Asian Pacific Islander Catholics In the United States: A Preliminary Report (2015)

Asian Pacific Islander Catholics In the United States: A Preliminary Report prepared by Jerry Z. Park, W. Matthew Henderson, and Kenneth Vaughan from Baylor University, Tricia Bruce from Maryville College, and Stephen Cherry from the University of Houston-Clear Lake, January 2015

This report is funded in part by support from the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops. We are grateful for data and reports from the Pew Research Centers, and the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate from which these findings were developed.

Christianity throughout the world constitutes the largest body of religious peoples according to recent estimates. As of 2010, there are an estimated 2.2 billion Christians in the world, nearly one-third of the world population. At an estimated 1.1 billion, Roman Catholicism stands as the largest body of Christian believers when divided along the most traditional demarcations of Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant.  

The largest concentration of the world’s 7 billion inhabitants is in Asia, and historically Christianity has been a minority faith community within the many nations that make up this continent (about 6 percent), and a majority faith in a very few. The 20th and 21st centuries, however, have born witness to a growth of Christianity throughout more countries in this region. We know also that of the 214 million individuals who have emigrated from one country to another, Christians are the largest share of these sojourners (49 percent). Moreover, we now know the specific origins of religious immigrants. Migration to the United States from Asia competes with migration from Latin America, and religion plays an important part in the stories of immigrants. While Christianity, specifically Catholicism, is the dominant religion among immigrants from Latin America, it is a minority faith among immigrants from Asia. In the specific U.S. context, the largest receiving nation of the world’s migrants, Christianity remains the majority among today’s new arrivals, and much like Asian immigrants around the world, the majority of U.S. Asian immigrants are not Christian.

Asian-Pacific-Islander-Catholics-in-the-United-States-A-Preliminary-Report.pdf