Originally posted by
Abount Buddhism.com.
How to convert and become a Muslim with Live Help?
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has come out with a new survey, this time focusing on
Asian-Americans and religion. I haven't had time to look through it carefully, but one thing jumped out at me right away.
"While
Asian Americans make up a majority of U.S. Buddhists, roughly a third
of American Buddhists are non-Asian; the Pew Forum estimates that
67%-69% of Buddhists in the U.S. are Asian,"
it says.
That's not a startling statistic, but it is very much at odds with a
Pew survey released in 2008, which said that only 32 percent of
Buddhists in the U.S. are ethnic Asians. Big difference.
Arun of
Angry Asian Buddhist has written several posts about this, demonstrating
that the older numbers just don't crunch. See, for example, "
Stop Using the Pew Study"
from September 2010. Arun's "back-of-the-envelope" rough calculation
found that the percentage of U.S. Buddhists who are ethnic Asians had to
be closer to 62 percent than 32 percent. Turns out Arun was right.
I see, however, that the older survey --
still online -- has not been corrected.
The
32 percent figure from 2008 has been picked up by journalists and
sociologists ever since it was published. From this number many
conclusions have been drawn about Buddhism in the U.S. that are,
obviously, invalid. Arun has argued that the older Pew survey numbers
have the effect of
marginalizing Asian Americans.
Other
than that -- and again, I've only looked through the new survey quickly
-- the next most interesting thing was comparing Buddhists in the 2008
survey and the new survey in areas of social issues. From this I take
it that ethnic Asian Buddhists tend to be more conservative than the
Buddhists sampled in 2008.
The 2008 crew tended to lean heavily
toward being liberal in political and social outlook, whereas the new
survey shows Asian American Buddhists tend to be closer to the U.S.
general public in political and social outlook. That's hardly startling,
but it suggests that the 2008 survey did not present an accurate
picture of U.S. Buddhists.
NOTE FROM THIS EDITOR:(
How to convert and become a Muslim with Live Help?) I am very sorry to say that it doesn`t happy this way. You may
San Diego’s Monarch School, which offers education to children impacted by homelessness, will receive $51k from His Holiness the Dalai Lama today. The money comes from surplus funds raised during His Holiness’s April 2012 visit to the city, an event that nearly 20,000 people attended.
