Story at a glance
- A new Pew Research Center survey states that more Asian Americans have no religious affiliation.
- Survey findings support other research showing number of nonreligious Americans is growing.
- The makeup of religious Asian Americans is changing as well.
Like the rest of the U.S., more Asian Americans are distancing themselves from religion.
A new Pew Research Center survey found that 32 percent of Asian Americans are now religiously unaffiliated.
In 2012, 26 percent of Asian Americans said they were religiously unaffiliated, according to the survey.
Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans had the highest percentages of non-religious people.
According to the survey, 56 percent of Chinese Americans and 47 percent of Japanese Americans are not affiliated with any religion.
The number of Asian Americans unaffiliated with organized religion mirrors rates among the American population as a whole.
About 30 percent of Americans identified as having no religion, according to a 2021 AP-NORC poll.
And a similar survey conducted by Pew that same year also found that about 30 percent of U.S. adults don’t identify with any specific religion.
The Pew survey released Wednesday also found that the religious make up of Asian Americans is changing in other ways.
Most notably, Christianity among Asian Americans is declining.
Christianity is still the largest religion among Asian Americans, but the percentage of people identifying as Christians has dropped by 8 points over the last decade.
In 2012, 42 percent of Asian Americans identified as Christians, according to the survey.
Now, that number has fallen to 34 percent.
Christian sects are pretty equally represented among Asian Americans.
Out of Asian American Christians, 17 percent are Catholic, 16 percent are Protestant and 10 percent are born-again or evangelical Protestants.
The number of Asian Americans identifying as Buddhists is declining as well.
In 2012, about 14 percent of Asian American adults were Buddhist, according to the survey. Now, 11 percent of Asian Americans say they are Buddhist.
Islam and Hinduism are growing faith groups among Asian Americans, the survey shows.
About 11 percent of Asian American adults are Hindu, up one percentage point from 2012, and 6 percent are Muslim.
Pew’s 7,006-person survey was conducted between July 2022 and January 2023.
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