The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey
by Danny Fisher
This courtesy of Phil Ryan over at the Tricycle Editors’ Blog: the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has at last released its long-awaited U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.
Among other things, the survey may be useful in terms of helping us Buddhists figure out the reality of our numbers here in the U.S. In a post from last week, I quoted a Salon.com article as saying that the numbers for American convert Buddhists alone were “sketchy,” ranging from “100,000 to 800,000.”
The Pew Survey finds that convert Buddhists and ethnic Buddhists together equal about 0.7% of the U.S. population.
Less than 0.3% of Americans listed their affiliation as Theravada (Vipassana), less than 0.3% as Mahayana (Zen), less than 0.3% as Vajrayana (Tibetan), less than 0.3% as “other Buddhist group.” 0.3% of Americans identified as “Buddhist” with no further specification.
Of the approximately 410 Buddhists surveyed by the Pew Forum, this is the ethnic breakdown: 53% were white, 32% Asian, 6% Hispanic, 4% Black, and 5% other/mixed. 53% were men, and 47% women.
The Pew Forum provides interested readers with full demographic portraits that are worth taking a look at. Like Phil, I’m especially struck by this: 70% of Buddhists surveyed report no children in the home. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but it’s certainly an interesting finding.
Take a look at the survey. It’s probably something you’ll be hearing more about in the months to come.
I don’t think the 70% is so remarkable when you look at the comparison with other religions. The average of homes-without-children across the study was 65%. More remarkable was that Muslims, Hindus, and Mormoms had homes-without-children rates in the 50′s, a far greater variation from average than the Buddhists with 70%.
My failure to notice these things is precisely why I am not a statistician. : )