[Buddha-l] Religion and political affliliation

[Richard Hayes]

With apologies to all the many buddha-l denizens who do not live in the
United States, there is just one more set of statistics I thought some
people might be interested in. The Pew Charitable Trust conducted some
surveys near the time of the 2008 elections to determine how religious
denomination correlates with political party membership. The full table
is much more complex than the following summary; for example, the full
table acknowledges that there are different types of Jews (although it
does not acknowledge that there are different kinds of Muslims or
Buddhists). As the United States prepares for the inauguration of its
next president, mull over the following statistics. "R" means either
either Republican or "leaning toward Republican" and "D" means either
registered Democrat or leaning toward Democrat. (The Pew table separates
those out.) There were no data for the Green Party.

D	R	Denomination
77	10	Unitarians and other pluralistic denominations
67	18	Buddhist
65	23	Jewish*
63	11	Muslim
56	23	Unaffiliated
48	33	Catholic
44	32	Protestant**
22	65	Mormon
15	10	Jehovah's Witness***

* This is a composite of Reform, Conservative and Orthodox
** This is a composite of evangelical and mainline, Caucasian and
African-American
*** The majority of JWs refused to answer the question 

A survey of non-Asian Buddhists in America that was done by James
Coleman in the 1990s showed 4% were registered Republicans and 9% were
registered Green. The Pew survey did not separate Asian and non-Asian
Buddhists; my guess is their political leanings are probably
significantly different, but that guess is based on purely anecdotal
evidence (which as Dignāga reminds us is no evidence at all). 

--
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico