Trying to do the Muslim math

Researchers at Hartford Seminary's Institute for Religious Research began with seven different lists of mosques in the United States.

They eliminated all duplicates, before attempting to verify the existence of each institution. This produced a list of 1,209 mosques. Interviews at 416 found that about 340 Muslims regularly prayed in a typical mosque, but 1,629 or so might be associated in one way or another with its religious life.

Then the researchers did what researchers do – the math. The numbers suggested that there might be 1,969,000 or so Muslims linked to U.S. mosques in 2000.

But there was a problem. Another study found 2,000 "mosques, schools and Islamic centers" and yet another 3,000, including "prayer locations." These numbers would push the population total higher. And what about all the Americanized, "cultural" Muslims who don't go to worship? What about mosques that only count the men?

"The data we have on how many people are going to mosques is actually pretty good, I believe," according to Mohamed Nimer of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "The problem is what happens when you try to postulate up from that number to some kind of estimate for the total Muslim population in this country.

"At that point, all kinds of things can happen to the numbers. No one agrees on how to make that leap."

This is serious business in the tense, highly politicized atmosphere following Sept. 11, 2001. Muslim leaders are striving to portray their community as a solidly mainstream presence in American culture. Everyone knows Islam is winning converts and becoming more visible, especially during seasons such as Ramadan, which is expected to end Dec. 6.

But how many Muslims are there in America? The Glenmary Research Center says 1.6 million, while CAIR and other Muslim advocacy groups say 7 million. Other reports jump all over the statistical map. Meanwhile, U.S. Census officials cannot ask questions about religion.

Writing in Public Opinion Quarterly, researcher Tom W. Smith is blunt: "None of the 23 specific estimates during the past five years is based on a scientifically sound or explicit methodology as far as one can tell from the published reports. All can probably be characterized as guesses or assertions." He concludes that the best estimates fall between 1.9 and 2.8 million, while most media reports continue to say 6 to 7 million.

While some researchers begin with data from mosques, others use telephone surveys. But Nimer said this fails to take into account immigrants whose English is weak. Others may hesitate to talk about their faith with strangers on the telephone. Finally, other surveys turn to immigration data focusing on ancestry and country of origin.

But immigrants are often hard to count, said journalist Joyce Davis, author of "Between Jihad and Salaam." Some are constantly moving to visit relatives in different parts of the nation, seeking the right place to settle. Some are unsure of their status with authorities. Some are trying to blend into this new culture.

"A significant number of Muslims simply do not want people to be able to trace them through a mosque," she said. "This was true before 9/11 and it certainly is true now. The assumption is that the FBI is paying close attention to those membership lists. Many Muslims – for a variety of reasons – may not want to join anything right now.

There are layers of other complications. Nimer is convinced only one out of three U.S. Muslims actively practices his or her faith. It's hard to know precisely how many African Americans are converting. Some surveys are notorious for missing Muslims from Southeast Asia, where Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population.

There is no clear bottom line. But Nimer said he believes conservative estimates of Muslims in America should fall between 2.5 and 4 million.

"It is crucial to realize that this is an issue that applies to all religious groups, not just Muslims," he said. "It is hard, as a rule, to count religious people. ... Are you counting people who are born into a particular faith or those who practice it? Do you want to count Arabs or do you want to count Muslims? Or do you want to count Arabs who are Muslims?"

Spirituality in the workplace?

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. – Tim J. McGuire is a baseball fan, but that wasn't why he kept a framed Mickey Lolich card on his desk when he was the editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

That baseball card was a gift from a man who applied for one of the newsroom's top jobs and, here is the twist, did not get it.

"But he wrote me a beautiful letter and he remembered that Mickey Lolich was one of my favorite players," said McGuire. "Sending me that card was such a beautiful, gracious thing for him to do.

"For me that isn't just a baseball card. It's a sacred object."

McGuire mixes work and spirituality all the time, even though he knows many people think this is heresy. Still the former editor is convinced that journalists and other stressed-out professionals must find some way to stop ignoring the holes in their souls.

That's one reason the 53-year-old Catholic layman parachuted out of his newsroom last summer, weeks after finishing his term as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He wanted to be able to speak his mind even more freely than he did during his years as a journalistic gadfly known for his brash management style and profane wisecracks.

Instead of retiring, he began writing a syndicated column called "More Than Work," dedicated to values and faith in the workplace. He also is a leader in the Partners In Preaching network of Catholic speakers.

Work is the last place most people think about spirituality, said McGuire, speaking during a seminar on "Faith, Religion & Values" at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. Instead of being the place where they express the values that are most precious to them, work becomes the place where these values are irrelevant.

"Work is brutal. Work is a four-letter word," said McGuire. "Most people don't think that work could possibly have anything to do with spirituality. ... They assume that these two worlds cannot mesh. But if we bring our souls to work, then we can transform our work. That is when our work can begin to transform us.

"The problem for most people is that their work transforms them into something bad, something bitter and tired and broken."

McGuire saw this happen day after day, but he doesn't think journalists are more "soul sick" than other people. All kinds of people struggle to find ways to cope with pain, confusion and anger. Some purchase mountains of possessions and others keep trading in one romantic relationship for another. Some turn to drugs and alcohol. Some literally worship their work, even though they may hate the work that they do.

This struggle is spiritual, whether people want to admit it or not. Finding a way to sleep at night is a spiritual process.

"Everybody has to have a spirituality and everybody does have one," said McGuire. "What we do with that personal madness that makes us who we are is our spirituality. ... Spirituality is about how we try to fill that hole in our souls."

Welcoming spirituality into the workplace doesn't mean holding revival meetings and letting people speak in tongues at their desks, he said. Proselytizing is wrong and there are settings in which it would be wrong for believers to display the symbols of their faith. The key is to make personal changes and vows that help "bring Sunday on over into Monday," he said.

That's why McGuire treasured that Mickey Lolich baseball card. That's why he uses computer passwords such as "blessed" that make him stop and think. A glass eagle sculpture on his desk is a reminder to treat his staff like eagles, not chickens.

Believers can find way to seek holiness, without being "holier than thou," he said. Take office gossip, for example.

"What are you supposed to do about that? You should not participate in the sin. You have to walk away," he said. "So far, so good. But what you can't do is point at those people and say, 'You're sinning! You're sinning! You've got to stop gossiping!' ...

"No, the way you cut down on the gossiping is that you stop gossiping yourself. But that's the hard part anyway, isn't it?"

Goodbye, Democrats. Hello, what?

It was sometime during the hearings into whether Judge Priscilla Owen was fit to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals that Father John F. Kavanaugh faced a hard question.

All 10 Democrats on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted against her and killed her recent nomination, even though the Texas Supreme Court Justice received the American Bar Association's highest ranking. The problem was that she favored restraints on abortion rights, including parental-notification laws.

"This was the first time in history that someone with her qualifications had been rejected in committee," said the nationally known Jesuit writer. "I couldn't believe it. ... That was when I had to ask: Why am I still a registered Democrat?"

Kavanaugh poured his feelings into a column in which he argued that it's time for Catholics to cut the political ties that bind and register as independent voters. While the priest stressed that he believes Catholic Republicans may also need to declare their freedom, he entitled his provocative piece "Goodbye, Democrats."

It helps to know that Kavanaugh is an old-school progressive, the author of books with titles such as "Following Christ in a Consumer Culture," "Faces of Poverty, Faces of Christ" and "Who Counts as Persons? Human Identity and the Ethics of Killing." This is one Jesuit who would never "wrap a rosary" around a conservative agenda.

Kavanaugh said he remains firmly opposed GOP doctrine on tax cuts, labor laws, welfare reform, the death penalty and a host of other issues. In the past decade, he noted, Democrats have compromised on all of those issues. But there is one issue on which his old party has steadfastly refused any compromise.

"One thing the Democrats really stand for, however, is abortion – abortion on demand, abortion without restraint, abortion paid for by all of us, abortion for the poor of the earth," wrote Kavanaugh. "I am not a one-issue voter, but they have become a one-issue party. ... If traditional Democrats who are disillusioned with the selling out of the working poor and the unborn simply became registered Independent voters, would not more attention be paid?"

In recent national elections, researchers have been watching for any signs that America's 60 million Catholics are changing their voting habits.

For generations, Frost Belt Catholics have been a crucial part of all Democratic coalitions. Today, Catholic trends are crucial in an era when Hispanic voters are gaining clout in Sunbelt politics. Thus, it matters that nearly three-fifths of the Catholics who said they frequently went to Mass voted for George W. Bush in 2000.

The question is whether this change is part of a fundamental realignment in the role that faith plays in American politics, according to two political scientists at Baruch College in the City University of New York.

Once, Southern evangelicals and northern Catholics were loyal Democrats. Once, the mainline Protestant churches were the heart of the Republican Party. But everything has changed. Today, liberal Protestants have joined a rising tide of "secularists" and "anti-fundamentalists" as the most loyal members of the Democratic establishment.

"The importance of evangelicals to the ascendancy of the Republican Party since the 1980s has been pointed out ad nauseam," noted Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio, in a paper presented to the Southern Political Science Association. "But if the GOP can be labeled the party of religious conservatives, the Democrats, with equal validity, can be called the secularist party."

And, they added, any list of nonnegotiable issues for secularists and leaders of the religious left would begin with abortion rights.

At some point, said Kavanaugh, Catholics must find a way to be active in politics without writing off the poor, the weak, the defenseless and the unborn. This is what their faith teaches. Right now, he believes that this means letting the political world see visible evidence that Catholics are no longer tied to one party.

"It's not just the unfettered worship of 'choice' that we see in the Democratic Party today, which some would even call a form of libertarianism," he said. "There has also been a capitulation to the power of money. ... It's painful to say this, but right now I see as much hard-heartedness in the Democrats as I do in the Republicans."

Worship for sale, worship for sale

In the beginning, there were the Jesus People.

They had long hair and short memories and they emerged from the 1960s with a unique fusion of evangelical faith and pop culture. They loved fellowship, but didn't like frumpy churches. They trusted their feelings, not traditions. They loved the Bible, but not those old hymnals.

So they started writing, performing, recording and selling songs. The Contemporary Christian Music industry was born.

And, lo, the counterculture became a corporate culture, one that was increasingly competitive and relentlessly contemporary, constantly striving to photocopy cultural trends. Out in the mega-churches, the definition of "worship" changed and then kept changing – Sunday after Sunday.

Even though this industry "makes claims for musical diversity among its ranks, it is primarily a reflection of current folk, pop and rock styles," noted veteran pop musician Charlie Peacock, speaking at a recent conference on "Music and the Church" at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. "Even today's successful modern worship music is composed of these and does not have a distinct style of its own."

The "bandwidth" of worship music today is actually quite narrow, he said, even if black gospel and "urban" music is included. This reality is especially obvious if the industry's products are contrasted with the dizzying array of church music found around the world and across two millennia of history.

Today, the bottom line is almost always the financial bottom line.

While believers lead the companies that dominate Christian music, secular corporations now own these smaller companies, noted Peacock. Clearly this is shaping the "Christian" music sold in religious bookstores and mainstream malls. But this corporate culture is also affecting worship and the heart of church life.

"The industry cannot be expected to always have the best interests of the church in mind," Peacock told nearly 500 scholars, musicians, entrepreneurs and clergy. "Christians within the companies may. But the overriding ideology of the system is to serve the shareholder first."

Serving the shareholders means an endless stream of new products, fads and artists – just like in the secular world. The new always vetoes the old and the saints don't use credit cards or own stock. Thus, CCM is dominated by pop, rock, urban and new worship music. Classical Christian music is below 1 percent on the charts.

Most worship leaders are trying to blend these radically different musical elements, reported pollster George Barna, describing a survey of Protestant worshippers, pastors and "worship leaders." Sometimes the easiest solution is to have different services for different audiences – a strategy the Barna Research Group found in three out of four churches.

Thus, the GI Generation attends a different service than the upbeat Baby Boomers or the mysterious young faithful of generations X and Y. The result looks something like an FM radio dial.

"What we know about Americans is that we view ourselves first and foremost as consumers," said Barna. "Even when we walk in the doors of our churches what we tend to do is to wonder how can I get a good transaction out of this experience. ... So, what we know from our research is that Americans have made worship something that primarily that we do for ourselves. When is it successful? When we feel good."

And sometimes people feel bad. According to the pastors, only 9 percent of the surveyed churches were experiencing conflict over music. But it's possible to turn those statistics around and note that 90 percent of all church conflicts reported in this study centered on musical issues.

Is peace possible? Peacock concluded that it will be up to ministers and educators to argue that there is more to worship than the niches on a CCM sales charts.

The industry can play a valid role in shaping the content of Christian music, he said, even in "contributing to the congregational music of the church. Still, the industry is at the mercy of a consumer with narrow tastes. Until this changes, it can't possibly function as a definitive caretaker and should not be asked to.

"This means that the stewardship of Christian music from the Psalms, to Ambrose, to Bach, to Wesley, to the Fisk Jubilee Singers and more, belongs to the church and the academy."