Survey of UT posters, part 2

[Skeezix]

I noticed that too. For me, I'm a quarter ethnically Jewish, but it's patrilineal, thus I have no claim to the cultural or religious aspect.

To the extent that any cultural traditions were passed on in your family, then you have claim to those.

 

[wild goose chase]

The thing is people often use "ethnicity" in two, often overlapping, but distinct ways, when talking.

Sometimes people intend to use it to mean involving a cultural component, and sometimes people use it to mean ancestry/descent alone.

 

[ttk77]

There's quite a large over-representation of the non-religious grouping relative to the city's demographics here.

This correlates well with the first part of this survey which indicated those with higher levels of education are over-represented here. I'm too lazy right now to look for the source, but I do remember reading a statistic that said those with higher levels of educations were more likely to be agnostic/atheist.

 

[wild goose chase]

Had space permitted, I would have broken down Christianity into Protestant, Catholic and Christian Orthodox.

By contrast, you often see surveys of religion where you see breakdowns from all the various branches of Christianity, and sometimes major denominations within Protestant Christianity (this seems especially common in the US) but then a bunch of non-Christian religions are lumped together or put as "other"!

For some reason, I get the impression that more than other cities in North America, Toronto seems to have its Christian population more evenly split between the three main branches (maybe some Midwestern cities with large populations of both Catholic and Orthodox could be comparable).

Toronto's percentage of Catholics (about 30%) is in line with large US Northeast or Midwest cities, though its harder to find stats on Orthodox/Eastern Christianity stateside, I wonder how Toronto's 4-5% compares to any major US city (I'd imagine Detroit or Chicago have a lot).

Also, I'd bet overall, if you look at Christian and non-Christian religious diversity alike, I'd bet Toronto would be among the most diverse in North America terms of being evenly split between major world religions due to our varied immigrant composition. I don't think any American cities have all of these following religious groups each individually being over 2% of the population, while Toronto does: Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu.

According to this report, the NY-NJ metro area is the most religiously diverse metro in the US as defined by percentage of Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists summed up, at a bit under 10%, followed by San Jose's metro at over 6%. Yet the entire province of Ontario, would, using the same criteria in the study, narrowly surpass it at just a bit over 10%. Ontario and the GTA's religious diversity relative to any US city is probably due to each of those four largest non-Christian religions (all of which are still nonetheless in single digits %) having their largest share of population in any metro in different parts of the country such as the East coast (Jewish), Midwest (Muslim), West coast (Hindu) and Hawaii (Buddhist) populations versus Canada where the largest populations of all of these religious minorities live more or less in one metro.

 

[AlbertC]

Southern Chinese, with minor Cuban influence, and Catholic.