As Christianity’s popularity continues to dwindle among Asian Americans in recent years, a recent study from the Pew Research Center finds that Christianity remains the most common religion for the demographic.
In a recent survey of over 7,000 Asian Americans, Pew found that “about a third of Asian American adults (34%) say their present religion is Christianity,” evenly split among Catholics (17%) and Protestants (16%). In 2012, when Pew conducted its last in-depth survey of Asian Americans, 42% of Asian Americans said they were Christian.
The Asian American population seems to largely mirror the general American population in that the share of adherents to Christianity has declined over recent decades while the share of those who don’t identify with any religion is increasing.
The survey found that about one-third of Asian Americans (32%) are religiously unaffiliated, a notable rise from the 26% recorded in 2012.
Buddhists and Hindus each comprise around one-tenth of the Asian American population, while Muslims account for 6%.
The survey, fielded from July 5, 2022, through Jan. 27, 2023, contains an error margin of +/-2.1 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
The six Asian-origin groups prominently featured in the survey’s analysis — Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese Americans — make up 81% of all Asian Americans. Pew didn’t have enough interviews with respondents of other Asian demographics to report on them separately but did include their totals in breakdowns by region.
Slightly more than half of Asian Americans surveyed “express a connection to Christianity,” however, there are still “large differences in religious affiliation among Asian Americans depending on their ethnic origin group.”
Over half of Chinese Americans (56%)…
Read the full article here