Folk religion, as the basis of the religious landscape in traditional
China, is a highly syncretic system which includes elements from
Buddhism, Daoism, and other traditional religious beliefs. Due to the
shortcomings of denomination-based measurement, most previous social
surveys have documented a very low percentage of folk religion adherents
in China, and found almost no overlapping among religious beliefs. This
study offers a quantitative portrait of the popularity, the
diffuseness, and the diversity of Chinese folk religion. With the
improved instruments in the 2018 China Family Panel Studies, we first
observe that nearly 50% of respondents claim to have multiple (two or
even more than three) religious beliefs and the believers of folk
religion account for about 70% of the population. By using latent class
analysis, this article explores the pattern of inter-belief mixing and
identifies four typical classes of religious believers: “non-believers
and single-belief believers”, “believers of geomancy”, “believers of
diffused Buddhism and Daoism”, and “believers embracing all beliefs”.
Finally, we find that the degree of commitment varies across these
religious classes. Believers of folk religion are found to be less
committed than believers of Western institutional religions, but as
committed as believers of Eastern institutional religions.
