This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Barna Group has conducted more than two million interviews across thousands of separate studies since its 1984 founding, a scale that has made it one of the two most widely cited sources, alongside the much larger Pew Research Center, for quantitative data on American religious life. Unlike Pew, a general public policy research organization that treats religion as one subject among many, Barna's research has stayed consistently focused on the beliefs, practices and generational shifts of American Christians, and particularly evangelicals, since its earliest surveys.
That focus has made the firm's own name a byword in evangelical circles for data-driven self-examination: congregations, denominational offices and Christian nonprofits regularly cite Barna's published findings when assessing their own effectiveness or diagnosing broader cultural trends, from generational disaffiliation to changing patterns of religious practice. The firm remains privately held today, continuing the survey research program George and Nancy Barna began four decades ago, still published under the same name it adopted in its own 2004 restructuring, Barna Research Group having become simply Barna Group without any change of ownership or mission behind the new corporate title.