Posted on 10/22/2003 2:12:00 PM PDT by quidnunc
The numbers of Roman Catholics are expanding in the South and West. Evangelicals are growing everywhere, and there are fewer Muslims than everyone thought.
These are some of the findings in the most complete religious survey of the United States, and one of the most surprising is that Muslims, many of whom attend mosque services, number just 1.6 million, far below the estimates of 7 million by Islamic groups.
The figures from the Religious Congregations and Membership survey of 2000 are based on the Muslims affiliated with America's more than 1,000 mosques, not the total number. The finding touched a sensitive nerve on the debate over the presence and influence of U.S. Muslims.
"Unfortunately, not all Muslims attend a mosque," says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
He said many have taken the 1.6 million to stand for the number of all Muslims, and in fact other national surveys have argued that the U.S. Muslim population is below 2 million. Mr. Hooper says the 1.6 million number for mosque affiliation "still sustains our 7 million figure" of all adherents to Islam.
"We believe this is a very reliable picture of American affiliation to local congregations," said Dale E. Jones, a statistician with the Church of the Nazarene and a chairman of the project.
"It's not like a national poll, but more like going to the nation's political wards and asking how many voting people they had," he said in an interview yesterday. The entire report is to be released tomorrow.
The every-decade survey, a project since 1966 of the Glenmary Home Missioners, a Catholic organization in Cincinnati, is considered the most reliable data on religious affiliation down to the county level.
The reports were collected from 149 of 258 known religious bodies in the United States, and evaluated carefully in cooperation with the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.
As expected, the Catholic Church has the largest adherence nationally; the state of Utah with its Mormon preponderance has the highest churchgoing rates; and Oregon, which is notoriously secular, has the lowest religious participation.
"There are now more Catholics in the West than in the Midwest," said Clifford Grammich of the Glenmary Research Center.
Catholic parishes in the West and South are growing faster than elsewhere, often by a third, he said. "The Church may have to shift more of its institutional resources to meet this growth, or give more attention to mission needs" there.
Most growth in religious affiliations may be due to Hispanic immigration and birth rates: Of the 11 million new adherents reported during the past decade by 87 of the largest groups, 9 million were Catholics.
All Protestants outnumber Catholics nationally, however, and they make up the largest religious grouping in 2,493 of the nation's 3,141 counties.
One reason for the cooperative census is to find out at the county and state levels how much of the population is "unclaimed" by religious groups and thus fertile ground for faith organizations to reach out.
Mr. Jones said that in the past decade, for example, the typical low-attendance states, such as Washington, have shown a spurt in "claimed" population, perhaps because of evangelism there during the 1990s.
"An awful lot of Western counties have shown gains in claimed people," he said.
Overall, according to this census sample, 50.2 percent of the nation's 280 million citizens are claimed by a local congregation.
In national polls, by contrast, more than seven in 10 Americans claim affiliation and nine in 10 profess belief in God.
The survey also has punctured the folk wisdom that rural Americans are more pious than urban ones. "There is really no difference between the metro and non-metro areas on how many are claimed by congregations," which is about 50 percent "claimed," Mr. Jones said.
But nationally, affiliation has dropped by a few percentage points in 10 years. Mr. Jones said this suggests a loss of denominational identity or feeling that "you can be a good religious person without belonging to a congregation."
For example, 71 percent of U.S. counties have not shown gains in "claimed" people in the past decade.
That decline is seen particularly in the more liberal Protestant "mainline," with United Methodists losing nearly 7 percent, the Episcopal Church 5 percent, and the Evangelical Lutherans more than 2 percent of their local memberships.
Though the survey sample is large enough to be representative, it had no way to gather data from "small independent churches" or the new "megachurches."
The eight historic black denominations, such as the National Baptist Convention and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, declined to participate.
Gathering good statistics is difficult, Mr. Jones said, and like many churches, the black denominations have lacked firm estimates. What the survey did show, he said, is that more black Americans are joining churches with European origins.
Utah, with its large Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints membership, for the second decade running had the highest rate of church affiliation at 74.7 percent. The District of Columbia is close behind with 73 percent.
By comparison, adherence in Oregon is 31 percent, and it is 33 percent in Washington.
The District of Columbia, moreover, boasts the third-largest number of congregations for a metro area.
(Larry Witham in The Washington Times, September 19, 2002)
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020919-76042020.htm
When President Bush disavowed the Holy Land Foundation last week, he said that the foundation's actions were "an affront to millions of Muslim Americans." The New York Times says there are "six to seven million Muslims living in this country." Most other newspapers and wire services report the same thing (perhaps because the Society of Professional Journalists recommends these numbers).
From reading the papers and listening to fawning public officials, it seems as though Muslims are everywhere in America. But at the same time, it certainly doesn't feel as though we're living in an age of Islamic ascendancy here in America. So how many Muslims are there? The indispensable Statistical Assessment Service (go ahead and bookmark their site, Stats.org, it's worth it) has sorted through the numbers for us in an essay entitled "A Question of Numbers," by senior analyst Howard Fienberg. And as it turns out, while there may be no definitive number, "six to seven million" is a gross exaggeration.
The U.S. Census doesn't ask questions about religious affiliation, and of all the major religions, only the Catholic church has solid data. (Catholics keep track of registered parishioners, baptisms, and funerals, all of which are reported to Rome.)
The claim of "six to seven million Muslims" is based on data provided by two Muslim lobbying groups, the American Muslim Council and the Council on American Islamic Relations. Their numbers come from the 2000 Mosque Study Project. That study supposed 1,209 American mosques and surveyed 631 of them (only 416 responded). The researchers found an average of 340 adults and children classified as active participants, and another 1,629 people who were "associated in any way" with the mosque. This would suggest about 2 million Muslims, but the study's authors adjusted the number up — for a total of 6 to 7 million "to account for estimates of family members and non-affiliated Muslims."
There are some problems with this guesstimate. For one thing, the mosques counted their own worshippers. But religious groups are notoriously prone to inflating their numbers. (Fienberg sites a Los Angeles Times report recounting that "the Southern Baptist Convention conducted an audit of membership rolls a few years ago and found that 25 percent of those listed had died or left the faith.") For another thing, it's curious to note that in the Mosque Study Project report, 15 percent of the Muslims came from two mosques, which raises questions about how the sample was selected. Other, more disinterested research shows a different picture of Muslim America. And finally, adjusting up 250 percent seems a questionable way to account for family members.
Tom Smith, from the National Opinion Research Center, tried taking a measure using his organization's General Social Survey. He found only 1.4 million Muslims and then adjusted up to 1.7 million.
Perhaps the best study comes from two researchers at the City University of New York, Barry Kosmin and Egon Mayer, who released findings based on the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, which asked 50,281 Americans to identify their religious affiliation. They projected 1.1 million adult Muslims, which they translated to 1.8 million Muslim adults and children.
In their rush to be King of the Victims, AMC and CAIR have tried to puff up the influence of Muslim Americans, and to a large degree, it's worked. The media — and even some people in the administration — bought it. Too bad the numbers just don't add up.
(Jonathan V. Last in The Weekly Standard, December 11, 2001)
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/672dpgmm.asp
Before September 11th, few Americans gave any thought to how many Muslims lived in this country. Suddenly it has become a matter of intense interest. Fortunately, the media seem to have the answer:
“There are about six million to seven million Muslims...” (Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 12)
“There are an estimated 7 million Muslims...” (Charlotte Observer, Oct. 9)
“The estimated six million to seven million Muslims in this country...” (The New York Times, Oct. 20)
But where did these numbers originate? There is no source of reliable government data on religious affiliation. Despite an early claim from the American Muslim Council that the estimate of six to seven million came from the U.S. Census (Jerusalem Post, Oct. 24), neither the Census Bureau nor the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) are allowed to collect such information.
So how do we determine how many adherents of any religion live in the U.S.? We must rely on estimates from surveys, indirect calculations based on data from places of worship, or proxy measures like ancestry and country of origin. Since each method has its own drawbacks, none yields statistics that are clearly valid.
Survey Researcher Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago was recently commissioned by the American Jewish Committee to review several studies on the size of the Muslim population in the U.S. (Associated Press, Oct. 22; The New York Times, Oct. 27). His review illustrates the difficulties in producing hard numbers for any religious body, not just Muslims.
For instance, Smith criticizes a study by Carol L. Stone, published in The Muslims in America in 1991, which put the Muslim population at 4 million. Stone used U.S. Census Supplemental Survey data on ancestry and assumed that the number of Muslims in this country of a specific ancestry (particularly Arab) matched the proportion in their countries of origin. After adding an estimate of African American Muslims, she arrived at a total of 3.3 million in 1980. She then added an estimate based on immigration and birth rates using the same assumptions to update the numbers to 1986. This yielded the number Smith disputes. Unfortunately, this calculation demonstrates why determining religious affiliation by ancestry is problematic. Most Muslims are not Arab, and many Arabs are not Muslim.
After faulting Stone’s methods, Smith used Census and INS data to reach an estimate of 1.5 to 3.4 million. But Smith himself notes that immigrants often differ markedly from the general population in their countries of origin. Russian immigrants at the turn of the century were predominantly Jewish, not Russian Orthodox. Likewise, immigrants from Lebanon have been mainly Christian, not Muslim. It would be equally inaccurate to assume that most British immigrants in Colonial America were Anglican, rather than Puritan, Quaker or Presbyterian. Still, how can we trust estimates on religious affiliation in many foreign countries when we still argue about our own? In addition, such estimates fail to account for deaths, emigration, or conversions to or from Islam.
So if it is impossible to pinpoint a reasonable estimate of Muslims by ancestry, can we rely on statistics provided by houses of worship? The most prominent example of this method is the 2000 Mosque Study Project (MSP), conducted for several Muslim groups, which produced the most commonly cited statistic of six to seven million Muslims in America. This was based on a nationwide estimate of 1209 mosques. Among these, 631 were surveyed and 416 responded. This resulted in a total of 340 adults and children classified as participants at the average mosque and another 1629 who were “associated in any way” with the mosque’s activities, yielding a figure of two million Muslims. The authors then adjusted the estimate to six to seven million overall “to account for estimates of family members and non-affiliated Muslims” (Washington Times, Oct. 27).
While this process may sound impressive, MSP’s lead researcher Professor Ihsan Bagby of Shaw University in North Carolina told the AP the number was a mere “guestimation” based on a study with serious methodological problems. Mosques could have inflated their rolls by counting “members” who were no longer active. Others may have intentionally inflated their estimates - a charge easily leveled at almost any religious group that collects its own data. For example, the Los Angeles Times reported on Oct. 25, that “the Southern Baptist Convention conducted an audit of membership rolls a few years ago and found 25 percent of those listed had died or left the faith.”
The NORC’s Smith further criticized the mosque study, noting that almost 15 percent of Muslims in the MSP sample came from only two mosques. (Each claimed almost 50,000 affiliates). Given the loose definition of just who is “associated in any way” with a mosque’s religious life, it is likely that some individuals were “associated” with more than one mosque. Therefore, they may have been counted more than once. Smith also claims that the sample was biased towards larger mosques, which distorted the size of the “average” mosque.
If using data from houses of worship is also problematic, could we simply survey individuals? Smith drew his own estimate from NORC’s most recent General Social Survey (GSS), which found 1.4 million adult Muslims in this country. The GSS analyzes responses more carefully than many studies, so its Muslim undercount should be lower than comparable surveys. To estimate the number of Muslim adults and children, Smith made two assumptions based on GSS data: Every Muslim respondent represented a Muslim home and every non-Muslim respondent represented a non-Muslim home. This process yielded an estimate of 1.7 million.
Case closed? Not quite. Other researchers’ estimates differ. Barry Kosmin and Egon Mayer, sociologists at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, recently released their 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). ARIS asked members of 50,281 American households to identify their own religious affiliation, if any, and that of their spouse or partner. The researchers hoped to explicitly determine if respondents considered themselves
adherents of a religious community, rather than asking the religious community to tally its own membership. ARIS found 1.1 adult Muslims and, according to The New York Times (Oct. 25), estimated 1.8 million Muslim adults and children.
The estimates of religious affiliation provided by ARIS and GSS both seem reasonable, but such surveys can still have problems that lead to questionable results. While we can no longer uncritically accept that there are six to seven million Muslims in this country, a precise figure remains elusive. In a later article, STATS will further investigate this issue in the context of other religions.
(Howard Fienberg [Statistical Assessment Service] in VitalSTATS, November 2001) http://www.stats.org/newsletters/0111/muslims.htm
It's time to review the truth.
If we pander to the blacks, the latinos will feel neglected so we will probably have to give amnesty to them as well as set up free tuition to the college of choice to bring them around. The what? Oh, the whites are conservative in nature, all we have to do is give them a tax cut and let their children pay for it and they will come around. So many decisions to make and so little time to do it. Life is such a drag in the oval office.
:>)
A lot of Muslims are leaving the U.S. because the feds are enforcing the immigration laws and because of the Patriot Act.
Not just Zoroastrianism. Islam also displaced much of Byzantine Christianity.
Look at California.
I haven't actually seen anything that indicates that any serious enforcement of the immigration laws are taking place.
There have been a number of articles about Muslims either heading back home or attempting to go Canada because the immigration people were getting too close for comfort.
Some Muslims from the U.S. are actually attempting to obtain political asylum in Canada.
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