Study points toward a future we can work and hope for

The American Muslim Poll 2019 from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding has been getting some media attention, mostly because of the finding captured in this chart:

This seems to me an important piece of data -- but not really so surprising, merely showing that two communities under the gun in our white nationalist environment recognize affinities and also the location of likely allies. That is, U.S. Muslims and Jews aren't dumb.

But there's lots more to this poll and it seemed like a worthwhile project to comment on some aspects of it:

• I had a hard time locating my tribe in it. The section on methodology describes one of the groups polled as "self-identified Protestants (parsing out white Evangelicals)". Does that cohort include both white mainliners and Black churchgoers? They don't say. Was the sample size just too small to break out; if they had broken out Blacks from whites, would the findings been any different?
  
  In the data summaries, "Protestant" attitudes toward U.S. Muslims seem always to split right down the middle of the distribution between Islamophobia and affirmation of others as is illustrated in the chart above. A similar down-the-middle positioning shows in "Protestant" electoral inclinations and evaluation of the nation's direction. Might my tribe be deeply divided between white Republican nationalist and Democratic inclusivity wings whose attitudes wash out in these statistics? I wonder.

• Political party identification among Muslims shows fissures familiar in our society--except when it comes to age. As Muslims get older, they become more likely to vote Democratic, at least nowadays.

  As with the general public, party alignment varies by race in the Muslim community. White Muslims (25%) are more likely than Asian Muslims (9%) to vote Republican and about six times as likely to vote Republican as Black Muslims (4%). Uniquely, Muslims’ voting pattern diverges from the general public—as they age, the general population leans more Republican whereas Muslim Americans continue to identify as strongly Democratic.

• I found this surprising. Education in comparative religion succeeds in promoting interfaith respect.

  ... it is worth noting that knowing something about Islam is even more powerful a predictor of tolerance toward Muslims than knowing a Muslim personally, suggesting that knowledge of the faith helps dispel generalized tropes about the people even more than knowing one good individual member of that group, who can be dismissed as an exception or “one of the good ones.”

  Maybe interfaith education is more potent than I would have surmised.

• I'm not convinced that this observation is deeply supported in the data, but you got to love it. Participation in #Resistance breaks down barriers and begins healing.

  The majority of all three major racial groups know a Muslim, but Hispanic Americans (63%) are more likely to know Muslims than white Americans. Hispanic Americans (39%) are also more likely to have a close Muslim friend than white Americans (21%). It is important to note that Muslims and Hispanic Americans are both groups that are a target of the current administration’s divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric. Resistance movements that demand “No Ban, No Wall” may have helped bring these two groups together.

The report is highly readable and available online to anyone curious.