NEW YORK, U.S., May 13, 2015 (Times of India): Fueled by immigration, America’s Hindu population has reached 2.23 million, an increase of about one million or 85.8 percent since 2007, making Hinduism the fourth-largest faith, according to estimates based on wide-ranging study of religions in the nation. The proportion of Hindus in the US population rose from 0.4 percent in 2007 to 0.7 percent last year, according to the Pew Research Center’s “Religious Landscape Study” published on Tuesday.
The study only gave the percentage shares of Hindus in the population, rather than numbers, but calculations by IANS using the population proportions in the report and census projections showed that the number of Hindus rose from 1.2 million in 2007 out of a total US population of 301.2 million that year to 2.23 million in 2014 in a population of 318.88 million. This amounts to an increase of 1.03 million or 85.8 percent in the Hindu population during the seven-year period. Pew said that it may have underestimated the size of the Hindu population in an earlier report.
[HPI Note: In 2008, Hinduism Today estimated the population of Hindus in the US at 2.29 million — see https://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=158. It appears quite likely that the earlier number cited by Pew is indeed an underestimation, as there is no logical reason for such a sharp increase in the number of Hindus since 2008.]
Looking at the socio-economic profile of Hindus, the new Pew report released on Tuesday said they had the highest education and income levels of all religious groups in the US: 36 percent of the Hindus said their annual family income exceeded $100,000, compared with 19 percent of the overall population. The new report said that most of the increase in the Hindu population came through immigration and not conversions: 87 percent are immigrants and nine percent are the children of immigrants. Only 10 percent of the Hindus are converts, with Catholics and unaffiliated each accounting for 3 percent.
HPI Note: “Only 10 percent of the Hindus are converts” is actually the most startling statistic in this survey, and well beyond anything Hinduism Today would have guessed. That translates, using Pew’s numbers of the Hindu population today, to 210,000 Hindu converts in the US.