In March 2025, the Pew Research Center published a report based on its research covering almost 80,000 people in 36 countries. The research uncovered some interesting findings regarding how adults continue to follow, change or abandon the religious faith in which they were brought up as children.
The term refers to a situation in which the religious identity or affiliation of an adult is different from the one in which they were brought up as a child. The researchers say that they chose the term ‘switching’ rather than ‘conversion’ because in many cases the adults had chosen to identify as atheist, agnostic or being ‘nothing in particular’. The researchers counted switching as moving from one religion to another, for example Christianity to Islam, but not within a religion, for example from one Christian denomination to another.
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