Analysis / Why sourced research matters in civic debate
Wed Nov 11 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Why sourced research matters in civic debate
Liberty on the Line
A country that cannot agree on basic facts cannot argue honestly about what those facts mean. In debates about Islam in America, that failure shows up in both directions. One side circulates numbers no one can source, or treats every mosque as a suspect file. The other side treats inquiry itself as a form of hostility, as if asking how many institutions have been built, or what official agencies say about extremist threats, were an attack on a people.
Neither habit is worthy of a self-governing nation.
This site exists, in part, to impose a simple discipline: if we publish a number, we retrieved the document it came from, and we put the link next to the figure. Pew’s 2017 estimate of 3.45 million Muslims, its later 2026 estimate of about 5.5 million, and its 2050 projection of 8.1 million are different kinds of claims — an estimate, a later estimate, and a forecast. The US Mosque Survey’s 2,769 mosques in 2020 and the U.S. Religion Census’s 2,771 are nearly the same count, produced in the same research cycle, and the two-mosque difference is worth noting rather than hiding. Official GAO figures about domestic-terrorism cases measure investigations, not a religion.
Precision is not pedantry. It is how you keep a serious argument from hardening into a myth. It is also how you keep faith with readers, including readers who will disagree with our advocacy.
The same discipline applies to tone. Muslim Americans are not a statistic, and they are not a monolith. A project that claims to care about the rule of law cannot ask the law to treat a class of citizens as presumptively dangerous. It can, and should, insist that extremist movements be named, that immigration and education policy be debated in the open, and that the country’s Christian and constitutional inheritance be taught rather than taken for granted.
If you use this site, take the links with you. Quote the caveats as well as the headlines. Correct us if we miss something. The point of a public record is that other people can check it.