Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, American attitudes toward Islam remain strikingly unsettled. And by some measures, attitudes are more negative than they were in the attacks’ immediate aftermath. In March 2002, just six months after 9/11, 25% of U.S. adults said Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence. Today, that figure stands at 51%, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Views have also grown sharply more partisan: 76% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents now say Islam encourages violence, compared with 29% of Democrats and Democratic leaners, a gap nearly three times wider than the one recorded in 2002.
These numbers reflect more than abstract public opinion. Muslim Americans continue to report real consequences: 43% of U.S. adults say Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, and 42% say Muslim Americans have a negative impact on the country. Anti-Muslim hate crimes, which spiked from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001, have never returned to pre-9/11 levels. Yet the picture is not uniformly bleak. Roughly a third of U.S. Muslims say someone has expressed support for them in the past year specifically because of their faith, and Muslim Americans themselves describe a complicated mix of discrimination and goodwill from their neighbors.
At the same time, the American Muslim community has grown substantially more visible, both demographically and politically. The U.S. is now home to an estimated 5.5 million Muslims, up from 2.4 million in 2007, and the number of mosques nationwide has more than doubled since 2000. Political representation has followed a similar trajectory: four Muslim members of Congress currently serve, with a fifth soon to join, compared with zero in 2001, and New York City inaugurated its first Muslim mayor this year. Growth and visibility, in other words, have not resolved the polarization; they have coexisted alongside it.
These findings come from “25 Years After 9/11, a Portrait of Muslim Americans,” a data essay published by Pew Research Center and authored by principal researcher Besheer Mohamed. The essay draws on a quarter century of Pew surveys, FBI hate crime statistics, and independent mosque census data to trace how public opinion, discrimination, and political representation have each evolved since 2001. The full essay, including detailed survey methodology, is available at the link above.
This research reflects the kind of rigorous, nonpartisan work that led AVDF to support Pew Research Center’s broader religious pluralism initiative. In fall 2025, AVDF’s Board approved a $300,000 grant to Pew, as part of the Foundations’ Interfaith Leadership and Religious Literacy portfolio, to evaluate the current state of religious pluralism across the United States. The grant draws on the same infrastructure behind the Muslim American research. Pew’s American Trends Panel is a nationally representative sample of more than 10,000 Americans, supplemented with oversamples of Muslims, Jews, and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to ensure adequate representation of smaller religious traditions.
With AVDF’s support, Pew fielded this larger pluralism survey in 2026, measuring two dimensions of religious life nationwide: how Americans of every faith (and none) feel about and behave toward people of other traditions, and how much Americans believe they know about religions other than their own. The survey asks how often people engage socially across religious lines, how curious they are about unfamiliar beliefs and practices, and how they perceive religious discrimination and influence in American life today.
Pew expects to publish the full religious pluralism report this fall, and as with the Muslim American essay, the organization will make its underlying survey data freely available so that researchers, journalists, and educators can put it to their own use. This work will provide something increasingly rare: a reliable, nonpartisan baseline for tracking whether the country is moving toward greater religious inclusion or further insularity, and for identifying exactly where and among whom attitudes are shifting.
“A quarter century after 9/11, we still lack a clear, trustworthy picture of where American religious pluralism actually stands,” said AVDF President and CEO Michael Murray. “Pew’s research gives educators, faith leaders, and journalists something they have rarely had: hard evidence, rather than assumption, about how Americans of different faiths see and engage with one another. We look forward to sharing the full findings later this year.”
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