There Are How Many?
KPRC Television in Houston has done a small profile of Santeria (Lukum?). The thing that caught my eye is this bit towards the end of the piece.
“Despite it’s growing popularity it’s difficult to pinpoint how many people practice Santeria. Some estimates put it as low as 22,000 in the United States. Other estimates have it as high as 5 million. Since many people are still afraid to admit they practice this religion, it would be difficult to come up with an exact number.”
Five million? That seemed a bit high, but I double-checked with Adherents.com to see what they had to say.
“Regarding Santeria alone: It is difficult to determine worldwide numbers of Santerians, as the religion is syncretistic, goes by different names (including Lukumi, and Camdomble in Brazil) and has been actively suppressed by the Communist government in the country where it is perhaps the largest: Cuba. Estimates of Santerians include 800,000 in the U.S. and one million in Brazil, plus 3 million in Cuba (although many Cuban practitioners identify themselves officially as Catholics or Communists/atheists). A worldwide number of people who at least sometimes self-identify as adherents of this loosely-organized religious category might be 3 million, but this is just an estimate.”
Which means five million isn’t so off the mark. With close to a million Santerians in America alone (making it around the same size as the modern Paganism movement in America). It will be interesting if the media takes more notice of this faith in the future, and if tensions between Catholics and practitioners of Santeria will generate any sparks.
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Not bad! That’s easily 600,000 more Santerians than Unitarians. . . How unfortunate that Thomas Jefferson was quite evidently a false prophet when he said – “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.” What would Jefferson think of UUism today? I expect that he would be appalled by som things and not just the fact that UUism has failed miserably to live up to his false prophecy in terms of membership.
[...] contraction and rise in followers of “no religion”. Some sources assert that there are close to a million adherents to Santeria in the U.S.A., putting them in close demographic parity with modern Pagan faiths. But unlike modern Pagans who [...]