Pew surveys and the politics of demography

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the second report of the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey on June 23, 2008 which again uses its 2007 flawed report about the population of Muslims in America.

This new PEW analysis examining the diversity of Americans' religious beliefs and practices as well as their social and political attitudes finds that 92% of those interviewed believed in the existence of God or a universal spirit and 58% prayed privately every day.

Although many Americans are highly religious, they are not dogmatic in their faith, the survey said adding that 70% of Americans with a religious affiliation say that many religions "" not just their own "" can lead to eternal life. Most also think there is more than one correct way to interpret the teachings of their own faith.

According to the PEW survey, 78.4 percent Americans are Christians, 4.7 percent (including 1.7% Jews) belong to other faiths and 16.1 % do not belong to any faith while 0.8% declined to answer affiliation.

However, to the disappointment of seven-million strong American Muslim community, the new PEW survey also insists on its arbitrary figures about the Muslim population. It says that Muslims account for roughly 0.6% of the U.S. population. Its May 2007 survey claimed that the population of the American Muslim community is no more than 2.35 million which is closer to the estimates announced by the American Jewish Committee in October 2001.

These figures were repeated in its February 2008 and now in the latest PEW survey.

Tellingly, the AJC study "" titled Estimating the Muslim Population in the United States - claimed that the best estimate of Muslims in the United States is 2.8 million at most, compared to the 6 or 7 million figure used by many researchers and Muslim organizations.

Interestingly, for the Muslim population, the PEW relied on its 2007 controversial report but for other faiths it has taken other sources into consideration. For the American Muslims, the PEW survey, just like the AJC report, is no more than an attempt to undercut the influence of American Muslims. It looks a desperate venture to discount the role of American Muslims.

The PEW's demographic figures of American Muslims already made an entry into the Wikipedia encyclopedia's article on American Muslim population estimates. Since then the Pew numbers are quoted frequently as an authoritative estimate of American Muslims.

Religious denominations, like all interest groups, can gain or lose political clout based on perceptions of their size, according to J. Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, Calif. In the case of the U.S. Muslim community, Melton says, its efforts to influence policy in the Middle East would get a boost if it were viewed as being larger than the country's Jewish population, which is estimated at 6 million. (The latest PEW survey puts Jewish population at 1.7%.) "It's a political question: How does it sway votes?" he argued.

The American Jewish Committee's executive director David Harris has warned that the increasingly visible American Muslim lobby posed a challenge to U.S.-Israel relations. In an article published by the Jerusalem Report in May 2001, Harris urged American Jewry to unite with Israel to battle against the growing Arab and Muslim lobbies here and the challenge they present to long-standing U.S. support for Israel. Harris cited the "myth" of high Muslim population figures as one tactic Muslims are using to advance their position.

The American Jewish Committee and other groups estimate the number of Jews in this country is about 6 million. "Six million has a special resonance," Harris wrote in the Jerusalem Report magazine. "It would mean that Muslims outnumber Jews in the U.S. and it would buttress calls for a redefinition of America's heritage as 'Judeo-Christian-Muslim."-

The American Jewish Committee survey of Muslim population was conducted by Tom W. Smith of the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago who questioned the study, "The Mosque in America: A National Portrait," released in April 2001 by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The CAIR study reported that the number of mosques rose by about 25 percent, to more than 1,200, from 1994 to 2000. Based on reports of attendance at some mosques, researchers estimated the number of American Muslims at 6 million to 7 million. The project surveyed individual mosques, finding that 340 adults and children participated at the average mosque and that another 1,629 were "associated in any way" with the average mosque's activities, yielding a figure of 2 million Muslims. The authors then adjusted the estimate to 6 million to 7 million overall to take into account family members and unaffiliated Muslims.

Based in part on that report, most media organizations, as well as the White House and the State Department, have said that there are at least 6 million Muslims in the country.

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