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Abstract
Religious demography is generally a challenging endeavor and counting and defining religions and religious identities in an Asian context is notoriously difficult. Buddhists in both Asia and the West have a long tradition of gray-zone religiosity, which means that membership and mono-identity is less common than syncretic engagement and hybrid identity. The immigrant Buddhists in the West are generally far more numerous than the convert and new age Buddhists. Their numbers are, however, extremely difficult to ascertain. This article discusses the methodological and theoretical problems in quantifying immigrant religion and the challenges of operationalizing such constraints into concrete methods. The empirical data derive from the author’s engagement in research on Buddhism in Denmark, in which traditions from both Theravada and Mahayana groups are represented. While concrete figures are suggested, it is also concluded that further empirical research as well as comparison with more contexts are necessary for the continued refinement of usable methods in counting immigrant religion.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. According to the World Religion Database, there are 520 million Buddhists in 2015. The Pew Forum (Global) estimates the number to be 488 million in 2012. If the concept of Buddhism is broadened to include ‘wider Buddhism’ with folk religious elements, “it is appropriate to speak of 1 billion Buddhists” (Johnson and Grim, World’s Religions 36).
2. On sources and collections of data for religious demography in general, see Todd Johnson and Brian Grim, World’s Religions 163–89.
3. Arguments against categorizing Buddhism as a religion are often based on élitist and theological ideals that are not relevant for the majority of living Buddhists. When the British anthropologist Martin Southwold concluded that “either the theistic definitions and conception of religion are wrong or Buddhism is not a religion” (367, emphasis in original), he pointed to the need to understand Buddhism as a lived religion rather than (just) a theological system of belief; for the marginal few (primarily Western individuals) who claim that Buddhism is not a religion, Malcolm Hamilton’s (16) comment might suffice: “If that small minority who are strictly atheistic in their understanding of the nature of the Buddha have to be excluded as not followers of a religion, then so be it.”
4. Charles Prebish first described this binary opposition to analyze the situation in American Buddhism regarding two distinct groups of Buddhists with distinct ways of understanding and practising their religion. See also Paul Numrich for an introduction to this scholarly field.
5. Until 1998, the advisory board was constituted by Christian theologians who could, more or less for ideological reasons, pick and choose between whom they liked or disliked. Since then, the board has consisted of an historian of religion, a sociologist of religion, a theologian, and a lawyer, but approval to become a recognized religious group is still based on Christian criteria. Thus, one can only be a member of one recognized religious community and mono-religiosity is reflected in the membership criteria.
6. Buddhist hybrid religiosity is expressed by the different acronyms from the American scene, such as ‘Jubus’ (Jews integrating Buddhism with Judaism), ‘Bujus’ (Buddhists with Jewish parents), ‘UUbus’ (Unitarian Universalist Buddhists), ‘Ebus’ (Episcopalian Buddhists) or ‘Zen Catholics’.
7. Regarding Buddhism in Denmark, related to these projects, see Jørn Borup, “Buddhism”; “Religiosity”, Borup and Lars Ahlin; Ahlin et al. Since 2009, in each edition of the Centre for Contemporary Religion’s yearbook, statistics and analyses of the recognized Buddhist communities have been available online.
8. Especially the World Religion Database, the World Christian Database, the World Value Survey and surveys from the Pew Forum were used. For the project on the Vietnamese immigrants in Denmark, a report and raw data from a survey on the values of ethnic minorities from the Think Tank of the Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs were used to supplement my own data with data from a larger representative survey.
9. In such a model, attributes (e.g. gods) need not be present in all taxonomic units (e.g. a religion), as long as it contains some of them (e.g. belief in transempirical powers, ritual practices, institutional formation). That is, some forms of Buddhism might lack gods, but they have many other elements in common with other religions and therefore belong to the same conceptual family, the same way as, in a ‘Buddhist sense’, a thread with overlapping fibers does not constitute an essential core but exists pragmatically as an observable entity. Whether such network metaphors are based on theories of necessary ‘prototypes’ or not, an ‘unbounded’ categorization of religion and Buddhism with its ‘pool of elements’ (Three Jewels, doctrines, rituals, gods, etc.) opens up the plurality of traditions, practices, and interpretations with different kinds of Buddhisms. By moving from ‘either/or’ to ‘more or less’ criteria, ‘gray zone’ Buddhism can also be included, as can a spectrum of more or less secular or religious Buddhists, more or less engaged Buddhists, hard-core practitioners and sympathizers, ad hoc religiosity, private religiosity, syncretic hybrid Buddhism, dharma shopping, funeral Buddhism, meditation Buddhism, etc. See Benson Saler for an introduction to this model of family resemblance, aligned with theories of prototypes.
10. A recent WIN-Gallup international survey on religiosity and atheism showed Vietnam to be the country with the most notable decline in religiosity since 2005, while at the same time showing no atheists (Washington Post). According to the Washington Post, Barry Kosmin, the principal investigator for the American Religious Identification Survey, was “doubtful of the accuracy of the survey overall and some of the international comparisons” (Washington Post).
11. Although also highly respected by the Vietnamese, Thich Nhat Hanh and his modern universal Buddhism primarily cater to ethnic Danes, as do Vipassana and mindfulness meditation. Very few people of Himalayan origin are part of the Tibetan Buddhist groups, which are over-represented in relation to their small number of members and adherents. The same is true of those originating in Japan. Very few are members of Soka Gakkai and none are part of Zen groups. In general, there are hardly any convert Buddhists joining the immigrant Buddhist temples and groups.