The United States recently has experienced some trends toward secularization, including a growing share of the population that does not identify with any religion and a shrinking share of people who say they regularly attend a church or other house of worship. During the fielding period, Australia, Japan and the United States had rising numbers of infections, while Italy and some other European countries had started to recover from the large number of cases reported in April and May. For me, his years are a painful reminder of the 10 years my mother spent without seeing her parents and of the agony of my paternal grandfather’s death on the island when his wife and children were here in the United States. People with less education are significantly more likely than those with a secondary education or higher to say their personal religious faith has deepened in five of the countries surveyed: Spain (those with less education are 11 points more likely to say this), Italy (8 points), the U.S. Responses largely mirror how people answer the question about their own religious faith, although respondents may additionally be taking into account their views on the role of religion in their nation’s public life.

You’ve probably heard people say they’re “spiritual but not religious” when describing their faith, and wondered what it truly means. 16 beliefs and behaviors is “essential,” “important but not essential,” or “not important” to what their religion means to them, personally. The survey posed similar questions to members of non-Christian faiths and religiously unaffiliated Americans (sometimes called religious “nones”), asking whether various behaviors are essential to “what being a moral person means to you.”3 Among the unaffiliated, honesty (58%) and gratitude (53%) are the attributes most commonly seen as essential to being a moral person. For example, among Christians who say that working to help the poor is essential to what being Christian means to them, about six-in-ten say they donated time, money or goods to help the poor in the past week. But those who do see these things as essential to what it means to be a Christian are more likely than others to say they live a healthy lifestyle (by exercising, for example), consider how a company treats its employees and the environment when making purchasing decisions, or attempt to recycle or reduce waste as much as possible.

A new Pew Research Center study of the ways religion influences the daily lives of Americans finds that people who are highly religious are more engaged with their extended families, more likely to volunteer, more involved in their communities and generally happier with the way things are going in their lives. The survey also asked people if the strength of religious faith in their country as a whole has changed due to the pandemic. Perceptions about the pandemic’s influence on faith are tied to people’s own levels of observance – those who are more religious are more likely than their less religious compatriots to say COVID-19 has strengthened their faith and that of others in their country. Some previous studies have found an uptick in religious observance after people experience a calamity. Majorities or pluralities in all the countries surveyed do not feel that religious faith has been strengthened by the pandemic, including 68% of U.S. Majorities in nearly every country surveyed say that the religious faith of people in their country has not changed much as a result of the pandemic.

Majorities in 11 countries say the coronavirus outbreak has not changed their relationship to immediate family much. Just 5% of Americans who report no religious affiliation say their religious faith has increased due to the coronavirus outbreak. Even though the coronavirus is a global pandemic, not all countries have experienced the disease in the same way. Even though there will be a huge number of life-permitting universes lying within the cosmic landscape, nevertheless the number of life-permitting worlds will be unfathomably tiny compared to the entire landscape, so that the existence of a life-permitting universe is fantastically improbable. In the Netherlands, 17% say their country has become more religious, even though just 7% of Dutch adults say they, personally, are now more religious. There are also significant differences by income group in Canada, Italy, the UK, the Netherlands, France, South Korea and Japan. But as any gourmand worth an ounce of orzo will quickly tell you, there isn’t a grain of truth to Polo as the pasta pioneer.