This is just a small part of a larger article about religious affiliations that can be found currently on CNN.com - I thought it might be of interest:

The full story

The excert:


Among other findings involving smaller religious groups, more than half of American Buddhists surveyed were white, and most Buddhists were converts.

More people in the survey pool identified themselves as Buddhist than Muslim, although both populations were small -- less than 1 percent of the total population. By contrast, Jews accounted for 1.7 percent of the overall population.

The self-identified Buddhists -- 0.7 percent of those surveyed -- illustrate a core challenge to estimating religious affiliation: What does affiliation mean?

It's unclear whether people who called themselves Buddhists did so because they practice yoga or meditation, for instance, or claim affiliation with a Buddhist institution.