from Floating Sheep: geographies of religion (mapped by search terms). I like the way he overlaid the queries for sex for comparison.
Latest Updates: demographics RSS
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aziz
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shahed
This article by the AP’s Rachel Zoll is based on demographic data from my salatomatic.com site. Now that it has been online for five years, we’ve gathered enough data points on US/Canada/UK mosques to do some interesting analyses and hope to put out a comprehensive report soon.
Here’s a teaser:
15% of US mosques do not allow women to serve on their boards. In Canada, this jumps to 20%. In the UK, it is 24%. (Data copyright 2010 Halalfire Media)
This information is reported to us either by the mosques themselves or by people who attend them. Interesting in that I believe an official stance like this is illegal in all these countries.
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aziz
a great series at Open Left by diarist dreaminonempty has been chronicling the future decline and fall of the Republican Party on the basis of demographic trends, ethnic and religious. The post on religious trends had a extensive section on how muslim voting trends, which have been much more volatile in response to policy than comparable groups like African Americans or Jewish Americans. I take these results at City of Brass and re-open an old debate about whether there is/should be a "muslim vote" and whether it would necessarily be aligned with the political Left.
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thabet
Nearly one in four people of the global population are Muslim, says latest research from Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Some of the key findings:
- More than 60% of the global Muslim population is in Asia and about 20% is in the Middle East and North Africa.
- The Middle East-North Africa region has the highest percentage of Muslim-majority countries.
- More than 300 million Muslims, or one-fifth of the world’s Muslim population, live in countries where Islam is not the majority religion.
- India has the third-largest population of Muslims worldwide, behind Indonesia and Pakistan.
- China has more Muslims than Syria.
- Russia is home to more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined.
- Of the total Muslim population, 10-13% are Shia Muslims and 87-90% are Sunni Muslims. Most Shias (between 68% and 80%) live in just four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq.
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thabet
Is so-called New Atheism in the US an elitist movement?
(I am a little wary of someone asserting “it’s obvious” without some data.)
Theos, a Christian think-tank, did a survey to look at religion, class and atheism in the UK too:
One of the questions, adapted from an earlier BBC/ICM survey, asked people not simply what they believed (about God) but whether they had changed their mind, and by cross-tabulating these results with standard demographic questions, we can get a reasonably detailed picture of the class composition of atheism and theism in the UK.
[I]n summary the study found that lifelong theists (“I have always believed in God”) are disproportionately from lower socio-economic grades (DE: semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers or those unemployed or on state benefits), whereas lifelong atheists (“I have never believed in God”) are disproportionately from upper social grades (AB: higher or intermediate managerial or administrative professionals).
No surprise there. The default position in the UK (and seemingly in humans themselves) has long been belief in God, so you would expect theism to be a mass movement and atheism a more select one.
What is interesting – and surprising – is that “converts” to theism (“I believe in God now but have not always done so”) are disproportionately from upper and upper-middle social grades (ABC1: as above plus supervisory, clerical, junior managerial or administrative professionals), whereas “converts” to atheism (“I used to believe in God but I no longer do so”) are disproportionately from lower social grades (DE).
Your thoughts?
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thabet
Amanda Platell’s dog whistle is working overtime:
[...]
Sadly, though, it is not the indigenous middle-class, hard-working, tax-paying population that’s exploding.
According to statistics, our latest baby boom is partly down to high birth rates among immigrants, and partly due to rising numbers of younger mothers.
Amanda Platell was born in Perth… not the one in Scotland but the one thousands of miles away in Australia. She has a funny foreign accent (a weird combination of Australian and middle class English found in a London suburb). She is (I think) an immigrant to the UK…
So, basically what Platell means by immigrant is nigger, Paki, wog, darkie, blackie, etc.
At least Melanie McDonagh in The Daily Telegraph was honest about her dislike of Somali and ‘lower class’ mothers.
(Via Angry Mob.)
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thabet
(Via CNN.)
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thabet
A useful collection of religious maps of the US. Here’s the one for Muslims:
(Via @datastore.)
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thabet
The ‘Muslim demographic threat’ YouTube video has made it to Snopes.
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thabet
The BBC has a closer look at the ‘Muslim demographic threat’ YouTube video which has over 10 million hits.
The corporation has even made its own video and posted it as a response to the original.
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thabet
“Latinos are changing the nature of American religion”:
The main reason, he thinks, is ethnic identity. Evangelical services are not only in Spanish, as many Catholic sermons are nowadays, but are performed by Latinos rather than Irish or Polish-American priests, with the cadences, rhythms, innuendos and flow familiar from the mother country. The evangelical services tend to be livelier than Catholic liturgy and to last longer, often turning into an outing lasting the whole day. Women play greater roles, and there are fewer parishioners for each pastor than in the Catholic church.
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razib, murtad fitri
re: “1.5 billion muslims.” i think it might be not too far off digging into the data. probably a slight overestimate, but not by hundreds of millions. i’m not done with my audit, but there are two main issues with muslim numbers in terms of overestimates.
1) asking muslim organizations in a country gives overestimates. e.g., an islamic center in argentina has floated the number 1.5% muslims based on some assumptions about argentine arabs. but an independent religious survey suggests that those of “other religion,” which is a category exclusive of catholics, jehovah’s witness, mormons and a few other groups is 1.2%. muslims would be in that 1.2%. the fact that argentina’s president in the 1990s was a convert from islam to catholicism probably make a higher number of muslims seem plausible.
2) albania is often given as 70% muslims. this is the historical number, with the balance being catholic and protestant. the problem though is that only 90% of albanians avow religious identity, even nominally. of these 70% are muslims, so the real proportion is 70% X 90%. keep doing this sort of thing, and it adds up a bit.
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razib, murtad fitri
follow up to the post re: 1.5 billion muslims. here are “back of the envelope” off the top of my head
150 million bangladesh
150 million pakistan
150 million india
200 million arab
150 turks + iranian
200 million indonesians
40% of subsaharan africans = 500 X 0.4 = 200 millionthat’s 1.2 billion. so can the other 300 million be accounted for by europe, new world, odds & ends like far east, central asia? doubt it. i think 1 billion is a lowbound that is not credible, but 1.5 billion is beyond the bounds of credibility for a highbound. i think 1.1 – 1.3 billion is probably a good 95% confidence interval. though i left out some smaller regions, i tried to overestimate for the ones above.
but i’ll crunch some numbers.
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thabet
There has been speculation since the start of the year that the owner of Leyton Orient is thinking of moving out of its 70-year home in east London.
Some fans are suggesting that the ethnic profile of Leyton has changed so much that most of their supporters, largely white English, no longer live in the area; thus, it makes financial sense to move to an area where their supporters live — a predominantly white area further up the Central line or out into Essex. (I’ve been to Brisbane Road a few times and, yes, it is largely white.)
Workers from the new EU countries in, like Poland, are accused of not developing an interest in the local club because they are in the area for a short period.
Another complaint is that second generation Asians and blacks who do watch and play football tend to support successful clubs like Arsenal or Manchester United* rather than local sides. In my experience, this is probably also true (but not exclusively so; family and friends in Leicester support the local football club).
This would probably make for an interesting study given how much the game has changed, but I think trying to blame the misfortunes of a struggling lower league club on the local Asian or black population is a bit harsh, if not outright stupidity**. It appeals to a prejudice that is rife across the country (‘foreigners are taking over’, ‘over way of life is dying’).
*I have yet to meet a Bangladeshi who doesn’t support Liverpool.
**The inequality in the top tiers of the game make it difficult for a system comprised of 90-odd professional clubs to sustain itself.
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razib, murtad fitri
an attempt to defend obama’s claim that the USA is one of the largest muslim muslim countries. cuz of it’s muslim minority. yes, 2-6 million is a large number. but weak.
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razib, murtad fitri
data on atheism across societies. oh, and yes, of the over 2,700 people surveyed in pakistan for the WVS, none admitted to disbelieving in god. the 0% is not a rounding. the sample is somewhat higher SES, with 6% having university degrees, and only 40% not completing elementary schools, FWIW.
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razib, murtad fitri
taking off on thabet’s post, British Muslims: the new Victorians. checking *the world values survey* it does not seem that the liberalism of french muslims can be explained by differences between the source countries. more later. re: the morality data, doing a log-transformation of the data you can predict 25% of the variance in muslim attitudes by host country attitudes on any given topic.
i will try and do more rigorous comparisons to host countries as well as seeing % who are immigrants and residential segregation matter. it seems that the french model of assimilation has been more powerful than the german and british models of de facto and de jure & de facto multiculturalism in assimilating toward national norms.
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razib, murtad fitri
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razib, murtad fitri
I have a post up at ScienceBlogs noting the erosion in numbers among American Catholics part of a general shift away from institutional religion.
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razib, murtad fitri
washington DC has a lot of muslims?:
According to data from 2000, more than half of District residents were identified as Christian; 28% of residents are Catholic, 9.1% are American Baptist, 6.8% are Southern Baptist, 1.3% are Eastern or Oriental Orthodox, and 13% are members of other Christian denominations. Residents who practice Islam make up 10.6% of the population, followers of Judaism compose 4.5%, and 26.8% of residents adhere to other faiths or do not practice a religion.
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razib, murtad fitri
i don’t have much to add to the aris report for 2008. though i did post on the fact that many more americans have atheistic & agnostic beliefs than are atheists & agnostics. the big change in the aris survey was between 1990 and 2001, when the number with no religion doubled. 2008 is just a moderate extension of the trend.
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razib, murtad fitri
American Religious Identification Survey 2008. Will be interesting to compare with Religious Landscape Survey. Here’s a headline from a summary: More Americans say they have no religion.
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razib, murtad fitri
Religiosity is adaptive website. fertility data.
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razib, murtad fitri
i skimmed the survey listed below. LOTS of stuff, you got to read. two general points
1) some of the stress felt by muslims seems pretty clearly due to anti-muslim sentiment which is particular & distinctive to muslims. i.e., it can’t just be attributed to the fact that a large % of muslims are racial minorities (some of the questions seem pretty keyed in to this reality).
2) some of stress and anomie seems to be a byproduct of the demographics of muslims. i.e., in many social & demographic ways african american muslims are far more like african american christians than asian muslims (who are mostly south asian i’m sure). some of the questions also suggest to me that there is something more than the conventional level of anomie in the african american community at work, but rather a trend which emerges from the fact that large numbers of muslims who
a) convert to islam and so move themselves out of prior social networks
b) but are not fully integrated into a muslim social network
i think this is most well illustrated by the demo of “asian muslims,” who are probably the least likely to be converts, and so have a natural communal framework which is historically robust. in contrast, many of the black and white muslims are converts with weaker historical ties, and don’t have as many people to rely on.
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razib, murtad fitri
the complete religious landscape survey (PDF) has stuff not easily viewable on the web. this shocked me:
belief in: personal/impersonal force/other,both,neither/refuse/atheist/don’t knowevangelical:79/13/4/3/0/1
mainline:71/19/5/3/0/1
catholic:60/29/4//4/1/2
mormon:91/6/1/10/0
jewish:25/50/4/4/10/7
buddhist:20/45/7/3/19/6
hindu:31/53/5/2/5/3
muslim: 41/42/7/3/5/2 -
thabet
The UK’s former chief scientist says the Iraq war will be seen by future historians* as the first of many 21st-century “resource wars”.
(*Only if people in The Future are going to be as fascinated with ‘history’ as we are today.)
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aziz
I am curious about the demographic makeup of our online community here. I want to do a poll but i want to make sure that we have the right categories first. So I’ll start in the comments by listing various archetypes, and I’d like to ask your help in completing it. then we can have an ongoing poll in the sidebar to collect the actual data. I think it will be pretty interesting!
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razib, murtad fitri
the audacious epigone constructed a moral relativism index using the pew religious landscape survey by looking at “responses to the question of whether or not there are “clear and absolute standards for what is right and wrong”. ”
1. Mormon 121
2. Jehovah’s Witness 119
3. Evangelical 117
4. Historically black 94
5. Catholic 91
All religious 89
6. Mainline Protestant 83
7. Muslim 79
8. Orthodox 73
9. Other Christian 69
10. Unaffiliated 55
11. Hindu 51
12. Jewish 38
13. Other non-Christian 28
14. Buddhist 4he was surprised that muslims came in so low. easy answer: 5% of these muslims admit to not believing in god. IOW, many people in the USA seem to identify as muslim without muslim beliefs.
p.s. muslims are the second most supportive religion of welfare aside form historically black churches.
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razib, murtad fitri
one thing re: religious groups like jews is that the numbers come out different depending on how you define a “jew.” look at the jewish identity survey. there are, for example:
1) jews who are religiously jewish (believing, active in synagogue)
2) jews who are self-identified as jewish, but non-believers in any religion
3) jews who who are self-identified as jewish, but believers in non-jewish religions. the jewishness of american white buddhism is so well know that it’s almost a joke, but the majority of these jews of non-jewish religion are actually christian
4) people who have one jewish parent, are religiously jewish by identity and belief, but who might not be accepted as jewish by all jews (i.e., matrilineal descent)
5) jews who are religiously jewish, but not ethnically so (converts)because of these factors estimates of the numbers of jews can vary by a multiplicative factor of 2, or even 3.
some of the same issues apply to muslims too. among jews it is tacitly accept that jews who are atheists are “more jewish” than jews who convert to other religions, especially christians. on the order of 5% of self-identified muslims are atheists.
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razib, murtad fitri
religious identification survey (USA). this is the best resource online that i know of. supplement liberally with the american religious identification survey and the GSS.
