Religion in Korea
As of 2005, approximately 46.5% of the South Korean population express no religious preference. Of the rest, most are Buddhist or Christian; according to the 2005 census, 29.2% of the population at that time was Christian (18.3% professed to being Protestants and 10.9% Catholics), and 22.8% were Buddhist. Approximately half of Koreans (49.3% in 1995) are unaffiliated with any religion, and the remaining portion (1.3% in 1995 affiliated with other religions, including Islam and various new religious movements such as Jeungism, Daesunism, Cheondoism and Wonbuddhism.
posted by Wonji Dharma at
January 20, 2010
1 Comments:
My sense is that these statistics seriously misrepresent religion in Korea. I think the methodology employed is borrowed directly from the west and reflects western (and largely Christian) conceptions about "membership" in a religion.
Similar statistics show that a large portion of the Japanese population is also "non-religious". But other statistics consistently show that if you add all the Buddhists and all the Shintoists in Japan together, the total is about 150% of the population, because so many Japanese are both.
What we really need to know is what does it actually mean in these statistics when a person is listed as "non-religious"?
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