[Buddha-l] Religion and political affliliation

[jkirk]

What happened to the Hindus, who're missing from the list? They
could hardly be considered "pluralistic" here in the USA, where
it's Sanatandharma all the way.
JK

==============

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

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