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American Religious Identification Survey
RELIGION AND IDENTITY: HISPANICS & JEWS
Decades of prior research by the present scholars as well as others, has drawn attention to the multi-layered nature of social identity, particularly as it relates to religion. For example, the largest minority group in the US, the Hispanic population, is a grouping based upon cultural identity. It is a diverse grouping in terms of history, national origins and race. The common cultural elements are assumed to be the Spanish language and religion - the Roman Catholic faith - both of which can be related to the alternative usage of Latino/a for Hispanic. This assumption tends to make the existence of Hispanic Methodists or Buddhists appear to be incongruous. People identified as Hispanic or Latino are automatically presumed to be Catholic because most are and most also hail from countries that have Catholicism as their established religion.
True to expectations, the present study found that about 57% of adults who identified themselves as being of Hispanic origins indicated their religion as Catholic. However, about 22% indicated their religion as one of the Protestant denominations, 5% indicated some other religious identification and 12% indicated that they have no religion.
Among American Jews "Jewish identity" is likewise an amalgam of religious, ethnic and cultural elements. The present study sought to ascertain the demographic boundaries of the entire population of adults in America based on religious self-classification. Thus the report focuses analysis only upon groups of adults in terms of how they classified themselves with respect to religion.
In the case of the Jewish population the study probed further into not only the religious identification of respondents, but also into parentage, upbringing and whether the respondent considered himself or herself Jewish.
We found that the Jewish adult population that identifies with Judaism as a religion represents 53% of all adults who can be classified as Jewish. The remaining 47% of the total consisted of adults who indicated they are of Jewish parentage or were raised Jewish or considered themselves Jewish for some other reason.
Projecting from the present sample, there are about 5.3 million adults in the American Jewish population: 2.83 million adults are estimated to be adherents of Judaism; 1.08 million are estimated to be adherents of no religion; and 1.36 million are estimated to be adherents of a religion other than Judaism.
As these examples should make clear, religious identification is often a highly complex attribute. For that reason, this report has limited itself to a strict and specific aspect of that identification, namely the classification of people and households on the basis of how respondents answered the key question: "What is your religion, if any?"
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