Seven Million Muslims in the US? Not Likely

Why is President Obama overstating the Muslim population in the United States?

In an interview before his trip to the Middle East he said: "If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

And in his speech in Cairo, President Obama repeated an often-used estimate of the American Muslim population that has little evidence to support it. He said:

"The dream of opportunity for all people has not come true for everyone in America, but its promise exists for all who come to our shores -- and that includes nearly 7 million American Muslims in our country today -- who, by the way, enjoy incomes and educational levels that are higher than the American average."

Leave aside the question of opportunity and look at the number. Seven million Muslims? Not likely.

Start by acknowledging the difficulty in estimating the size of any religious group. How do you define a member? Someone on the rolls of a church, temple, mosque? Someone who attends a prayer event? Someone who practices a particular ritual? Holds a particular theology?

Each of those questions will get you different numbers.

Start with the large religious survey known as ARIS: "American Religious Identification Survey." This is a poll that's been taken three times. In 1990, 2000 and 2008. It is, as such things go, a very large poll. The most recent included 54,461 people. Compare that to most national presidential preference polls that question about a thousand people.

ARIS asks people a simple question: "What is your religion, if any?"

Here's the breakdown of the American adult population, based on ARIS: Christians, 76%; no particular religion, 15%; no answer, 5.2%; and all other religions, 3.9%

That last category includes all the Jews, Muslim, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and any other faith you can think of. A total of 8.8 million adults.

Breaking that down, the survey estimates that Muslims constitute about .6% of American adults – 1.3 million people.

Another large survey was conducted by the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life. This poll included an attempt in 2007 to specifically identify Muslims. The Muslim outreach survey included questions in Arabic, Urdu and Farsi. Like the ARIS, the Pew survey came up with a figure of about .6% of adult Americans.

Next, let's turn to the Mosque Study Project, conducted by Muslim-American scholars in 2001. It was part of a larger study of American congregations called Faith Communities Today, coordinated by the Hartford Institute for Religious Research.

It estimated that about 350,000 Muslims attended weekly prayer services. And that about 2 million people attend the annual Eid services – the largest on the Muslim calendar by several orders of magnitude. And then the report says, without any additional explanation:

"Estimates of a total Muslim population of 6-7 million in America seem reasonable in light of the figure of 2 million Muslims who associate with a mosque. "

Imagine if the Southern Baptists took the number of people who attend one of their churches on Christmas and Easter -- when just about every church holds many packed services -- and asserted that the real number of Southern Baptists were more than three times as large. Would that seem "reasonable?" Particularly if several major surveys were unable to locate these additional Southern Baptists?

Let's dismiss a few issues: No question that some Muslims don't respond to surveys at all. And that there is a language barrier for many Muslims. And that many Muslim women are harder to locate for surveys than men.

All true. Let's grant for argument's sake that there are half again more Muslims than the surveys find. Or even twice as many.

That still leaves us a long, long way from the 6-7 million "estimate." And a long, long, long way from the United States being "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

To be sure: Muslims are hardly the only American religious group to puff membership numbers. Nearly every group does so to one extent or another. But I am not aware of any other group that puffs so hard.

What the point? Politics. And particularly Jewish-American politics. Muslims in America, rightly or wrongly, see themselves as competing with Jews for political power. And the number of Muslims actually identified by any major survey is between a half and a third the number of people who identify themselves as being Jewish (which is a shrinking demographic, btw), depending on the survey.

Puffing the number up to "6-7 million" boosts Muslims over Jews. Should this matter? Maybe not. But it does, a lot, to many Muslims in the United States and abroad.

Which may explain why, in a week when the president is trying very hard to reach across a political and religious chasm, Obama defies the data.