Problems with the Pew Forum's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

Keeping up with demographic information isn't a high priority for me, but I just noticed this blog post (2 months old) which mentions that the Pew survey (mentioned in a previous post entitled 0.7% of Americans are Buddhist) has some serious flaws when it comes to the results regarding Buddhism.

I don't want to try to quote the post, because it involves several levels of nested quotes that I'm too lazy to deal with, but the issues come down to:

• The survey was conducted only in English and Spanish. Anyone who's been to a Thai, Lao, or other Asian or Southeast Asian temple will know that a significant number of people who attend don't speak English or don't speak it very well. Often the monks don't speak any English. So it wouldn't be surprising if a survey conducted only in English or Spanish missed quite a few Buddhists.


• The survey excluded Hawaii, something I totally failed to notice. As you may know, Hawaii has a high Asian population, especially Japanese-American.

So the following Buddhism-related findings from the survey:

...Buddhism in the U.S. is primarily made up of native-born adherents, whites and converts. Only one-in-three American Buddhists describe their race as Asian, while nearly three-in-four Buddhists say they are converts to Buddhism.

Are seriously brought into question. I thought 33% Asian seemed a bit low. Intuition makes me think that it should be more like 50%, but I have no scientific basis for that.

Anyway, I'm actually more interested in things like how many Buddhists are "heaven focused" vs. "nibbana focused", how many are focused on rituals vs. practices like meditation, and stuff like that. It's my general perception that American "converts" are more into the philosophy of Dhamma whereas people born into Buddhism are more likely to perform certain rituals and do things to earn merit (like giving/dana) in order to be reborn in a heavenly state. The sense I get is that Americans who are more "heaven oriented" vs. "nibbana oriented" basically end up identifying more with some other religion rather than becoming Buddhist. After all, we have other religions that promise much easier ways to get to heaven that probably seem more appealing to many people, and they're more traditional in the culture as well.

I wonder... if there were more of an effort to promote the heaven-oriented Buddhist path in America and the west in general, would there be more people interested in Buddhism? Do westerners go for that kind of thing or do the ones who just want to do good things to get to heaven find that something like Christianity makes more sense to them? Would promoting this kind of thing be good or bad?

Anyway, thanks to Dharma Folk for helping lead me to this information on the problems with the Pew survey.