also active in at least one other (nonreligious) kind of voluntary organization, including charity groups, sports clubs or labor unions. Only about half of all inactively religious adults (51%) and fewer than half of the unaffiliated (39%) say the same.7

A similar pattern appears in many other countries for which data are available: Actively religious adults tend to be more involved in voluntary organizations. In 11 out of 25 countries analyzed outside of the U.S., actives are more likely than inactives to join community groups. And in seven of the countries, actively religious adults are more likely than those who are religiously unaffiliated to belong to voluntary organizations.

In addition, a higher percentage of actively religious adults in the United States (69%) say they always vote in national elections than do either inactives (59%) or the unaffiliated (48%).

Outside of the U.S., actively religious adults are more likely than “nones” to report voting in national elections in half the countries (12 out of 24) for which data on this measure are available; in the remaining countries, there is not much of a difference. Actives also are more likely than their inactive compatriots to say they vote in nine out of 24 countries, while the opposite is not true in any country for which data are available.8

These are among the key findings of a new analysis of data from cross-national surveys conducted since 2010 by Pew Research Center and two other organizations: the World Values Survey Association and the International Social Survey Programme. This report focuses on countries with sufficiently large populations of people who are actively religious, inactively religious and religiously unaffiliated to allow researchers to compare all three groups using the same survey data. As a result, the analysis cannot be truly global: 26 countries surveyed by the WVS are used to measure self-rated health, happiness and voluntary group participation; 25 countries, also surveyed by the WVS, are included for voting; and 19 countries surveyed by the ISSP are used to examine smoking, drinking alcohol, obesity and exercise. A Pew Research Center survey provides U.S. estimates for self-rated happiness. The countries analyzed are mostly Christian-majority nations in Europe and the Americas (because these countries tend to have substantial unaffiliated populations), though the analysis also includes a few African and Asian countries and territories, such as South Africa, South Korea and Japan.

An additional reason this study relies heavily on data from Christian-majority countries is that regular attendance at religious services – a key measure in this study – is a more central practice in some world religions (such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism) than in others (such as Hinduism or Buddhism, in which there is less emphasis on communal worship).