Tolerance of Afterschool Clubs Formed by Religious Students

Education Next Survey

As partisan controversies and multiple lawsuits proliferate over the Trump executive order banning migration from six Muslim-majority countries, many have expressed concern as to whether the American tradition of tolerance of other religious groups would be extended to practitioners of Islam, one of the world’s largest religions.

Even before the 2016 election, a Pew Research Center report said Muslims (along with atheists) got the coldest reading on a thermometer measuring feelings toward other religious groups. Since the election, NBC News has reported a tripling of “hate crimes targeting Muslims, their mosques and businesses.”

“A lot of Muslim students are scared,” a University of Tennessee student told the New York Times. A Muslim doctor in a small Minnesota town now wonders “whether the people who had [once] seemed so warm were secretly harboring hateful thoughts or suspicions about” his family, the Washington Post reported.

Most of these reports are anecdotal, or they report actions taken by scattered individuals. They do not measure change in the general state of public opinion. Have public views toward Muslims declined? We sought to cast some light on this heated topic with the following survey question, posed in 2008 and again in 2017: “Do you support or oppose allowing a group of Muslim students to organize an afterschool club at your local public school?” To allow for comparisons with other groups, we asked the same question about generically “religious” students, as well as “Evangelical” and “atheist” students. To keep questions from contaminating one another, each of four randomly selected groups was asked about just one religious orientation.

We chose to ask specifically about clubs formed by religious students because the Supreme Court has approved this form of religious activity in schools. In Good News Club v. Milford Central School (2001), the court found that restrictions on such afterschool clubs taking place at school facilities violated students’ rights to free exercise of religion. But journalist Katherine Stewart, in her book The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, questions the decision as follows: “I don’t have a problem with children discussing religious beliefs, but I do have a problem with them believing that those beliefs are sanctioned and endorsed by a public school.”

In answering the survey question, respondents could say they supported club formation by religious groups, opposed it, or neither supported nor opposed it. We moved the placement of this neutral response from the middle response category in 2008 to the last one in 2017, thereby reducing the likelihood that this neutral position would be chosen. To see whether the changes over time are genuine (and not just due to the change of the placement of the neutral category), it is important, therefore, to look at the changes in both support and opposition, as either or both can increase if fewer people choose the neutral opposition.

In 2008, members of the public supported the generic right of religious students to form clubs by a decisive margin: 58% favored them, while only 10% opposed them, the rest taking a neutral position. Over the ensuing nine years, however, support for these clubs declines (Figure 11). Approval slips by 3 percentage points, while opposition grows by 13 percentage points.

Despite a declining tolerance for student rights to form religious clubs, the willingness to grant such rights to Muslims climbs dramatically. In 2008, opposition to Muslim club formation, at 23%, was almost as widespread as support, at 27%, with as many as 50% refusing to take a position one way or another. But in 2017, tolerance of Muslim clubs exploded upward by 18 percentage points, to 45%—a near majority of all respondents—while opposition ticked up by only 4 percentage points, to just 27%. What was once a near-even split in opinion now represents about a two-to-one advantage for Muslim club toleration.

The biggest change has occurred among Democrats. Their support for tolerating religious clubs in general has fallen by 4 percentage points, and expressed opposition to the practice has increased by 18 percentage points. Despite this overall decline, Democrats have become dramatically more favorable toward Muslim rights since 2008. Opposition to the formation of Muslim clubs fell by 2 percentage points, while support jumped by no fewer than 24 percentage points. Today, Democrats support Muslim clubs by a 55%–15% margin. (Democrats are also much more likely than Republicans to favor clubs for atheists but less likely to think Evangelical clubs should be allowed.)

As for Republicans, their views on religious clubs in general do not change much, nor do their views on the rights of Evangelicals shift more than a modest amount in a negative direction. They are a bit more open to atheist clubs than they were in 2008. Percentages for and against Muslim clubs have ticked upward in roughly equal amounts. Today, 43% of Republicans would not tolerate them but fully a third say they would.

In other words, the highly partisan debate over Muslim immigration seems to have enhanced toleration of Muslim gatherings—at least in schools—on the part of Democrats, without having an adverse impact on tolerance among Republicans. On net, there has been a steep increase, not a decline, in the public’s inclination to allow Muslim students to gather together after school in a club of their own choice.