Gap in Census Leaves Need for Religious Data

The census has caused anxiety--even anger in some quarters--with its questions about everything from income to plumbing. But there is one major aspect of American life it fails to cover: religion.

Congress barred the Census Bureau in 1976 from compelling people to reveal their religion. As a result, America’s religious landscape remains surprisingly ill-defined. Some of the most fundamental presumptions are based on educated guesswork, suspect science or leaps of faith. Consider a few questions:

* Are Muslims displacing Jews as America’s largest non-Christian faith group? If so, the shift could affect everything from public school curricula and workplace practices to U.S. policy in the Mideast. But Muslim population estimates are highly controversial--ranging from a few million to 10 million.

* Are American Jews marrying outside the faith at a rate of 52%? Ever since that statistic was reported in 1991, fears that Jews could be headed down a demographic path to disappearance have topped the American Jewish agenda. Yet some demographers estimate the intermarriage rate to be far lower.

* Are Latinos abandoning traditional Christian denominations en masse for evangelical movements? Trying to define the number of evangelicals can be difficult. And pinpointing the number of Latinos, regarded as the evangelical world’s fastest-growing segment, is even dicier because their immigration status and language barriers stymie accurate counting.

Given existing complaints about the census, it might seem quixotic to suggest adding more questions. But the lack of reliable data is fueling calls for better ways to chart the most religiously diverse nation in the world. Some Jewish leaders, for example, are urging the U.S. census to begin including the faith question again--it was asked once, in 1957, as a voluntary survey.

Others suggest that the government intensify its current efforts to have private organizations do religious research. Currently, for example, private groups use government funds to examine issues such as the link between prayer and public health.

For their part, private foundations are underwriting a growing raft of religious research. For example, Pew Charitable Trusts last year awarded a grant to Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding to undertake an extensive study of American Muslims, including a population estimate.

Similar efforts are being launched elsewhere. Britain, for example, has announced that it will include religion in its next census for the first time since 1851. Both American and British advocates say that national censuses are the cheapest and most efficient way to collect information.

Some Don’t Care Much About Counting

By contrast, some critics say the whole business of “sheep counting and sheep stealing,” as one demographer put it, should be de-emphasized.

“We don’t think, at the present moment in America, counting is the best way to understand our increased religious pluralism,” said Eileen W. Lindner, editor of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. “We now have a critical mass of people from different religious traditions. Whether we have the numbers or not . . . [we] need to learn ways to engage with them.”

The yearbook last year decided to stop publishing tables of religious affiliations. Among statistics that fueled the decision were those that showed Muslims at 527,000 in 1996 and 3.3 million in 1998--a gargantuan growth widely challenged as improbable.

“We made an attempt to see if anyone has good numbers, and basically what we are finding out is that people don’t,” said Derek Lander, a yearbook staff member.

Such statements may surprise many faithful, but the dubious state of religious data is well known among demographers.

“Any religious data you see [are] highly biased, and most of us tend to be very leery” of them, said Samia El-Badrey, a longtime demographer of Arab Americans who heads the Texas-based International Demographic and Economic Association.

“Most data [are] collected by religious organizations; hence they tend to be higher than reality because the sources want to make sure their numbers are high,” El-Badrey said.

The reliability of data differs widely across denominations.

For Catholics, the matter is fairly straightforward: Parishes use registration records, nose counts at Mass, or more recently, calculations based on baptisms, funerals and countywide vital statistics.

By contrast, faith communities with no central hierarchy often don’t keep records at all. Buddhists, for instance, say they have no idea how large their community is overall--and aren’t particularly concerned about it.

In a faith with no sacramental rites of passage for membership, who is a Buddhist, anyway? asks Don Morreale, the Denver-based author of “The Complete Guide to Buddhist America.”

How do you define a follower?

Is someone who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ but doesn’t belong to a church, proselytize or tithe a Christian? Are Nation of Islam followers Muslim, even though some of their tenets have departed from orthodox Islam? What about “bookstore Buddhists,”--people interested in reading about the philosophy but who don’t practice?

Another minefield is methodology, demonstrated by the Jewish intermarriage debate.

When a Jewish population survey reported the 52% intermarriage rate in 1991, the reaction was furious. Suddenly, the issue of “continuity” exploded.

Orthodox Jews, with their traditional ways, large families and low intermarriage rates, produced a controversial chart claiming that only they would increase the number of Jews over time.

The numbers continued to reverberate at a conference in February sponsored by the USC Institute for the Study of Jews in American Life and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Charles S. Liebman, an Orthodox professor at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv, said intermarriage “violates the most basic norms of Judaism [and] threatens Jewish survival.”

Deborah Dash Moore, a Reconstructionist Jew and Vassar College religion professor who herself married a non-Jew, countered that “behavior, not blood” was most important in ensuring Jewish continuity.

Amid the storm, however, some demographers are questioning the statistic’s validity. Several new local surveys indicate a lower intermarriage rate, said Pini Herman, a consultant to the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles. Boston, for instance, reported 25%; Los Angeles, 41%. Some demographers believe the national figure is closer to 37% and that the original survey had flaws that yielded a skewed sample.

United Jewish Communities plans to undertake another national survey this year with methodological changes to ensure a more accurate count, Herman said. But, he added, the furor has sapped energy from other pressing issues.

“You have real problems like Jewish poverty, but they are not as dominant as intermarriage,” he said.

But the thorniest question among religious demographers is the size of the Muslim population.

The American Muslim Foundation contends that unreliable numbers have prevented Muslims from claiming their fair share of minority rights, political recognition and business opportunities.

But the Islamic tradition is not particularly conducive to data collection. Muslims do not organize themselves in a hierarchical mosque structure. Many people balk even at registering with mosques, believing their prayer life is between themselves and God, said Hussam Ayloush of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Anaheim.

Muslim organizations often assert that Islam is “one of the fastest-growing faiths in America” with at least 6 million adherents. But Tom W. Smith, the Chicago-based director of the general social survey at the National Opinion Research Center, calls the 6 million claim “completely invalid. They basically are just inventing an estimate.”

At least three large national studies conducted in the early and mid-1990s by the Chicago research center, the University of Michigan and UCLA all found that Muslims comprised about 0.5% of the U.S. adult population--roughly 950,000 adults--Smith said. (By comparison, surveys indicate that Jews make up about 2.2% of the adult U.S. population.)

The claim of fast growth rates is also disputed. David B. Barrett, the demographer who charts world religions for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, estimates that Orthodox Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus and even atheists are all growing faster than Muslims.

Some demographers counter that the lower estimates seriously undercount Muslims because many mistrust the government and refuse to respond to surveys.

Even so, some Muslims acknowledge that the 6 million figure is suspect. Fareed Nu’man, whose 1992 population survey for the American Muslim Council pinned the number at 5 million, said he was often pressured to arbitrarily boost the number to 6 million.

Nu’man used census data, nose counting at mosques, telephone directories and personal interviews to estimate the Muslim populations in San Diego and Los Angeles, and he tallied just half of what community leaders were claiming.

Whereupon, he said, his funding was cut and he was “pushed out of the circle of Muslim research.” He now runs a Muslim food service firm in Philadelphia.

One problem with most estimates of the Muslim population is that they assume that immigrants from mainly Muslim nations are mostly Muslim. But studies have found that a disproportionate number are Christians--the majority of Arab Americans, for example.

Other key components of Muslim population estimates are simply unknown--such as the number of African American Muslims. One study currently used as the basis for many estimates arbitrarily estimated the number of African American Muslims at 1 million. Nu’man, who is African American, put the 1990 figure at 2.5 million.

But John Weeks of San Diego State University, who has done research on Southern California Muslims, says the number could be as low as 350,000 based on recent surveys in New York and elsewhere showing that Muslims composed 1% to 3% of African Americans.

Barrett, of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, called the paucity of solid data pathetic. The U.S. government, he said, should fill the information void.

“I have never met anyone who thinks asking about religion is a dangerous question,” he said. “Ignorance is the danger, when you make decisions without any basis in fact.”

* MINORITIES AND THE CENSUS

Census forms allow multiracial identification, but some urge checking one box only. B1