Back when this blog was in its first incarnation, I used to occasionally do some challenge questions. I stumbled across one this week that seemed like a good candidate, and since my computer is still broken I figured I’d throw it out there.
As part of their religious landscape survey, Pew Research has put together a racial diversity ranking of religions and major denominations in the US. Six groups were found to be more diverse than the U.S. general population. What are they?
A few clarifications and one hint to help:
1. The diversity ranking measures the spread across 5 racial groups: White, Black, Asian, Latino and Mixed/Other. A perfect score would be 20% in each category. In other words, a group dominated by one group would not be considered diverse even if that group was a minority group in the US.
2. Pew breaks Christianity down in to major denominations and includes several types of unaffiliated (aka not religious) groups in their survey. If you want to see the groups included, see this page.
3. The survey also only looked at people in the US, so diversity is only based solely on that. Groups may have more diversity in other countries, but only their US members were counted.
4. If you need a hint: 3 of the top 6 groups are Christian or Christian-adjacent* and 3 were other religions or unaffiliated groups.
For the answer, see the list here.
*For purposes of this question, Christian adjacent means that the members of the group might consider themselves Christians, but a majority of Christians in other denominations do not.
graph paper diaries 
I knew that SDA and JW were going to be up there, having noted it for years. I thought American Baptist and Church of Christ would be well up there as well, and they only sorta were. Few Asians in those groups, which I should have thought of. Having four out of five groups doesn’t count that much, I see. I think the nondenominational Christians, were they measured, would be up there as well, as would Pentecostal groups – though again, few Asian Pentecostals.
I was surprised at UMC. Ben’s church is the most diverse in Houston.
Buddhists (facepalm): shoulda thought of that. I did get it from your hint, but not as instantly as I should have.
The US-only picture does skew things a bit. My own denomination, ECC, was founded by Swedes and has only recently sttarted to sprout nonwhite congregations here. But there are more of us in Africa than the US. I think the Episcopalians and Catholics may have some of that as well.
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10 am is the most segregated hour in America. Don’t know if there is an original source.
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