Gaps on the Map (more on "the silence of the internet")

Although I'm glad that anyone read the article at all, I think that my former point was missed about looking at the (imperfect) map of the internet as "an indirect indication of real cultural change".

Looking at a map made in Japan in 1604, the difference in detail between one part of the world and another is telling: while Southeast Asia was a navigable distance from Japan (and there were permanent Japanese settlements in Southeast Asia in 1604), it's nevertheless very hard to make sense of the vague mess surrounding 緬甸 (Myanmar/Burma).  Meanwhile, the coastlines of the Caribbean are very clearly delineated, and are easily recognizable based on what we would expect to see on a 21st century map.  In 1604, the Caribbean was the focus of a great deal of the world's attention: it was where the "fast money" was being made in the slave trade and the sugar industry.  You can see, by contrast, that nobody was making much money in the vague jumble of rivers and mountains surrounding 緬甸 and 安南 --although it would have been much easier for the Japanese to map out the coastline of Southeast Asia.

The level of detail, care and the awareness of what is being depicted indirectly reflects the cultural and economic importance assigned to these places at that time.  Of course, this particular map is an interesting example, because it was made in Japan, but also reflects Japan's reliance (in 1604) on European sources of information (a European "worldview" in a very literal sense).  There's nothing inevitable about that dependency: in 1604, there were Japanese mercenaries in the employ of the King of Thailand (as good a source of information as Herodotus ever had) but the Japanese evidently did not have much interest in that view of the world.

What do we really learn from the declining significance of Buddhism in different online forums?  I've suggested that it is an indirect reflection of something significant, even if we can't be precise about what the decline in interest really is.  The point of  my former article was not that Yahoo groups is of unique importance, nor that the Google Ngram statistic is "a perfect map" of cultural change.  Conversely, why would we ignore them, as indicators of a change of some kind?

Note, for example, that from 1968 to 2008, the cultural currency of "vegetarian" was in decline [click here for figure 1]… but, by contrast, "vegan" was increasing in usage during the same period [click here for figure 2]… I think that is an interesting indication of something.  It certainly isn't a perfect map, but it indicates what people are paying attention to (and publishing books about).  Annoyingly, by the way, words are tracked separately with and without capitalization, setting "Vegans" against "vegans" [click here for figure 3].

Well, here's the menacing chart showing the decline in interest in "theravada" from 1968 to 2008 [click here for figure 4].  You need to compare this to the separate chart for "Theravada" with a capital "T" [click here for figure 5].

These are the annoyances of relying on computer-automated research: believe it or not, the decline in interest in "Communism" (with a capital "C") was more rapid than the decline in interest in "communism" (lower-case) [click here for figure 6].  Again, this is an indirect indication of something: perhaps critics of Communism are more likely to leave the word without a capital letter and apologists are more likely to keep the capital letter, and perhaps people just stopped capitalizing the letter after some point at which it had become overly familiar as a noun.  One strange factoid spins out of this: 1974 was the first year that the lower-case spelling was more common than the capitalized form.

The Google Ngram system also separately tracks the most correct spelling Theravāda (with the second a marked as ā) but the number of uses of this spelling recorded is so infinitesimally small that we have no choice but to ignore it.

Are these charts completely meaningless?  No, I don't think so.  Generally, what we can see is that by 2008 the level of interest in Theravāda Buddhism was only slightly higher than it was in 1968; it briefly reached higher levels of interest for some of the years in-between, and then declined.


By contrast, it will be no surprise to anyone that there was a sudden increase in publications using the word "Islam" in the year 2001 [click here for figure 6].  Even before 2001, you may notice, the numbers for "Islam" are exponentially higher than "Theravada", and were increasingly higher than "Buddhism" over time.

In earlier blogicles, I've pointed out that Buddhism is much less popular than people seem to presume in (1) the U.S.A., (2) Canada, and even in (3) Taiwan.  I've also pointed out that statistics of this kind can sometimes (4) just be misleading junk.

At present, there is no easy or obvious assumption that Buddhism is "growing" or "flourishing".  Everywhere that I've done research in-the-field, the religion is shrinking; moreover, interest in the religion is declining faster than the brick-and-mortar institutions.  Buddhism certainly isn't flourishing in Cambodia, nor in Laos, nor in any part of China I've known.  The facile assumption that Buddhism would rapidly grow in the West has proven to be false, and, meanwhile, the religion is really struggling to survive in many of its homelands.  Although they're very imperfect maps of human activity, I do think that indications such as Google Ngram (and declining Buddhist blogging, etc.) reflect these changes.

Buddhism and the Silence of the Internet

The culture of communication is changing: this makes it difficult to measure any kind of cultural change through the lens of any given medium.  In an earlier article, I commented that one of the problems with counting the number of Buddhists in America through a telephone survey is that the culture of the telephone itself has changed in the last 20 years (who will answer an unknown number in the middle of the work-day, etc.).  However, the simple fact that I'm here dealing with is the decline of the discussion of Buddhism in English.  In some ways, the numbers speak for themselves, and in some ways they require quite a lot of talking to.

Jeffrey Kotyk recently drew attention to the sheer decline in the use of the word "Theravada" itself through Google's own statistics; you can compare that chart to what seems to be declining interest in Zen Buddhism, and other key terms (see his article, here).  Although interesting, staring at that chart (below) raises many questions about what type of change the Google Ngram statistic really measures (in relation to changes in the publishing industry specifically, and the culture of communication generally).  By contrast, the more colorful chart above is very simple: it shows the decline in the number of messages sent to an online discussion forum (namely, "Pali: The Pali Collective").

There was a generalized complaint about declining activity from the "Progressive Buddhism" blog a few months ago, too: "…so many of the 'names and faces' of 2007,8,9 and 10 are gone or have simply shifted interest…".  That complaint is evidently applicable to "The Pali Collective" and many other online discussion groups I've recently glanced over; when I look back at the archives of messages from 2007, I can see the names of a few Pali scholars whom I know/knew and respect, who are evidently no longer active in the forum.  However, "The Pali Collective" is still a relative success story: a large number of groups that I looked up have completely ceased to exist.  Others, like the (declaredly) academic forum moderated by Richard Hayes have gone silent, but have not formally shut down.  Circa 10 years ago, that forum was an extremely noisy place.

The Dhammadutas group (as shown above) declined into silence, and was then taken over by Spam.  Clicking through the archives, 2009 seemed to be the last year of real (human-to-human) communication on the forum, but it had already been in decline for some time.

By far the most active discussion forum shown in any of these charts is "Dhammastudygroup", but we nevertheless must observe a decline over the last several years (the level of activity is now roughly half of what it was at its peak).

This discussion forum for Black Buddhists seems to have been a convivial gathering around 2006, but declined soon thereafter, and now has not had a single message posted in 2012.

The broadly inclusive forum named "Sangha" has now declined to a tiny fraction of its former level of activity.  Although I'm showing a (roughly) 10 year period for each of these forums, I would note that "Sangha" was actually founded in 1998.  As such, this is probably one of the longest-running (continuous) discussion forums for Buddhism (in English), although it is not as old as the (now-moribund) forum overseen by Richard Hayes that I mentioned before ("Buddha-L").

I have seen many, many other examples of decline (and, frankly, I do not know of any real exceptions to the rule).  I've presented charts based on Yahoo groups specifically, because they display their own statistics in a manner that is easier to read than Google groups and other competitors (glance over the grid of numbers, e.g., at the bottom of the Buddhadasa group… also in stark decline).

Are we looking at a change in the culture of communication, or are we looking at an indirect indication of a real cultural change?  Before I started a blog of my own (à bas le ciel) I did look through a long list of possible websites that I could have (instead) become a contributor to.  There were no good options.  Although I do still have three articles in peer review, in the last few years I've surveyed my publishing options on paper, again and again; the choices that exist (for an author) are similarly bleak, and many of the publications are in an ongoing state of decline.

Is the growth of my own blog now an exception to the rule?  Although I'm surprised at my own growing number of readers, I also see this small-scale success in the context of the collapse of other modes of publication that should have (or could have) been available to me.  19th century journals really did contain "notices" written as casually as these blog-articles (often more casual still) and a forum of that kind (on paper) is now severely lacking for anyone in the field.  As I mentioned in recent articles, we no longer have the type of "scholarly pamphlet" that the Buddhist Studies Review and the Pali Buddhist Review used to be (as recently as the 1990s).  In looking over the charts above, however, we seem to be witnessing the shrinking of the internet (as a forum for Buddhism in English) especially since 2006.  If you've been actively searching for blogs or new publications on Theravāda Buddhism lately (and, perhaps, this is how some of you discovered my writing in the first place) you will have noticed: I don't have much competition.  As time goes on, I seem to have less and less competition, not more.

When Statistics are Junk: a Study of Religion and Atheism Worldwide

If the social sciences are at all scientific, we have to admit, bluntly, when we're looking at junk science.  I am going to argue (briefly) that a recent poll on religion and atheism (that managed to grab headlines) is junk.

The case is not hard to prove.  The study states that they interviewed 51,927 people worldwide.  It also states misleadingly, that, "In each country a national probability sample of around 1000 men and women was interviewed" (p. 7 of the press release).  If that were true, we would have an absurd situation: how could 1,000 interviews be equally representative of Lithuania and the People's Republic of China?  Indeed, how could you even conduct research with the same methods in the (starkly different) political conditions of those two countries?

The reality is even worse: they did interview 1,000 people in Lithuania (1,025 to be exact) and they did interview about the same number in Canada (1,003).  How many people did they interview in all of mainland China?  Precisely 500.

That's right, just 500 interviews are supposed to represent the religious diversity of the country, from Xinjiang (新疆) to Shanghai (上海), and have a reasonable level of statistical significance for a population of well beyond one billion people.

On this basis, they offer the absurd claim that China has the highest rate of atheism in the world (47%).  Perhaps the readers of newspapers would take this claim less seriously if they realized that this generalization is based on only 500 interviews --half as many as the company had used to represent the tiny population of Lithuania.

It is absurd, and this is not the only absurdity.  The press release very casually mentions that the interviews in some countries were conducted by telephone, in some face-to-face, and in some they were merely an online survey!  Fully 10,376 of the surveys were internet questionnaires: this data would not in any way be comparable to the other methods described.  Among other serious forms of bias, of course, is the fact that you would only get replies from people who use the internet (!) and who are comfortable reporting sensitive information over the internet; this excludes the average man in your average poverty-stricken totalitarian regime.

Some of the other categories are self-evidently absurd as well: the total number of Jews interviewed (in the entire world!) was only 106.  If someone offered generalizations about Judaism in England on the basis of merely 100 interviews, people might look askance at it, although the number of Jews in England is relatively few; in this study, instead, we have claims made about Judaism from Texas to Tel-Aviv, being made on the basis of only 106 interviews (and I do not know how many were by telephone, vs. internet, etc.).

The number of Buddhists interviewed (in the entire world) was a total of 725.  I do not know how many hundreds of millions of Buddhists there are on the planet, but 725 persons would be an extremely small percentage of them, and certainly incapable of representing even the diversity seen from Thailand to Taiwan, let alone from India to Japan.  The number of Hindus whom they interviewed was a similarly puny 974 persons (and, again, we are using the term "interview" very loosely, as I would not normally count an online form as an interview).  There is no basis whatsoever for any generalization about the state of these religions in this study.

Why is it that journalists (reporting these numbers as matters of fact) did not see any of these warning signs?  This is junk science, and the conclusions do not deserve to be taken seriously by anyone.  (Links to examples of the source being cited as factual: (1) in the Washington Post, (2) by the BBC, and (3) by the Ottawa Citizen).

I have the population of Lithuania as 3.2 million.  They interviewed roughly 0.032% of the population of that country, and if they had used a consistent and robust methodology (not internet questionnaires!) that might be a study worth reading.  The population of Canada is more than ten times larger than Lithuania, but the sample size is still the same, so we're talking about only 0.0029% of the population being interviewed.

How about China?  Can we even express the same equation as a percentage?

Interviewing 500 people out of 1.344 billion equates to 0.000037% of the population.  That would round off to zero.  Even if the best methodology imaginable were used, this would be insignificant --and there are serious warnings that the methodology was in fact inconsistent and (in my opinion) deeply flawed.

Full citation of the study: Gallup International Association (not related to Gallup Inc.), "Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, 2012", Press Release.

Taiwan's Funeral and Cremation Statistics (2001–2011)

After looking at the Taiwanese government's data on religious identity, the obvious next step was to try to spot trends in the various types of funerals conducted on the island.  The results have not been so obvious.

I have a lot to learn about the funeral business in Taiwan.  Somehow, they're managing to bury, cremate and inter vastly more people than the number who actually die on the island.  I assume that there are some very interesting reasons for the discrepancies in these numbers (perhaps some overseas Chinese are shipping their remains to Taiwan, etc.) but it is wildly incongruous that 139,125 corpses were cremated (火化場) in Taiwan in 2011.  Why?  Well, only 153,206 people died in Taiwan in that year (meaning that the cremations would seem to be, prima facie, more than 90% of the deaths), and a further 68,336 corpses were sent to funeral homes (殯儀館); and when you add those two figures together, you're looking at much, much more than 100% of the corpses that you would expect to be in circulation.

Although a human corpse may be reduced to ashes just once, apparently the process of interring the relics happens repeatedly in 21st century Taiwan.  As a cultural outsider, I'm assuming that a large portion of the repeated interring are the result of urbanization, land-scarcity, and the resulting relocation of human remains from one place to another.  I do not know if families now relocate human remains for other reasons (perhaps to consolidate remains from a family in a single location, that were formerly dispersed at various sites, or perhaps some families simply upgrade their cenotaphs).  I've certainly read about traditional re-burials and re-interring of remains (in passing) in the last few centuries of Chinese tradition.  However, starting only in the year 2008, the government started tracking a separate statistic for the number of ashes "moved out"; I assume that the majority of the remains "moved out" of one location are then interred again in another location, meaning that the statistics for the number interred in one particular year are not (alas) proportional to the number of deaths in that year.

Just how disproportionate do the statistics get?  In the year 2011 alone, we had 175,956 ash reliquaries (骨灰) interred in Taiwan, but only 153,206 people died.  When you look at the first chart, you can see that the black line for ashes interred exceeds the number of deaths per annum.

Although some (unknown) number of these could be people who died abroad whose families relocated (or repatriated) the remains to Taiwan, a large proportion of this total must have been interred some number of years after the death --and not necessarily interred for the first time.  Even if we subtract the number of ash reliquaries recorded as "moved out" (only 4,206) from the number interred in the same year, we still have a number that exceeds 100% of deaths in 2011.

In other words, the numbers don't make sense, but they probably fail to make sense for reasons that are really interesting, and deserve further research.  I have no idea whom I could ask for more information on this subject (has anyone heard of a professor with some salient research background?).

I'm still inclined to consider the funeral statistics relative to the total number of deaths on the island, because population has grown significantly (2001–2011) and the number of deaths increased from 127,892 (in 2001) to 153,206 (in 2011).  I have to compensate for population growth somehow, and measuring funerals relative to deaths makes more sense than births (or total population).

In looking at the statistics, it is clear that the government is trying to track the total amount of ground occupied by cemeteries and cenotaphs of various kinds (and, yes, the total area is growing) but the methodology of what exactly they're tracking under these headings is unclear to me.  I have separate statistics from the Taiwanese government for (1) bone relics 骨骸, (2) ash relics 骨灰, (3) planned burials, in contrast to (4) unplanned burials (a distinction that I assume concerns the type of land occupied by the grave); and then there is also the aforementioned contrast between the numbered of corpses registered at (5) the crematorium 火化場 and (6) the funeral home 殯儀館.  It is entirely possible that all of these categories are overlapping (and double-counting) in ways that I can't guess at.  None of them add up to 100% of anything, and, as explained, they certainly exceed the 100% standard we might expect to find in the number of deaths per annum.

As to what the real issues are at work here, I don't yet know: perhaps some social scientist will get in touch with me and explain how the various government registries really work.

Religious Identity in Taiwan 2001-2011

The statistics on religion in Taiwan are extremely interesting, but my initial warning (and final conclusion) here would be the standard refrain that "more research is needed".

The statistics that we have (on religion in Taiwan) are not provided by the census: the numbers are put together by a separate department of statistics inside the Ministry of the Interior (M.O.I.).  They rely on a number of other agencies, that evidently report on different religions in different ways.

Is that a problem?  Well, it means that each statistic can only be compared to itself over time, and that you can't really compare the numbers of one religion to another.  The measures used to define and document "membership" in different religions is not uniform, so you get a number that may be quite abstract that tracks the change within each religion, but that can't be compared to the others.

The threshold to be counted as a follower of Buddhism (n = 167,088) is completely different from the threshold to be counted as a Protestant (n = 401,023) and the two religions are administered by starkly different agencies.  Buddhism in Taiwan is governed by the B.A.R.O.C., a unique government agency, with unique restrictions that do not apply to any other religion on the island (cf. any of the work on this subject by André Laliberté).

If someone were looking uncritically at the bar charts of the raw numbers from the M.O.I., they would have the (incorrect) impression that Christians vastly out-number Buddhists on the island; meanwhile, the estimate offered by the C.I.A. would seem to devolve from a completely different universe.  It's the same universe, just two very differently calibrated statistics.

Although the C.I.A. is not my preferred source of information, their estimate that 93% of the population is either Buddhist, Daoist, or some combination thereof, would lead us to expect to find more than 21½ million people in this category in Taiwan (the island's population, in 2011, exceeded 23 million).  How many Buddhists and/or Daoists are recorded by the M.O.I.'s methodology?  Merely one million (n = 1,005,451) in their combined category of all "temple" (寺廟) religions (inclusive of Buddhism, Daoism, and a number of other East-Asian religions, the most numerically significant being Yi Guan Dao [一貫道]).

What none of these statistics indicate is how many people have no religion at all (be they atheist, agnostic, or otherwise).

The C.I.A. estimate does not leave any category at all for people who might be "none of the above".  In this cultural context, it seems that people who might otherwise be listed as having "no religion" are instead presumed to be "misc. Buddho-Daoist"; that's very misleading, and raises a set of issues that deserve some research unto themselves.  As with many post-colonial societies around the world, the contest between missionary Christianity and "Local Religions" has created a cultural assumption that anyone who has not consciously converted to a foreign religion will (by default) implicitly accept the local religion.  This is utterly untrue, and sets up a strange asymmetry of the religions: one category of religions is consciously chosen (and converted to), whereas the other is presumed to include everyone who does not reject them (by dint of their ethnicity).

The statistics we've got from the M.O.I. remain useful: they simply cannot be compared across categories and they have no relationship whatsoever to each religion's proportion of the total population.  Those are two considerable caveats, but I'll work with the numbers I've got.

Whatever paperwork is required for a person to be written down as a follower of a particular Buddhist organization in Taiwan (under B.A.R.O.C.) is evidently not the same as the procedure used for the other religions (not governed by B.A.R.O.C., nor any comparable institution).  Some of the smaller religions are reporting vague estimates to the government (e.g., it is not credible that Taiwanese Scientology [山達基教會] had exactly 1000 members every year since 2009, whereas they had only 100 members in 2008, etc.); others give very precise numbers, with annual fluctuation (there were exactly 902 Confucians [儒教] in 2011, whereas there were 909 in 2010 --or, at least, these were the numbers documented as formal members of one of the 15 confucian temples generating the paperwork).  I can also imagine, at least hypothetically, that some religions would be more motivated than others to provide documentary evidence of their following to the government, especially inasmuch as such paperwork may be linked to the regulation (if not subsidy) of social services provided by the religion.

Although Catholicism [天主教] is a minority religion in Taiwan, it is massively institutionalized: in 2011, Taiwan was home to 9 Catholic Hospitals, 7 Catholic Clinics, 16 Catholic Middle Schools, and 142 Catholic Kindergardens and Nursery Schools (exceeding the number of Buddhist institutions in every category mentioned; see the charts for some other examples).  This type of institutional depth probably produces paperwork documenting the membership of a larger proportion of their followers.  Religions, also, will vary as to their requirements for people to "enroll" to receive various rites of passage (and, again, the litigious nature of baptism, marriage, etc., in the Catholic tradition is a point of contrast).

The raw data for the number of religious institutions (shown here as eight pie-charts) can be misleading in many ways: there is no correlation between the number of institutions and their number of beneficiaries.  10 small schools may have fewer students than 1 large one, and so on for the number of patients in hospitals, or the number of homeless people assisted by a shelter.  There are nevertheless a few interesting facts that seem to leap off of the page here.  The focus of Catholicism on early childhood education is an interesting contrast to the emphasis that Taiwanese Daoism (apparently) places on retirement homes for the elderly, and "welfare foundations" (presumably for the poor?).  The underwhelming performance of Buddhism in all categories is self-evident.

At any rate, you've got the incongruous situation that the Christian minority (estimated at 4½% of the population by the C.I.A.) dominates the institutional landscape, and has greater numbers of formally documented followers than Buddhism --with the significant caveat that the nature of the documentation applied to the two is not comparable, and has no correlation to real numbers of devotees.  Confused yet?

However surreal the statistics may be, they're still indicative of changes over time: from 2001 to 2011, the number of (documented) Buddhists actually declined.  This is both true in real numbers and when we render the number as a percentage of the (growing) population.

In the first chart, the orange line shows you that the decline took place between 2002–2004, and that the numbers have recovered some of their losses since then, from 2004–2011.  This orange line is showing the total for all of the "temple" (寺廟) religions measured as a percentage of the population (year-by-year), to compensate for the growth in the latter.  In raw numbers (with no such compensation) there were 1,053,165 "temple" followers in 2001, and this declined to a low of 946,469 in 2004; the number increased again to 1,005,451 in 2011 --but because of the growth of the total population, this is a more significant decline than the number itself would suggest.  As a proportion of the population, "temple" religions declined.  As already explained above "temple" (寺廟) is a category that includes Buddhism, Daoism, and a few other East-Asian religions (all 902 Confucians [儒教] aforementioned); the category excludes all forms of Christianity, Islam, and so on.

During this period, both Buddhism and Daoism declined.  In raw numbers, the documented followers of Buddhism declined from 212,671 to only 167,088 in 2011.  Although this is an abstract figure (with all of the caveats stated above) and does not indicate the proportion of the population that is Buddhist, when we compensate for population growth, we're looking at a decline from 0.95 to 0.71 (a number that is abstract, but still indicative of change).  The corresponding decline in Daoism can be seen on the charts.

What does that mean?  Is there a real and ongoing decline in Taiwanese Buddhism, or have there been institutional changes (in B.A.R.O.C.) during this period that would have distorted the figures?

One of my reasons for writing an article of this kind is to invite responses on that point from my colleagues (some of whom know much better than I) --but there does seem to be "cause for pause" in these numbers, and many questions that deserve some further study.

Religious Identity in the Canadian Census

Canada does not operate under the principle of the separation of church and state (quite the contrary: we were founded as a British Empire colony governed through the collusion of church and state, and our "constitution"* opens with the declaration of "the supremacy of God").

* [The meaning of the word "constitution" is debatable: the document in question is actually called "Schedule B of the British North America Act", and it was, along with its prequel, an act of British Parliament.]

Although the disadvantages are numerous, the lack-of-a-separation between church and state entails that our census does report on religious identity (unlike the American government's census, that refuses to ask the question as a matter of principle).

If you're expecting to see the numbers from the 2011 census data, you may be waiting a few years yet.  The findings are "rolled out" in a series of thematically-specific reports.  The data on religion from the 2001 census was published in May of 2003; the publication of the 2011 results (pertaining to religion) are not yet on the docket for 2012.

The most striking thing about the data that I'm looking at is the near-zero rate of reporting for aboriginal religion (or First Nations "traditional religion", or whatever term we might apply).

In the year 2001, the only province or territory with a non-zero value for "Aboriginal Spirituality" was the Northwest Territories, where this category amounted to only 0.6%.

It is astounding to see an absolute zero for this category (or any equivalent category) in provinces like Saskatchewan, that have large populations identifying as First Nations (but not, apparently, identifying their religion as such).  Part of the reality here is that a very large proportion of Canada's indigenous people do identify themselves as Christian (with invidious divisions between Protestant and Catholic contested between communities, and sometimes within them).  In Southern Saskatchewan, I note, even the Mormons have made some efforts to convert the Cree and Saulteux, and I heard a few verbal anecdotes indicating that they have had at least a few converts so far.  Another part of the reality may be "survey fatigue", as the census has very specific questions for self-identification as aboriginal, including specific band association (i.e., a greater degree of specificity than for other ethnic groups).

There may also be a significant cultural difference between the expression of indigenous identity (qua religious identity) in the U.S. and Canada in the 21st century.  It will be interesting to see if these numbers remain at zero when the 2011 findings are published.

Unlike the U.S. data (that separately counted atheist, agnostic and "no religion") the Canadian data presents just one vague category of "no religion".  This has been re-enforced by having a check-mark box for the value of "no religion", in contrast to a blank line to write in any other religious identity as a noun of the respondent's choosing.  This standard continued in the 2011 census (see illustration).  In a sense, this precludes the possibility of diverse self-identification as various shades of "atheist", etc., and encourages the respondents themselves to subscribe to the category offered (if their religion does not correspond to the type given in the list of suggested identities on the left-hand side of the form).

Of course, an even more fundamental assumption predetermined by the wording on the census form is that each person can have only one religion.  In many cultural contexts (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, etc.) the opposite is true; we cannot guess from the census data to what extent the opposite might be true in Canada.  The reality of having more than one (simultaneous) religious identity can (and does) extend to people having multiple marriage ceremonies, and even multiple funerals.  Currently, this remains outside of the remit of the census.

The headline-grabbing story that emerges from the census data is that "no religion" has increased significantly across the country, and also that it varies significantly between provinces.  In the bottom half of the first illustration, you can see that Saskatchewan is significantly more secular than Quebec; however, Quebec itself also has a significant increase within the "no religion" category.

The other story, here, is that Canada is much more Catholic than it is commonly imagined to be: Catholicism is the single largest religion in Canada (43% in 2001) and this is not only for historical reasons, but is also re-enforced by ongoing patterns of immigration.  New immigrants who had arrived (in Canada) between 1991 and May of 2001 were only 4.6% Buddhist; 23% identified as Roman Catholic, the single largest religion amongst new immigrants, with Muslims constituting 15% by contrast.  However, new immigrants were also very frequently secular: 21.3% opted for the "no religion" category.

Without digressing into specific denominations, it is no surprise to anyone living in Canada that "mainstream protestantism" has been on the decline, coeval with a number of small sects increasing their numbers.  Roughly aggregating all protestants together, their share of the population declined from 35% (in 1991) to only 29% (in 2001).  I say that this is done "roughly", for several reasons, one of the most striking being that (in 2001) a statistically significant 2.6% of respondents identified as "Christian", with no further denomination or identification.  The decade's decline in the number of protestants would be much less dramatic if we were willing to assume that this further category was largely comprised of "misc. protestants" --or even if we were willing to assume that half of this category was protestant.

Contrary to many inflated claims that I have seen around the internet, Buddhism is not now (2001) and never has been a numerically significant religion in Canada; both its absolute size and its growth (1991–2001) are puny relative even to Islam.  As we should see the 2011 data within a few years, it might be interesting for anyone to take out a bet on whether or not these trends will continue.

The establishment of Buddhism in Canada (such as it is) has transpired in the shadow of war: the relocation of refugees (and wartime allies) created in the 20th century's wars in Asia brought Buddhists to Canada (the arrival of our Lao and Cambodian populations were very directly linked to that chapter of history, and do not reflect a constant form of economic migration; there have been several academic studies on the phenomenon, e.g., Penny Van Esterik, 1992).  The wars of the 21st century, following a familiar pattern, are now relocating Muslim populations to Canada.  I hear this discussed in a rather strange voice on C.B.C. radio, as if the broadcasters are not quite sure what angle to put on the fact that both refugees from Afghanistan and former allies/employees of the Canadian military are applying to permanently relocate to the country, and openly state that their families would be targeted if they remained in Afghanistan.

As with the evacuation of forces from Vietnam in the 1970s, there's an implicit recognition of military defeat if it is (in fact) impossible for the supposed conqueror's allies to remain in the country that they have allegedly conquered after the conquest is complete.  If (e.g.) the men employed as translators for the Canadian forces would be in danger if they remained in their countries of origin, this is a reasonable indicator of the extent to which Canada not only "lost the war", but has also created enduring hostility, and the conditions for civil war to ensue thereafter.  I do not think that this transfer of population will be from Afghanistan only, and I do not think that the full extent of it will be captured in the 2011 census (i.e., there will be a lag, for many years after the conclusion of the war, as with refugee camps on the Lao border continuing to send "evacuees" to the U.S. and Canada for a period of decades after the military had withdrawn, etc.).

The Only Statistic for Buddhism in the USA

There are not many statistics worth knowing for Buddhism in the U.S.A., and I would like to offer a few notes on some of the limitations of the main statistic that's now available: the A.R.I.S., illustrated above.

One fact that leaps off of the chart here is that Buddhists now outnumber the adherents of all the religions native to North America combined: this is not something to be proud of.  In the context of a former British Colony, this is part of the endgame to cultural genocide.  I've included the statistic for just how endangered First Nations religiosity really is for just that reason: to keep this in the perspective of the genocidal social history of a country that has (lately) adopted a form of political pluralism that allows Buddhism to be preached, practiced, and develop institutions of mortar and brick.  Complaining that Buddhists are a small minority in the U.S. is not morally equivalent to complaining that Buddhists are a minority in South Korea (itself an interesting fact), nor is it morally equivalent to the situation of Buddhists in countries where their own religion had been indigenous prior to conquest (and persecution) by Islam.

In relation to the chart, I would quickly mention a few things about what the A.R.I.S. numbers do and do not tell us.

1. Most people would look at the increasing bar-chart and assume that the survey is capturing the opinions of increasing numbers of Buddhists born overseas: the opposite is true.  Amazingly, the 2001 A.R.I.S. interviewed zero persons born in China, zero persons born in India, and zero born in Thailand, Vietnam, Japan or Sri Lanka.  The random sample did manage to interview two persons born in Bolivia and two persons born in Venezuela, and it lists 7 as "other" (unspecified); from what I can see, however, there seem to be zero from traditionally Buddhist countries.  So, believe it or not, the A.R.I.S. numbers do not capture increasing immigrant Buddhism to the U.S.; the skew is in the opposite direction, and we're looking (disproportionately) at non-immigrant Buddhists in these charts.

2. Many of the most obvious types of distortion in the data relate to the method of "random number dialing" itself: these are telephone interviews, and for anyone wondering "how did they manage not to interview a single person born in China?", part of the answer may be that speakers of Chinese as a first language refused to participate in the interview at all.  Plenty of people will hang up on a voice they don't recognize; some immigrant groups may be especially unwilling to discuss politically-sensitive information over the telephone, in their second language, in these circumstances.

Telephone-interview data has other important sources of distortion: in 2001, 32.4% of the persons interviewed were "not employed", with a further 11.2% describing themselves as only employed part-time.  That is not a representative sample: it's a sample of the type of people who are available to answer the phone at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and who choose not to hang up when they hear that this is about a survey.  Inevitably, this method will over-represent people who are retired, unemployed, or who are working as stay-at-home parents.

What makes this worse is that the skew is not consistent over time: normally, a distortion in a baseline study can be ignored (to some extent) as soon as we've got a sequence of studies to compare it to, because all stages of the study should reproduce the same distortion equally.  However, if there is one thing that has changed more dramatically than religion (in the period 1990 to 2008) it is the culture and technology of the telephone.

3. If I had access to the full data-set (and I don't, thus no cross-tabulations in SPSS) I would work only with the reports of the interviewed person's own religion: the number of interviews is 54,451 --and I would prefer to work strictly with the "self-described religion" of those 54,451 persons interviewed.  Instead, the data that A.R.I.S. has made public on their website tells us about the reported religion of 228,182 persons indirectly represented in the interviews.  In measuring religion by telephone, that's a problem.

I do not think that the persons interviewed will fairly represent the religions of their own spouses and children: instead, we're looking at a kind of skew arising from the degree of paternalism (and varying thresholds to conversion) in the different religions.

Hypothetically, if they had interviewed Bhikkhu Bodhi's own mother, she might have been confident in stating that her children were all the same religion that she was herself (but, in fact, her son had converted to Buddhism, and become a famous monk, etc. --something the parents did not approve of).  Some people will continue to describe you as your religion-of-birth no matter how you may insist that you have converted to another religion --and this tendency can be especially strong within the family unit (inasmuch as religion becomes a marker of shared ethnic identity more than a reflection of belief or personal choice).  The thresholds and boundaries are also very different for the various religions concerned: at what point would an apostate Catholic actually be described as "not Catholic" by his or her own father (in the context of a telephone survey)?  It's worth considering that the dotted lines involved are considerably different for Catholicism, Judaism, etc.; direct self-identification as "agnostic" is probably much less ambiguous than the question of whether or not your parents would report you as "agnostic", or even what your own spouse might say about you.

I've combined the numbers of atheists and agnostics into a single category for all three years (1990, 2001 and 2008) because they were combined as a single category in the first study (1990).  This total does not include those who describe themselves as having "no religion": the latter category is much larger than the first two.  In 2008, the study found 1,985 self-described agnostics, plus a further 1,621 self-described atheists; however, I have not treated this as the same category as the 30,427 other respondents who instead said that they have "no religion".

As some sort of disclaimer, I should say that I'm not a fan of studies of Buddhism in the U.S., and it's a relatively prolix literature, pioneered by Charles Preblish (from whom you can hear a one-hour lecture on Youtube, reviewing some of the changes in the field of study that he partly invented, over the course of the last few decades).  In many ways, the study of Buddhism in North America has become a pretext to study Buddhism in vitro, and in the medium of the English language only.  This entails all the same problems that I've complained about (when Anthropologists make comparative claims in comparing something known to something unknown) in my article "Problems of Canon and Reason"… and all of the problems I've complained about resulting from the lack of canonical literacy in both East and West (both in Cambodia and in Sri Lanka… what did you think I meant by "East and West"?)… and more.