Monday, January 24, 2011

American Indian religion

After rolling my eyes at the Native American invocation given at the memorial service rally in Tucson, I wondered what percent of American Indians even belong to an indigenous religion.

According to the GSS, here is the distribution of religious affiliations for American Indians (sample size = 1,818--I didn't count the white wannabes)

Percent

Protestant  53.3
Catholic 17.8
None 13.2
Other 7.4
Native American 4.1
Christian 3.3
Buddhist 0.8

Wow! A whopping 4 percent of American Indians belong to an indigenous faith.

According to the most recent GSS Survey (2008), 0.7% of Americans are Amerindians. So the Tucson event catered to--what--about three people?  I've got more cousins. Organizers didn't give a damn about the wishes of real, live Indians (or they would have asked a Protestant minister to pray). They really care about their fashionable liberal buddies.

2 comments:

  1. Hilarious!

    Actually, to be more precise, for a population of 308,745,538, I make it 88,609

    - which (come to think of it) is indeed almost exactly equal to 3.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4:42 PM

    I'd bet most of the "Other" are probably "Old-Religionists", too. At least vaguely/peripherally. A better estimate is thus ~1-in-10.

    One further point: The American-Indians on the reservations are among the most culturally-depressed people on this planet. That discourages affiliation with that religion. Reservation Indians were one of the groups that inspired the term "Fourth World"!

    ReplyDelete

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