12/18/2023 0 Comments Percentage of christiansSingapore’s lack of a single dominant religion coincides with more “religious switching,” Pew’s terminology for adults converting to a different religion from the one they were raised in. Yet the country has the region’s highest rate of conversions-including to Christianity-according to a special Pew Research Center study on religion in South and Southeast Asia released today. Today, two out of three Singaporeans don’t see religion as very important. Surrounded by deeply religious countries with overwhelming Muslim or Buddhist majorities, the island city-state is by some measures the world’s most religiously diverse society, with no single faith composing a majority. In any case, the numbers show how religiously diverse Myanmar is and that the government faces challenges with that.Among its neighbors, Singapore is a spiritual anomaly. Especially when, as the Myanmar Times report says, the number of Christians in contested Kachin State are heavily under-reported. Ma Ba Tha is not just anti-Muslim, it is Buddhist nationalist, so Christians could come increasingly into its focus. “But it may turn out as short-sighted to ignore such fears now. But Muslims only experienced a slow growth, even including the self-identified Rohingya, who were not counted in the census. Thomas Muller, analyst for World Watch Research of Open Doors International, which supports Christian minorities globally, said: “As the Buddhist nationalist group Ma Ba Tha keeps warning against an influx of Muslims threatening Buddhist-majority Myanmar, there were fears that, if the census showed a growth in percentage of the Muslim population, it could fuel the tensions Ma Ba Tha is stoking. In Karen, Christians have also recently been threatened by a spate of Buddhist nationalists illegally building pagodas on church grounds. The relationship between both the Kachin and Karen ethnic groups – the two mainly identify as Christian – and the government is tense, and exacerbated by slow progress in identifying and prosecuting perpetrators of the many documented cases of sexual assault in the states by Myanmar troops. “The government should release the real findings,” she said.įleeing from violence: Kachin Christians Dec 2011World Watch MonitorĪrmed conflict in Kachin and Kayin (Karen) states prevented the full collection of data, but the UN estimates that the religious makeup of those states will not significantly alter the proportion of Christians in the country. However, Daw Khun Jar, coordinator of the Kachin Peace Network, feels the Buddhist majority in Kachin is a fabrication. Christians in Kachin account for 34 per cent of the population. More than 85 per cent say they are Christian in Chin, which is the only state that doesn’t have a Buddhist majority. The latest report showed that half of Myanmar’s three million Christians live in the states of Shan, Kachin and Chin. If they had been included, it would have brought the Muslim population to four per cent, instead of two per cent. Hinduism showed small gains, while animism and Islam showed a decline, although the census didn’t count the estimated one million Rohingya Muslims, considered as non-citizens. Buddhism had a fall of one per cent since the 1983 census, but with almost 88 per cent of the population identifying as Buddhists, it remains the dominant religion. The UNFPA, however, said in 2015 that it would release information on ethnicity and religion in 2016 because it required “more time for analysis and consultation”.Ĭhristianity remains the second most popular religion. Some commentators say it was delayed to avoid a backlash from nationalists anticipating a sharp rise in non-Buddhist religions, which they feel threaten Myanmar’s Buddhist identity. The religious data is the latest in a staggered release of volumes published over the last two years. Myanmar’s Christian population has increased dramatically, according to the latest figures in a supplement to the 2014 Population and Housing Census, conducted by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).Ĭhristians now make up 6.2 per cent of the population – more than three million people – compared to 4.9 per cent the last time a full census was conducted in 1983.
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