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10% or 38%? Counting Hindu – American Interfaith Marriages

10% or 38%? Counting Hindu – American Interfaith Marriages

Last updated on: October 22, 2026 at 8:28 am by Dr. Dilip Amin

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10% or 38%? Counting Hindu – American Interfaith Marriages 2026-10-22T08:28:34-07:00 Dr. Dilip Amin

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Are 10% or 38% of American Hindus Marrying Outside Faith?

What two studies conducted around 2007–2008 can—and cannot—tell us about immigrant generations and wedding patterns.

Abstract

Pew Research Center reported that 90% of 257 married Hindu respondents in its 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey had Hindu spouses; in that survey 86% of Hindu respondents were foreign-born. An independent examination of 910 selected Macy’s wedding registry entries associated with Patel, Reddy, Jain, and Singh Dharmic surnames classified 350 (38%) as marriages to people with names categorized as outside the Dharmic traditions (mostly Abrahamic). The estimates differ sharply but are not measurements of the same population or outcome. Pew measured reported religious affiliation among existing marriages; the registry analysis used names from a selection of prospective weddings. Pew survey represents mostly foreign-born Hindu while the registry is likely to have more American born, a better representation of the second generation. These results motivate investigation of generational differences in interfaith marriages.

The question behind two very different numbers

What proportion of Hindus and other Dharmic-background Americans marry outside their religious traditions? The widely quoted Pew figure of approximately 10% (from 257 families) and the 38% (from 910 couples) observed in the author’s registry study have sometimes been treated as contradictory. They need not be. The crucial questions are who was observed, when marriages occurred, and whether the sample represents what kind of a broader population.

What Pew actually measured

Pew’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey interviewed a nationally representative sample of more than 35,000 adults in 2007, with additional oversampling of certain small religious groups. Among married 257 respondents identifying as Hindu, 90% reported a spouse of the same religion. Pew reported that 86% of adults identifying as Hindu were born outside the United States and 58% between the ages of 30-49.

The immigrant composition matters. It is possible most immigrant respondents may have married before migration, while others married after arriving. Their marriage histories may differ from those of people who spent childhood and adolescence in American schools.

The 2008 Macy’s registry investigation

The original workbooks contain lists of registry names, spouse names, dates and locations, plus separate classification and summary worksheets. The four surnames—Patel, Reddy, Jain, and Singh—were used as practical markers of selected Dharmic-background communities. The researcher assigned male/female indicators and categorized spouse names as Dharmic or outside the Dharmic group (for practical purpose, will call them Abrahamic), with exclusions for some first names considered unlikely to identify Dharmic-background registrants. This was a manual, name-based coding exercise, not a questionnaire establishing self-reported religion. Three independent reviewers assessed the original study source data in 2008.

In particular, the Reddy workbook reports 75 initial records and excludes 28 registrants with Christian-sounding first names, leaving 47. The Patel exclusions also include names associated with Muslim. These exclusions should be understood as subjective eligibility decisions, not verification of personal faith.

Figure 1. Registry classifications by surname

Male and female patterns

The original gender tabulations report 179 out-group marriages among 516 male surname-bearing people (34.7%) and 171 among 534 female surname-bearing people (32.0%). These are surname-bearer denominators, not a partition of 910 distinct wedding records. When both spouses share the studied surname, a wedding can contribute two people to a gender denominator. The gender rates therefore should not be averaged to recreate the wedding-level 38.46%.

Figure 2. Gender-Specific rates within each surname

Why 10% and 38% should not be compared as competing national estimates

Figure 3. Different outcomes, populations and sampling method

The two percentages are plotted side by side only to illustrate their different measurement frameworks; their numerical gap is not an estimated generational effect.

What can responsibly be said about the next generation?

The registry population plausibly differs from Pew’s predominantly immigrant Hindu respondents because it concerns people registering for weddings in a U.S. retail system at a particular time. However, registration at Macy’s does not establish U.S. birth, childhood residence, age, or religious identification. Some registrants may have been immigrants, and some weddings may have taken place outside the United States. It would therefore be inaccurate to claim that the 38% estimate directly measures second-generation Hindu Americans.

The strongest defensible interpretation is narrower and more useful: the registry study observed a substantial share of name-classified out-group pairings among selected prospective weddings. This observation raises a testable hypothesis that marriage patterns in American-raised Dharmic-background cohorts may differ from patterns among the predominantly foreign-born Hindu population reflected in Pew’s 2007 survey.

Why better research is needed

A rigorous future study should record self-identified religion and religion raised in for both spouses; birthplace; age at arrival; years in the United States; age at marriage; whether marriage occurred before migration; parental religion; and whether the ceremony ultimately occurred. It should separately classify Hindu–Jain, Hindu–Sikh and other intra-Dharmic marriages; marriages to Christian, Jewish and Muslim partners; and marriages involving unaffiliated partners. It should include enough U.S.-born and childhood-arrival participants to report generational differences with appropriate survey weights.

Conclusion

Pew’s 10% and the registry’s 38% are not mutually exclusive facts about one common population. Pew’s national survey shows that the Hindu respondents of that period were overwhelmingly foreign-born and that most married Hindu respondents had Hindu spouses. The independent registry investigation identifies a different, selected collection of prospective weddings with a much higher rate of name-classified out-group pairings. Neither number, by itself, establishes the current interfaith-marriage rate of U.S.-born Hindu Americans. The responsible conclusion is a call for a representative, generation-sensitive study—not a claim that one estimate disproves the other. The observed 28-percentage-point difference should not be interpreted as an estimated immigrant-generation effect.

Author’s other publications

Interfaith Marriages Global Survey of Hindus

Hindu-Christian Marriages

Hindu-Jewish Marriages

Hindu-Muslim Marriages

Book: Interfaith Marriage: Share and Respect with Equality

Hindu

General Christian

Education and Religion

About Dilip Amin, Ph. D.

Dr. Dilip Amin is the founder of Interfaithshaadi.org and HinduSpeakers.org. Dr. Amin is Director of the Peninsula Multifaith Coalition of the San Francisco Bay area. He is a Dharma Ambassador and on the Advisory Committee at the Hindu American Foundation. He is a jail chaplain and a Columnist at Patheos. He is a faculty member at Hindu University of America. Dr. Amin has guided 1300 youth in interfaith relationships over the past 19 years and has summarized his experiences in several books: Hindu Vivaha Samskara, Interfaith Marriage-Share & Respect with Equality (also published in Malayalam) and Hindu-Muslim Marriage: Difficulties and Reconciliations (also in Hindi). You can read more about the author here.

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