The Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures (GRF) project produces innovative, cross-disciplinary research on religious change worldwide. Since 2008, it has conducted surveys on religious beliefs, practices, and identities in every major region of the world, totaling nearly 250,000 interviews in 111 countries and more than 130 languages. Each year, the project generates hundreds of articles in major media outlets, millions of web visitors, and more than 1,000 citations in academic journals and books.
The GRF has four main focal areas: cross-national surveys, demographic studies, tracking restrictions on religion, and support for open science. In Phase IX, the cross-national survey will measure multiple aspects of religious pluralism in 30 to 35 countries. Separately, GRF’s team of demographers will use data from the 2020 round of national censuses and recent, large-scale surveys to rank approximately 200 countries and territories by their levels of religious diversity. The demographers also will compile data on the size and characteristics of the global population of self-identified atheists, and in a small number of countries, the research team will attempt for the first time to project future levels of religious belief and importance (not just religious identity).
Also in Phase IX, the GRF will continue to track restrictions on religion worldwide, using both human coding and Large Language Models (LLMs). To continue to widen its reach and strengthen the field, the Center will hire a data archivist to help make its data more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) with machine-readable metadata, digital object identifiers and other enhancements to GRF datasets and reports online.
