Taiwan has the second-highest religious diversity in the world, boasting not only some of the world’s major religions, but also a variety of folk religions, according to a recent report published by the Religion and Public Life Project of the Washington-based non-partisan think tank the Pew Research Center.
On a scale of zero to 10, Taiwan scored 8.2 on the project’s Religious Diversity Index, trailing behind only Singapore, which received a score of 9.
According to the US survey, nearly half of Taiwan’s population are folk religion followers (44.2 percent), followed by Buddhists (21.3 percent), other religious adherents (16.2 percent), unaffiliated believers (12.7 percent) and Christians (5.5 percent).
The rankings are based on the percentage of each of the 232 countries’ population of people that follow the major world religions — Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam and folk religions, as well as unaffiliated religions and other religions — as of 2010.
“The closer a country comes to having equal shares of the eight groups, the higher its score on a 10-point Religious Diversity Index,” the study said.
The study also found that among the 12 countries that have a “very high” degree of religious diversity — which requires a score of seven or higher — six are in the Asia-Pacific region — Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam (third), South Korea (eighth), China (ninth) and Hong Kong (10th).
On the other hand, the lowest scores are mostly earned by Islamic countries, such as Morocco and Pakistan, while the Vatican comes bottom of the global religious diversity rankings with a score of zero.
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