U.S. Muslim Population Far Lower Than Thought

U.S. Muslim Population Far Lower Than Thought

NewsMax.com Staff
Friday, Sept. 20, 2002

There are about five and a half million fewer Muslims in the U.S. a new survey of religious affiliations shows.

Instead of the 7 million Muslims in America Islamic groups have claimed, the survey found just 1.6 million.

That was just one of the major surprises contained in what the Washington Times described as "the most complete religious survey of the United States."

The survey also revealed the numbers of Roman Catholics are expanding in the South and West and Evangelicals are growing everywhere.

The findings were contained in the Religious Congregations and Membership survey of 2000 - a survey conducted every ten years since 1966 by the Glenmary Home Missioners, a Catholic organization in Cincinnati, considered the most reliable data on religious affiliation down to the county level.

The Muslim population figures are based on the Muslims affiliated with America's more than 1,000 mosques, not the total number. The finding, the Times reported, touched a sensitive nerve on the debate over the presence and influence of U.S. Muslims.

"Unfortunately, not all Muslims attend a mosque," Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Times.

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," Dale E. Jones, a statistician with the Church of the Nazarene and a chairman of the project, told the Times.

"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 told the Times in an interview yesterday. The entire report is to be released tomorrow. The findings 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.

Among them:

The Catholic Church has the largest number of members 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," Clifford Grammich of the Glenmary Research Center told the Times.

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.