In Vietnam, 96 percent of adults burned incense in ancestor veneration rituals in the last year—even though many are religiously unaffiliated. About 48 percent of the Vietnamese adults surveyed in recent Pew Research claimed no religion. Across East Asia, ancestor practices are higher among Buddhists and lowest among Christians, but people of all faiths commonly participate in the rituals.
East Asians (and also Southeast Asians) express and describe their religious and spiritual beliefs and practices in different ways than Western cultures, upending the notion that they are not religious. A recent Pew Research report helps illuminate how Western biases have formed past survey questions about spirituality based on the Abrahamic religions and missed the ways in which East Asians participate in spiritually meaningful practices.
“I have been on many panels that discuss the ‘nones’ as a global phenomenon. China and Japan are routinely presented as some of the most non-religious countries in the world. But this cannot be further from the truth,” said Dr. Anna Sun, a religious studies scholar at Duke University.
“I have been emphasizing in my own work that researchers are measuring the wrong things,” she added. “The results will surprise most people by showing how vibrant religious life is in Asia, beyond the old framework and the unsuitable old survey questions.
They show how we can finally understand the richness of different forms of religious experiences through the new paradigm we are developing as a community of scholars, with new conceptual ideas and new sensibilities.”
Religious Switching
In 2023, Pew Research surveyed over 10,000 adults in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. It is part of a global effort, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation, to understand religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Over 15 years, the project has conducted surveys in 111 countries, region by region.
While the survey asked questions often prioritized in Western research—such as religious identity—it pushed the field of religious studies in new directions as it developed new measures that better describe what is actually happening in people’s lives.
If one only looked at a snapshot of religious identity with Western assumptions, one could easily misunderstand the data when it describes people in East Asia disaffiliating with religion—37 percent of people in Hong Kong and 35 percent in South Korea said they left their childhood religious identity.
However, while the bulk of religious change is disaffiliation (identifying with “nones”), Pew found that some also joined new religions. Pew began referring to the phenomenon as “religious switching,” because people aren’t leaving in one direction only.
Of adults surveyed, 53 percent in both Hong Kong and South Korea said they had changed their religious identity since childhood.
In addition, 19 percent of adults in South Korea and 14 percent in Hong Kong who were raised with no religion are now Christians. In Taiwan, 21 percent of adults raised in non-religious families are now Buddhists, while 17 percent of adults raised with no religion in Vietnam also switched to Buddhism.
Among those who now claim no religion, they usually leave Christianity or Buddhism—in Hong Kong, 53 percent said they are no longer Christians, while in South Korea, 49 percent said they are no longer Buddhists.
“East Asia has a high level of religious switching relative to other parts of the world,”
said Jonathan Evans, the lead Pew researcher. Western Europe has comparable rates of religious switching, but it’s mostly a narrative of leaving Christianity. In the United States a small number switch between denomination categories—Protestant, Catholic—but like Europe, most are leaving Christianity altogether.
The Limits of Religious Categories
But importantly, religious identity does not tell the full story. “Plenty of people in East Asia don’t identify with religious groups, and yet they clearly hold some spiritual and religious beliefs,” said Alan Cooperman, director of religion research at Pew. “In Japan, very few identify as Shinto (4 percent), but a huge number of Japanese (38 percent) say they believe in the kami.”
For western populations, identity labels might mean more, said Cooperman. But “when we think about Asia, the more important thing is what people say they believe and what they say they do… Religion in Asia is complicated. When people say they were raised with religion, and they no longer have a religion… It matters more in some places than in others. It’s less of a solid clue in Asia than it is in Western Europe, North America, Australia or New Zealand.”
Still, people’s former religious identities appear to influence their practices. While people might not identify with a religion today, if they were raised with a religion, they are more likely to still participate in certain practices affiliated with that religion.
The identity label still matters to a degree, said Evans, describing the pattern of behavior like a stairstep downward as identity moves toward no religious affiliation. “Lifelong Buddhists in Taiwan are 30 percentage points more likely than former Buddhists to say they generally go to temples or pagodas (91 percent vs. 61 percent). The former Buddhists, in turn, are 16 points more likely to visit temples or pagodas than are Taiwanese who have been unaffiliated all their lives (61 percent vs. 45 percent),” said the report.
Evans said the survey did not ask which spiritual practices are the most important for people, and yet some things appear prevalent throughout the region—for example, many people do gravesite maintenance or offer food, drinks, and candles while identifying with different religions (85 percent in Japan, 84 in Vietnam, 55 in South Korea).
Finding Meaningful Measures
The work of Sun and other advisors helped shape the kinds of questions the survey asked to ensure a more meaningful understanding of the spiritual life of East Asians.
Typically, in addition to religious identity, Western religious scholars track data on measures like frequency of attending services, views of the Bible, and whether you consider yourself to be religious or not.
“In the study of religion, one legitimate criticism was that in a lot of cases, people who came from Western perspectives studied religion in non-Western places using Western perspectives,” said Cooperman. “Even the word religion and the concept of religion, but also emphasis on God and measuring certain practices and religious identities.”
So, “we tried to flip that on its head and take that and say, ‘what is religion in other places?’”
What Pew found is that “the questions need to be broader questions,” he said, without being too loose.
One tricky linguistic thing is the word “religion” itself, said Evans. The word “was imported to the region about a century ago from the scholars. The term ‘religion’ in other languages in East Asia focuses on more hierarchical structures, like Christianity or Islam, or some of the new religious movements, but it may not, in some people’s minds, include things like Buddhism or folk beliefs. It may not be considered religion by the people who are doing and being these things.”
To get around that, the survey asked people if they felt a personal connection to a religious or philosophical way of life.
“Even people who separately said, ‘I don’t have a religion,’ said ‘I do feel a personal connection to the Buddhist way of life.’”
said Evans. For example, in Taiwan, among the religiously unaffiliated, 41 percent felt a connection to indigenous religions. In South Korea, 58 percent felt a connection to Confucianism.
The Future of Religion Research
In the next phase of religious research, Pew will survey adults in over 30 countries all over the world every two years to measure change over time. They’ll still ask the traditional Western measures, but now they’ve added questions created during the East Asian research, such as:
Do you believe in various kinds of spirits?
Do you take care of a family gravesite?
Do you believe in an afterlife? (not just heaven and hell)
Do you believe that there are spirits or spiritual forces in parts of nature—like mountains, rivers, and trees?
“They’ve never been asked in the U.S., but actually a lot of Americans hold those beliefs, too,” said Cooperman.
In a Harvard Divinity article, Sun wrote about the global importance of shifting the scholarship of religion toward mapping “linked ecologies” of religious practice to truly understand humans in the 21st century.
“This monotheistic framework no longer works for much of the contemporary Western world today, because the number of people in the West who identify themselves as having ‘no religion’ is steadily increasing, especially in younger generations,” she wrote. “Indeed, it is time for us to examine the unspoken hierarchy in our intellectual understanding of religious life, which implicitly places doctrinal belief above ritual practice, a universal God above local gods and spirits, and established religious identity above a more fluid sense of belonging.”
The latest Pew Research global report on religious “nones,” in fact, shows that religiously unaffiliated people still hold spiritual beliefs.
“To me, this signals the beginning of a new paradigm: we as social scientists are finally able to see religions—in all their incredibly diverse forms—more and more clearly on a global scale,” said Sun.
Rebecca Randall is an independent writer and editor based in the Pacific Northwest. She writes on religion, psychology, the environment, and social issues. She is the former science editor for Christianity Today.
