Two Rice surveys 17 years apart show support for restricting Muslim settlement falling 21 points

A 21-point fall in a national percentage ^[4] can be built two ways. Everyone in the sample moves a little, or one part of it moves a long way while another barely moves. Separating those requires the subgroup numbers, and the Rice team reports only that differences by political affiliation, religion and age became more pronounced, with party a significant dividing line by 2019 ^[3]. The release carries no subgroup percentages, no sample sizes and no margins of error ^[6].

The aggregate move is large in relative terms. Support in 2019 stood at about 45% of the 2002 level, so the fall erased 55% of the starting figure ^[5].

Kerby Goff, associate director of research at the Boniuk Institute ^[9], gave one explanation for the pattern. "Social science generally shows that when a group perceives a threat from outside, that perception produces a cohesive defensive response," Goff said ^[7]. "Over time, that cohesiveness dissipates. In the decades following 9/11, attitudes toward Muslims came to be shaped more by internal religious, political and demographic divisions in the U.S." ^[8]

Testing that decay would take more than two surveys 17 years apart ^[17]. Two observations cannot describe a curve. The earlier survey was fielded in 2002, after the September 2001 attacks ^[1][19], so nobody measured where the 38% sat before them ^[18].

The institute's 2024 work asks a different question of a different population. It examined religious bias and hostility following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel and the war in Gaza ^[10], and found that 23% of Jewish respondents and 16% of Muslim respondents reported an increase in bias or hostility since that date ^[11], with significant concern in both groups about experiencing bias in future ^[12]. That 16% and the 17% from 2019 ^[2] are not points on the same trend line: one is a minority group's self-report about a change in their own experience, the other is the general public's stated support for a policy.

Goff put a condition on when events abroad register at home. "Conflicts and targeting of specific religious groups do have consequences here in the U.S., but this is contingent on those conflicts overlapping with our own internal conflicts," Goff said ^[13]. He said the Israel-Palestine conflict is particularly significant because it intersects with Christian, Jewish and Muslim identities in the U.S. as well as political divisions surrounding international alliances ^[14].

Elaine Howard Ecklund, who directs the institute and led the two-survey comparison ^[1], framed the wider question. "Inclusion and religious pluralism need not be at odds with national identity, but when they are, this leads to religious discrimination, or at least provides a justification for it to some," Ecklund said ^[15].

The institute's other line of work is qualitative. Through the Houston Religious Leadership Project, researchers have interviewed and run focus groups with religious and community leaders across the greater Houston area to understand the opportunities and barriers to interfaith collaboration ^[16].

On the published evidence, the fall in the aggregate is solid. The stronger claim, that variance now carries more information than the mean, rests on breakdowns Rice has described but has not published here ^[3][6].