American Muslims grew in number over the past decade, outnumbering Jews for the first time in most of the Midwest and part of the South, while most mainline churches lost adherents, according to a census of American religions released on Tuesday.

The number of Muslim adherents rose to 2.6 million in 2010 from 1 million in 2000, fueled by immigration and conversions, said Dale Jones, a researcher who worked on the study by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.

“Christians are the largest group in every state, but some of the things we found interesting was the growth of the Mormons, who reported the largest numerical gain in 26 states,” said Jones, who presented the report to a conference in Chicago.

The number of Mormons, whose Utah-based church’s formal name is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, grew by 45% to 6.1 million in 2010, according to the census, which asked 236 religions to count their own adherents. Family members of adherents were generally included in the numbers.

Roughly 55% of Americans attend services with enough regularity to be counted, according to the data. By comparison, most surveys estimate roughly 85% of Americans profess religious faith, though they may not attend services.

Some 158 million Americans were classified as “unclaimed” by any religion in the survey.

Among major religions, the census found the number of Catholics, the largest single faith, declined 5% to 58.9 million during the decade.

“Catholics had the largest numeric decline,” including big losses in Maine where a priest abuse scandal came to light, Jones said. In the New England region, Catholic funerals are outnumbering baptisms, he added.

Buddhists make gains
Among the other largest US faiths, adherents to the Southern Baptist Convention held steady at 19.9 million over the decade, the United Methodist Church lost 4% to 9.9 million adherents, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America lost 18% to 4.2 million, and the Episcopal Church lost 15% of its adherents to 1.95 million.

Evangelical protestant congregations continued to grow, though slowly, to 50 million adherents. Most of the growth, surprisingly, was in urban areas and the vast majority of expanding congregations have fewer than 100 members and are not large mega churches, Jones said.

Jones said Buddhists made strong gains in the Rocky Mountain states, where the number of temples and congregations increased markedly. The total number of Buddhist adherents in the United States was nearly 1 million. There was no estimate in 2000.

Based on some of the temple names, I think some of the upscale yuppie types are looking for something different than the church they grew up in,” Jones said.

SOURCE:ynet news.com

American Muslims will be an important voting bloc in the 2012 presidential election, but some politicians have been hesitant to reach out to the community for fear of a backlash, said Corey Saylor, spokesman for the Council of Islamic-American Relations.

“People want us to be a part of their movements but sort of toward the edge of stage,” Saylor said. “Often times what we see is that if someone is getting close to the Muslim community, they get attacked for being weak on national security.”

Muslims want to participate in the political process, and they’re paying attention to domestic and foreign events, according to a report released last month by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington.

The report recommends that politicians engage Muslim Americans because they could play key roles in the upcoming election, especially in key swing states like Florida and Michigan.

The U.S. census didn’t ask about religious affiliation, so estimates regarding the size of Muslim communities living in Michigan and Florida are imprecise. But as minority voters become increasingly important in elections, Muslim political importance increases too, the report says.

“Because of numbers in Ohio, Florida, Northern Virginia, that’s going to make it a community whose concerns are a little more important to pay attention to this election cycle,” Saylor said.

In 2010, the Pew Research Center estimated that nearly 2.6 million Muslims lived in the United States, representing less than 1 percent of the population. By 2030, the number of Muslims living in the U.S. is expected to more than double, according to the Pew Research Center.

“It’s clear that they’re going to continue to grow and become a bigger piece of the electoral puzzle,” said Aimee Chiu of the American Islamic Congress. “It would be great to start looking at understanding the constituency.”

Policy decisions like the USA Patriot Act and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed the 9/11 attacks that caused American Muslims to abandon the Republican Party after supporting George W. Bush in the 2000 election, the report said.

Between 2001 and 2004, the percentage of American Muslims dissatisfied with the country’s direction increased from less than 40 percent to more than 60, according to the report. In 2008, 89 percent of Muslims who voted supported Barack Obama. In 2011, more than three quarters of Muslims approved of Obama’s performance, the report said.

But Muslim support for Democrats isn’t a sure thing. Forty percent of Muslims identified as independent in 2004, according to the report.

The Muslim population in the U.S. is very diverse, said Aimee Chiu of the American Islamic Congress. Muslims care about what’s going on abroad, but they also care about a wide variety of issues, she said.

Muslims are interested in domestic issues like the economy, health care, and civil liberties, Saylor said. Either party could cultivate support among Muslims if they engage with the community and address issues that they’re concerned about, the report said.

Meanwhile, American Muslims can work to show campaigns that engaging with the community is vital to winning elections, Saylor said.

“The people who organize the best and deliver, they’re more likely to get their issues listened to,” he said.

SOURCE:The Next America

WASHINGTON – Osama bin Laden didn’t have a very high opinion of Vice President Biden. He didn’t think much of the American-born terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, for that matter.

These are among the insights into the al-Qaeda leader gleaned from 17 letters and declassified documents released to the public Thursday.

In one of the more chilling missives, bin Laden calls on deputies to set up teams in Pakistan and Afghanistan to target airplanes known to be carrying President Obama and Gen. David Petraeus, then the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, on their visits to the region.

VIDEO: Bin Laden’s last words go online

“The reason for concentrating on them is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency … as it is the norm over there,” bin Laden wrote. “Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour in this last year of the war, and killing him would alter the war’s path.”

The documents, released by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, describe an increasingly frustrated and isolated bin Laden as he struggles to maintain control over the global movement he helped create. The documents suggest he worried that it had descended into a collection of rogue operations with no unifying principles.

The tone of some of bin Laden’s letters shows he was “struggling to exercise even a minimal influence over” regional affiliates, according to a CTC analysis.

It wasn’t surprising that bin Laden had difficulty in controlling his subordinates. “One problem with running an organization of murderers and fanatics is they can be hard to control,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer at the Brookings Institution, a think tank.

Bin Laden seems almost dismissive of Awlaki, the U.S. born al-Qaeda propagandist headquartered in Yemen. Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike last year, had been dubbed by a prominent Arab news network as the “bin Laden of the internet.” But bin Laden batted away suggestions that Awlaki could take over the al-Qaeda franchise in Yemen.

Riedel cautioned not to draw too many conclusions from the documents, since they are only a fraction of the thousands of documents seized at his compound. For example, the documents released Thursday hold no clues as to how bin Laden was able to hide in plain sight in Pakistan and whether anyone in the government there aided him.

While it’s clear that bin Laden was grappling to keep a grip on al-Qaeda, he remained attuned to the fact that the Muslim world was at a tumultuous moment in the last days of his life.

Just days before the SEALs raided bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad on a moonless night, bin Laden mused that the Arab Spring could be a “formidable” moment, a turning point for Muslim faithful. At the time of the writing, strongmen Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak had already fallen from power in Tunisia and Egypt.

“The fall of the remaining tyrants in the region was inevitable,” bin Laden wrote in a letter dated April 25, 2011. “If we double our efforts towards guiding, educating and warning Muslim people from those (who might tempt them to settle for) half solutions, by carefully presenting (our) advice, then the next phase will (witness a victory) for Islam, if God so pleases.”

SOURCE:USA TODAY News