German Lopez · Friday, March 10, 2017, 12:53 pm
This is demonstrably false — but a real survey finding.
Who faces more discrimination in America: Christians or Muslims? To many Americans, the answer may seem obvious — Muslims, after all, face a president who’s called to ban them from the US.
But among white evangelicals, the question is up for debate.
A new survey of 2,000 US adults, conducted in February by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), suggested that white evangelicals think Christians face more discrimination than Muslims. The poll found that 57 percent of white evangelical Protestants said that Christians face “a lot of discrimination” in the US today, while just 44 percent said the same of Muslims. White evangelicals were the only major Christian denomination to as a group indicate that Christians face more discrimination than Muslims.
A chart shows polling results about whether Christians face more discrimination than Muslims. Public Religion Research Institute [See link below to view chart]
White evangelicals’ beliefs here are easily disproved. But the results are telling in that they show how political and religious ideologies can drive some people into bubbles — to the point that they might believe a majority-Christian country is actually more likely to discriminate against Christians than Muslims.
Muslims face a lot more discrimination than other groups
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Muslims absolutely face more discrimination than Christians and just about any other religious group in the US.
There are all sorts of anecdotes to this effect, from people calling Muslims “terrorists” in the street for seemingly no reason to President Donald Trump proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US.
But the empirical evidence backs this up as well.
A Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year had Americans rank their warmth toward different religious groups. Muslims again ranked the lowest. Christians were higher — by fairly big margins — than every other religious group except Jews.
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