Christianity remains most common religion among Asian Americans

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%) and 47% of Japanese Americans do not affiliate with any religion, representing the highest percentages of religious “nones” among the Asian-origin groups large enough to be analyzed in the survey.

Nearly three-quarters of Filipino Americans (74%) identify as Christian, mostly Catholic, while 59% of Korean Americans identify as Christian, mostly Protestant. About a third of Korean Americans (34%) identify as born-again or Evangelical Protestants. 

Forty-eight percent of Indian Americans identify as Hindu, while 15% identify as Christian, 8% identify as Muslim, and 8% say they are Sikh. 

Buddhism is the most common religion among Vietnamese Americans (37%). 

While members of less populous Asian origin groups were not analyzed separately, they were included in the analysis grouped by region. 

“60% of South Asians in the United States other than Indian Americans (i.e., those who trace their origins to countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bhutan) are Muslim — higher than any of the six largest Asian origin groups,” the study finds. 

“38% of U.S. adults who trace their origin to Southeast Asian countries other than the Philippines and Vietnam are Buddhist.”

Roughly a third of Asian Americans say religion is “very important” in their lives. Asian American Muslims (60%) and Christians (54%) are much more likely than Asian American Hindus (33%) and Buddhists (31%) to feel that way.

“Looking at Asian Americans by their ethnic origin group, Japanese and Chinese Americans are notably less likely than members of other Asian origin groups to say religion is very important in their lives, reflecting the large number of ‘nones’ (those who describe their religion as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’) in these two groups,” the study states. 

“As a whole, Asian Americans born in the U.S. are somewhat less likely than Asian Americans born elsewhere to say religion is very important in their lives. And Asian Americans overall are somewhat less likely than the general U.S. population to say religion is very important in their lives (31% vs. 41%).”

Asian American Christians (55%) and Muslims (54%) are the two most likely groups to say they attend religious services at least once a month. Korean Americans were the most likely to say they attend religious services once a month (41%), followed by Filipinos (37%) and Indians (35%). 

Hindus (79%) and Buddhists (64%) are most likely to say they have shrines or altars in their homes that they use for worship. 

“Worshipping at home is also fairly common among Filipino Americans, owing to the large share of Catholics within the Filipino American population — 66% of Filipino Catholics in the U.S. say they have an altar, shrine or religious symbol used for worship in their home, compared with just 9% of other Filipino Americans,” the study notes. 

“While 36% of Asian Americans say they use a shrine, altar or religious symbol to worship at home, and 29% say they regularly attend religious services, only 15% say they do both of these things. This pattern reflects the varying worship practices of different religious groups.”

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