Muslims to outnumber Jews in the US by 2040, new research shows

By 2040, Muslims will replace Jews as the US’ second-largest religious group after Christians, Pew research projects. 

By: World Israel News Staff

Muslims are projected to outnumber Jews as the second-largest religious group in the US by 2040, a recent Pew survey shows

Pew Research Center estimates that there were about 3.45 million Muslims of all ages living in the US in 2017, and that Muslims made up about 1.1 percent of the total US population.

Muslims in the US are not as numerous as the number of Americans who identify as Jewish by religion, according to Pew’s estimate.

However, Pew’s projections suggest that the US Muslim population will grow much faster than the country’s Jewish population, and by 2040, Muslims will replace Jews as the US’ second-largest religious group after Christians.

By 2050, the US Muslim population is projected to reach 8.1 million, or 2.1 percent of the nation’s total population, nearly twice their size today.

The latest estimate combines information from Pew’s 2017 survey of US Muslims, which reported on the prevalence of Muslims among immigrants and other demographic groups, with official Census Bureau data on the number of people in these groups.

Muslims are not evenly distributed around the country. Some metro areas, such as Washington, D.C., have sizable Muslim communities. Likewise, certain states, such as New Jersey, are home to two or three times as many Muslim adults per capita as the national average. But there are also states and counties with far fewer Muslims.

A rapidly-growing Muslim population

Since Pew’s first estimate of the size of the Muslim American population, the number of US Muslims has been growing rapidly, although from a relatively low base.

When Pew first conducted a study of Muslim Americans in 2007, it estimated that there were 2.35 million Muslims of all ages (including 1.5 million adults) in the US. By 2011, the number of Muslims had grown to 2.75 million (including 1.8 million adults). Since then, the Muslim population has continued to grow at a rate of roughly 100,000 per year, driven both by higher fertility rates among Muslim Americans as well as the continued migration of Muslims to the US

Religious conversions have not had a large impact on the size of the US Muslim population, largely because about as many Americans convert to Islam as leave the faith.

Indeed, while about one-in-five American Muslim adults were raised in a different faith tradition and converted to Islam, a similar share of Americans who were raised Muslim now no longer identify with the faith.