A Reminder about the US Muslim Population

Via Pew Research:

Pew Research Center estimates that there were about 3.3 million Muslims of all ages living in the United States in 2015. This means that Muslims made up about 1% of the total U.S. population (about 322 million people in 2015), and we estimate that that share will double by 2050.

[…]

According to our current estimate, there are fewer Muslims of all ages in the U.S. than there are Jews by religion (5.7 million) but more than there are Hindus (2.1 million) and many more than there are Sikhs.

In some cities Muslims comprise significantly more than 1% of the community. And even at the state level Muslims are not evenly distributed: Certain states, such as New Jersey, have two or three times as many Muslim adults per capita as the national average.

More at the link.

FILED UNDER: Religion, US Politics, ,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. bookdragon says:

    Yep. In my neck of the woods, seeing a woman in a hijab is so common that my first reaction is no longer to note that she’s Muslim but to guess at which area her her family originally came from based on how it’s draped and the color and pattern.

  2. gVOR08 says:

    After Mikka threw Rick Scott off the show for not answering whether Islam hates us, Scarborough went on a tear and amongst other things claimed 10% of our doctors are Muslim. Kind of fun since he was in full suck up mode to Trump only a week or two ago.

  3. Davebo says:

    Does this mean Muslims are the new 1%?

  4. Gromitt Gunn says:

    I think it is also helpful to keep in mind that not all Arabs are Muslim.

  5. gVOR08 says:

    @Gromitt Gunn: And that not all Muslims are Arabs. I’m unaware of much hostility from, for instance, Indonesia.

  6. @Gromitt Gunn: @gVOR08: That sounds too complicated to keep straight.

  7. There’s nearly twice as many native americans (5.4 million) in the US as there are muslims. Worrying about muslims taking over and imposing sharia law is like worrying about your home getting burned down by an indian raiding party while you’re at work.

  8. Dave Schuler says:

    @Gromitt Gunn:

    I think it is also helpful to keep in mind that not all Arabs are Muslim.

    When I was a kid in St. Louis we used to attend a Maronite church (Lebanese Uniate Christians) and had many friends who were Lebanese. They had come here around the turn of the 20th century.

    Until the last, say, 30 years or so most of the Arabs in the United States were Christians. My present neighborhood has a significant number of Iraqi Christians—mostly Chaldeans and Assyrians who don’t consider themselves Arabs.

    That is a pretty substantial difference between the U. S. experience and the European experience of Middle Eastern immigration.

  9. OzarkHillbilly says:

    @Dave Schuler: St Louis picked up a rather sizable population of Bosnian Muslims during and after their civil war. Other ethnic Muslims have joined since then as well (Arab and Indonesians are 2 I have seen commonly) Not sure what the actual Muslim population of STL city is now but it would not surprise me in the least if it was pushing 5%.

    Growing up in a Lebanese neighborhood you probably remember the Syrian mob? Jimmy Michaels and the Leisure brothers? Always laughed at the fact they called themselves “Syrian” when everyone knew they were of Lebanese descent. Never could figure that out.

  10. wr says:

    @Stormy Dragon: ” Worrying about muslims taking over and imposing sharia law is like worrying about your home getting burned down by an indian raiding party while you’re at work.”

    Easy to laugh until it’s happened to you!

  11. Dave Schuler says:

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Growing up in a Lebanese neighborhood you probably remember the Syrian mob?

    Remember them? I used to go to church with them. I went to high school with their kids. Very, very big in the construction business when I was a kid.

  12. Gromitt Gunn says:

    @Dave Schuler: Indeed. My fiancé’s immediate family immigrated from Palestine to the Chicago area in 1947 (gee, I wonder what was happening then?). There are both Muslim and Christian branches in the tree (possibly Jewish as well – they fled Andalusia during the Reconquista, and it is hard to track records that far back.

    The Christian branches that remained in the Levant were kinda sorta responsible for Intra Bank.

  13. m u n c h box graduate says:

    Soooo the good professor here links to a report made by a muslime downplaying the size of the growing infestation horde of cockroaches??? and you lapdogs just lap it right up?? no wonder Michael Reynolds doesn’t comment anymore…was he just fed up with your intellectual dishonesty?

    muslimpopulation.com/America/….. United States United States 316.2 2.11 % 6.67million

    This is from a report in 1991…

    What is represented in this report is based on estimates made in 1991, the World Almanac reports that Muslim in the United States number approximately 5,220,00.

    islam101.com/history/population2_usa.html ….so over twenty years ago they are saying it is nearly double what you are claiming???

    and finally from snopes

    Although estimates of the Jewish population in the U.S. were fairly stable across various websites, estimates of the Muslim population varied dramatically – anywhere from 2.1 million to 6.7 million.

    why is it so hard to report?

    because … they go onto say well it is really less like .9% so they can claim that the hate crime statistics against muslimes are WAY up because they are SUCH a small part of the population.

    What Garbage you are.

  14. @m u n c h box graduate: The funny thing is you are self-refuting your own underlying claims. If Muslims are a problem, and there are actually more of them in the US than Pew states, there should be even more Muslim-generated problems in the US. When, in fact, there are practically none (certainly not at a rate larger than other groups in society).

    So, you are simply confirming what we all know: that fear-mongering about Muslims for being Muslims in nothing but bigotry (as, of course, your own colorful language underscores).

    The WHOLE POINT for my post was to show that if, as Trump argues, “Islams hate America” than how do we explain the peaceful 3.3 millions American Muslims? (Or your 6 million?).

    If you are correct, you are just undercutting your own position.

  15. munch troll says:

    Ha!

    self-refuting? i am just pointing out that there is only one benefit by sourcing the roach populations so low…. its to bolster the claim that there are many more hate crimes towards them per capita.

    In the book, Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat, written by Dr. Peter Hammond, he explores the topic of the impact that an increasing Muslim population has on that society.

    So this census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/2622000 puts total Detroit pop at 680250

    and biid.lsa.umich.edu/exhibit-items/introductory-panel-2/ puts the slime pop at 150000

    for a 4.5% population….then this starts to happen….
    and now this is happening…. detroit.cbslocal.com/2012/10/06/enter-at-your-own-risk-police-union-says-war-like-detroit-is-unsafe-for-visitors/
    and this already happened.
    http://www.clarionproject.org/news/american-muslims-stone-christians-dearborn-michigan#

  16. gVOR08 says:

    I noted above @gVOR08: that we’re not seeing much hostility from Indonesian Muslims. This morning Kevin Drum has a good summary of Jeffery Goldberg’s Atlantic article on Obama. Points out that our good friends the Saudis are doing there best to change that. They’re putting money and Wahhabi madrassahs into Indonesia.

  17. An Interested Party says:

    Soooo the good professor here links to a report made by a muslime downplaying the size of the growing infestation horde of cockroaches???

    Oh my, referring to other human beings as “cockroaches”…and to think you would call anyone else garbage…the projection is strong in this one…

  18. gVOR08 says:

    @m u n c h box graduate: @Steven L. Taylor: @An Interested Party: Dyam but that Munch Box comment smelled like Reynolds punking us with a conservative parody.

  19. munch says:

    When they breed like cockaroaches and infest western nations like a dark space under a NYC refrigerator …it’s an apt descriptor. And the good professor here is an apologist for them. And no I am not asshat’s alter ego sock puppet. I am my own troll. What happened to Reynolds?
    Was he banned? Or was he sick of all the garbage posts here????

  20. DrDaveT says:

    @munch:

    When they breed like cockaroachesCatholics or Mormons or Quiverfull.

    FTFY

  21. munch says:

    DrDumbass,

    THAT’S RICH!!!!! coming from an article on how muslime breed like cockroaches….literaly that is what the article is about….you lapdogs are sooooo f’ing blind!!
    so you try to insult mormons and catholics. LOL! ….from the article the good apologist linked to….

    The other main cause of Islam’s recent growth is natural increase. American Muslims tend to have more children than Americans of other religious faiths.

    and…

    In the United States, Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in 2010 to two-thirds in 2050

    also…

    Just over half of the projected growth of the American Muslim population from 2010 to 2015 is due to immigration.

    thank you muslime in chief….

    and remember… hawaiifreepress.com/ArticlesMain/tabid/56/ID/716/Hawaii-ldquoIslam-Dayrdquo-secretly-marks-September-11.aspx

    and look here how France has already been overrun….pjmedia.com/blog/latest-survey-finds-25-of-french-teenagers-are-muslims/?singlepage=true

  22. a quick reminder says: