Religion News Watch
USA, November 10, 2003: According to the report in Religion News Watch, more Americans than might be expected are impacted by the growing religious diversity in the U.S., although interfaith acceptance is not necessarily a byproduct of this reality, according to a recent survey. At the conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Princeton University sociologist Robert Wuthnow presented findings from his new Diversity Survey, noting that even a relatively small proportion of non-Christian religious adherents may exert a large presence in society. The survey, conducted among 2,910 people, found that 48 percent of the public claimed to have had at least some personal contact with Muslims; 35 percent with Hindus; and 34 percent with Buddhists. Eight percent of the public claims to have attended a Muslim mosque, ten percent a Buddhist center or temple, and six percent a Hindu temple. Wuthnow notes that these figures are considerably larger than the percentages of Americans in the 1970s who experimented with Eastern new religions. “In short, there is a kind of cultural awareness, undoubtedly forged as much by television and motion pictures and by international travel and cultural mixing as by recent trends in immigration, which far exceeds and transcends the actual numbers of Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist adherents,” Wuthnow says. The impact of such diversity may be evident in the finding that 54 percent of the American public thinks all religions are equally true (HPI adds: a specifically Hindu teaching), though in the same survey, 58 percent also agreed that “Christianity is the best way to understand God.” More problematic was the view of 47 percent of respondents who said that the word “fanatical” applied to the religion of Islam and 40 percent said the word “violent” did. Nearly one quarter (23 percent) said they favored making it illegal for Muslim groups to meet in the U.S. for worship. While perceptions of Hindus and Buddhists were more favorable (only about one-quarter of respondents regarded these two faiths as fanatical), one person in five still favored making it illegal for these groups to meet.