The Surprising Reality Of Jews And ‘Cultural Judaism’
(ANALYSIS) Before diving into the graphs, I should note that this is really the second post in a two-part series on religion as a cultural identity. I’d strongly recommend going back and reading the first post to get up to speed on a set of questions from the Pew Religious Landscape Survey (hosted on ARDA). Those questions are designed to dig more deeply into the idea of cultural Judaism and Catholicism.
Here’s a quick overview of how the survey works. Respondents were first asked the standard question: “What is your present religion, if any?”
They were given about a dozen response options, ranging from Protestant to Catholic to Jewish to agnostic. After answering that question, respondents were given a follow-up battery that asked: “Aside from religion, do you consider yourself to be any of the following in any way (for example, ethnically, culturally, or because of your family’s background)?” The options included Jewish, Catholic and several others.
Importantly, if someone had already identified as Jewish in the standard religious affiliation question, they were not allowed to also answer “yes” to the follow-up question. That means we can use these items to distinguish between people who are religiously Jewish and those who are culturally Jewish — and do the same breakdown for Catholics.
We can see that about 19% of American adults selected Catholic as their religious affiliation in the first question. That lines up well with a wide range of other datasets that estimate the share of Americans who identify as Catholic.
But here’s what’s more surprising: About 12% of respondents did not say they were Catholic in that first question, yet still answered “yes” to the item about cultural Catholicism. Put differently, roughly three in ten American adults are Catholic in one way or another. For context, that’s a larger share than the non-religious.
When it comes to Jewish identity, the percentages are much smaller. In the full sample, 1.7% of respondents said that Judaism was their present religious affiliation—right in line with widely accepted estimates. In fact, I pegged the number at about 1.5% in my book, “The American Religious Landscape.”
But here’s the surprising part: An additional 3% of Americans said that they are culturally or ethnically Jewish. Does that mean that nearly 5% of the U.S. population is Jewish?
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.