Measuring Religiosity of East Asians: Multiple Religious Belonging, Believing, and Practicing

Abstract

Social surveys normally assume that respondents adhere to a single religious faith in belonging, believing, and practicing congruently. Some surveys even take religious identity as the singular measure of religiosity and examine its relationship with other variables. This practice, however, fails to capture nonexclusive and hybrid religiosity, which is arguably the traditional and normal pattern in East Asia while becoming increasingly common in the West. We have developed a new set of survey questions and conducted a survey among East Asian international students at an American university. The findings show that multiple religious belonging, believing, and practicing are quite common, the level of believing and participating in religions varies substantially, and no confessionbased single measure of religious identity or practice is sufficient for measuring religiosity. We recommend this set of improved measures of religiosity be adopted in future surveys in East Asia and probably in the West as well.

How Can Religious Fractionalization and Polarization Inform Us at the County Level in Post-Communist Romania?

“…Against such a background, mapping religious, spatial confessional attributes of a place and sacred issues represents an interesting step in understanding the most important implication of religion in regional and national contexts which are continually shaped by specific confessions. This argument referring to the mapping of religion highlights the geographical relevance of religion in recent studies (Scott and Simpson-Housley 2001;Park 2002Park , 2005, connecting it to specific concepts of space, place and identity which frame new landscapes and spatial patterns and which often relate to new paradigms for various problematizing dialogues on confessional background and religion from a geographic perspective (Stump 2008;Knott 2008;Tong et al 2009;Yorgason and della Dora 2009;Yang and McPhail 2023). As regards religion and confessional geographies, Romania remains an interesting European spatial sample with certain dynamic confessional patterns framed both during past layers of time and in recent post-socialist decades with interesting, real diversity, which is briefly investigated in the next section.…”

Constancy and Changes in the Distribution of Religious Groups in Contemporary China: Centering on Religion as a Whole, Buddhism, Protestantism and Folk Religion

“…On the other hand, exclusivity is the core character of Western religions, while traditional Chinese religion is characterized as pantheism. Correspondingly, additive (Jordan 1993) or multiple religious belonging (Oostveen 2019;Yang and McPhail 2023) are some of the most salient characteristics of some Chinese religious practices. However, since the respondents of CGSS are required to only choose a single option of their religious affiliation, this study only aimed to reveal one aspect of the changing distribution of religious groups in contemporary China, given the scarcity of national religious data based on scientific sampling.…”

Creating welcoming and supportive campus climates for Buddhist students: Barriers and opportunities

“…While there is not much research on Buddhist students’ religiousness produced using religio‐culturally relevant frameworks, there are a couple of studies that do offer helpful insights. For instance, Yang and McPhail (2023) explain that many Buddhist students follow and/or practice more than one religion, and that in East Asian cultures (including East Asian‐American cultures), this is typically viewed as normal. Moreover, they explain that among East Asians, the distinction between which behaviors are religious and which are secular, or merely cultural, is not clear.…”

“…Admittedly, however, accurate demographic data on Buddhist students is difficult to provide. In part because many national surveys do not collect data on religious identity, and also because mainstream ways of asking about religion and measuring religiousness are deeply flawed (Edwards, 2021; Nielsen et al., 2022; Yang & McPhail, 2023). As Yang and McPhail (2023) explain, the clear Christian normative bias (e.g., the emphasis on self‐identification and assumption of exclusivity) in most efforts to measure religion and religiousness can lead to drastically undercounting East Asians and the religious traditions they follow.…”

“…In part because many national surveys do not collect data on religious identity, and also because mainstream ways of asking about religion and measuring religiousness are deeply flawed (Edwards, 2021; Nielsen et al., 2022; Yang & McPhail, 2023). As Yang and McPhail (2023) explain, the clear Christian normative bias (e.g., the emphasis on self‐identification and assumption of exclusivity) in most efforts to measure religion and religiousness can lead to drastically undercounting East Asians and the religious traditions they follow. So, it is likely true that there are more Buddhist students than we are aware of and that a greater percentage of them may be Asian/Asian‐American, especially given the drastic increase in East Asian international students studying in the United States in recent years—from approximately 60,000 in 2005 to over 370,000 in 2020, a five‐fold increase (Silver, 2021).…”