Recent polls conducted by the Gallup Organization (2006) as well as the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" (2008; hereafter “Pew Survey”) have shown that women and older Americans are more likely to self identify with, and belong to, an organized religious tradition. According to the Pew Survey, all Christian traditions have a higher percentage of female membership and all other traditions have a higher percentage of male members than the national survey total. A majority of Americans self report as belonging to a Christian tradition. Many religious groups are disproportionately older than the total sample. For example, according to the Pew Survey, approximately half of all mainline Protestants and Jews are over 50 years old.

Most people know that Christians (especially conservative Christians) typically oppose a host of sexual behaviors, including premarital sex. However, all too often what most people know tends to come from their immediate context and not from careful empirical study. To see if there really does exist a correlation between Christianity and opposition to premarital sex, sociologist Stephen Gyimah (Queen’s University, Canada) and colleagues investigated the sexual attitudes of Christians in Kenya, finding that Pentecostals were most opposed to premarital sex.

Given the number of mainstream Christian leaders who have publicly decried homosexuality in recent decades (think Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Pat Robertson, to name just a few), you might expect that gay Americans are about as likely to be Christian as they are to, say, speak fluent Urdu. But a new survey suggests that you'd be wrong. The Barna Group, a research organization based in California, recently released a report indicating that a strong majority of homosexuals self-identify as Christian and consider their faith to be central in their lives.

Walk into a typical American church on a Sunday morning and you are likely to find more women than men. There is nothing particularly new or even surprising about this trend, but if you compare the gender composition of evangelical and liberal churches you just might notice an interesting - and perhaps puzzling - reversal of the usual pattern. Unlike more socially conservative, and even moderate or “Mainline” churches, liberal congregations actually have more men than women in the pews. In fact, according to data from the Pew Forum’s 2008 Religious Landscape Survey, evangelical Protestant churches are 53% female while liberal churches are 54% male.