USA, May 12, 2009 [by the HPI Staff]: It’s time for a quiz. Which country is more Hindu, by percentage, than Mother India? Which twelve countries have more than 500,000 Hindus? Which eight have more than a million? Which five have more than two million?
Even the most knowledgeable Hindu scholar might find his view of Hinduism’s global presence change a little after studying the answers to these questions. Statistics about Hinduism, coming from several sources, have been compiled into a Wikipedia page you can visit at the “Source” above. Wikipedia has gathered data from several authoritative sources to create a series of tables clearly showing Hindu populations worldwide.
A particularly persistent misconception still found in the numbers Wikipedia references is the number of Hindus in the US. It is against American law to ask about one’s religion during a nation-wide census, and Wikipedia uses numbers from a telephone survey.
The figure given for the US Hindu population is just under 1.5 million. Hinduism Today believes this figure is too low, and here is why.
The official US Community Survey states that there are 2,630,000 Asian Indians in America today. Since India’s population is 81 percent Hindu, it seems reasonable that a similar percentage might apply to the US population who came from India. That would mean there are 2,130,000 Hindus in the US from India alone.
Yet many other Hindus have come from Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Bali, Trinidad, Fiji and elsewhere. It seems evident that there must be far more than 1.5 million Hindus in the US! And then, what of the 16.5 million Americans who practice yoga regularly–and the 72 million (24 percent of US population!) who believe in reincarnation, even though they may say they belong to other religions? These arguments are put forth more fully here: https://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/2008/1-3/61_swadhyay%20pariwar.shtml