Now following that election, it is fair to say that President Bush and the Republican Party squandered much of that Latino goodwill through a series of immigration proposals that Latinos of every religion found offensive. By the 2006 midterm elections, Latinos had returned, at least at a national level, to the 2 to 1 preference for Democrats that they had historically had. Even the Pentecostal Hispanics felt more strongly about immigration than the issues where they had more in common with the Republicans. But, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, in a half-dozen Senate and governor races, Republican candidates got serious Latino support. And for a different Republican presidential candidate, or in a year not dominated by emotional immigration debates, Latinos in general, and especially Protestant Latinos, can be expected to tune in to Republicans.

  Politicians lump Latino voters together at their peril. True, most Latinos are devoted Catholics, and are doing more than their part to revitalize the U.S. Catholic Church. But a growing group of Latinos are Protestant and Pentecostal, and except on the issue of immigration, they agree with their Catholic brethren on very little. For example:

  According to a poll done by my firm in 2006, a plurality of Catholic Latinos (42 percent) consider the most important issue in a presidential election to be the economy. By contrast, a plurality of Protestant Latinos (44 percent) are Values Voters. Values, to the Catholic Latinos, are the least important consideration in a presidential election, with only 23 percent of Catholic Latinos saying that values rank highest.

  Latino Catholics are three times as likely as Latino Protestants to belong to a labor union, or have family who do.

  Latino Catholics are slightly more upscale than Latino Protestants. Twenty-three percent of Latino Catholics have incomes of $75,000 or above, compared to only 12 percent of Latino Protestants.

  Source: PSB, 2006

  More than half of Latino Protestants speak English only, or mostly English with a little bit of Spanish. That is true of only 28 percent of Latino Catholics. Granted, the Latino Protestants generally represent later generations of Americans, but it is consistent with the larger trend that, in the minds of many Latinos, becoming truly “American” means converting to both English and Pentecostalism.

  Perhaps most remarkable is the difference between Latino Catholics and Protestants on abortion. Whereas Latino Protestants are strongly pro-life (58 to 26 percent)—again, remember the alliance with President George W. Bush in 2004—Latino Catholics are narrowly pro-choice, at 41 to 37 percent.

  Until the immigration debacle of 2006, Republican stalwarts had made real inroads with the Latino community. Remarkably enough, the fastest-growing religious group within the fastest-growing ethnic group in America looked just like them: nonlabor, pro-life, pro–English language Values Voters. Alas, in 2006, this group swung back to the Democrats.

  And the implications aren’t just political. More and more Protestant churches need to learn Spanish language and culture, and more and more Catholic ones need to learn what has been so appealing to their “base” about Pentecostalism. Whole new social networks, including for youth, are needed. People pray in surprising ways, and prayers of all traditions are rising from new tongues.

  Moderate Muslims

  Since 9/11, it hasn’t been very easy to be Muslim in America.

  Almost half of Americans have a negative view of Islam. When asked to rate their views of all major religions, only Scientology ranks lower.

  If one knows a Muslim personally, one’s views are moderated—but only a little more than one-third of Americans do know a Muslim personally. Nearly half (46 percent) of Americans believe that Islam encourages violence more than other religions—up from the 35 percent who felt that way six months after the 2001 attacks. More than half of Americans say Muslims are not respectful of women. Forty-four percent say Muslims are too extreme in their religious beliefs. Twenty-two percent say they wouldn’t want a Muslim living next door.

  But if you look at an actual demographic portrait of Muslims in America, there’s quite a contrasting picture.

  Americans think Muslims are violent? An overwhelming 81 percent of American Muslims support gun control, compared to barely half of Americans who do. Muslims are religiously extreme? Twenty-five percent of Muslims say they attend religious services on a weekly basis—virtually identical to the 26 percent of Americans overall who say they do. Forty percent of Muslims say they’re moderate—identical to the American proportion overall.

  In fact, if I were to describe for you a cohort of Americans who got married at a rate of 70 percent, registered to vote at a rate of 82 percent, were college-educated at a rate of 59 percent, and were on average making more than $50,000 a year—what group would you guess they were?

  Because that’s the average Muslim in America. Young, family-oriented, well educated, prosperous, and politically active.

  Oh—and growing. Since the 1960s, when immigration quotas that favored Eastern European immigrants were lifted, Muslims have been coming to the United States in steadily greater numbers, mainly to Michigan, California, New York, and New Jersey. There are more than 1,200 mosques in America now, up from about 450 in 1980. Since 1994 alone, the number of mosques grew 25 percent. And while Muslim immigration dropped sharply after the terrorist attacks of 2001, there is no question it is back: In 2005, nearly 100,000 people from Muslim countries became legal permanent U.S. residents—more than in any other year since 1985.

  Sources: Project MAPS/Zogby Poll, 2004; Harris Interactive, 2005, 2006; Gallup, 2004

  Experts disagree about how many Muslims actually live in America—counting Muslim immigrants, their offspring, and American-born converts to Islam, you’ll see estimates ranging from 2 to 7 million. But no one disputes that Muslims are growing not only in number but in political clout. In the 1990s, a group called the American Muslim Alliance set out to place 2,000 Muslims in American elected office by 2000. They got to about 700 before the drop-off in 2001—but in 2006, Keith Ellison of Minnesota became the first Muslim ever elected to Congress.

  The real significance in the emerging Muslim community is not so much the change in the number of Muslims, but rather the potential for change within the Muslim community that could go a number of significant ways. As the American Muslim community expands, the internal choices they make will determine how Islam is positioned in America, which could, in some small way, affect how it is positioned in the world.

  Already, American Muslims have done a 180 in presidential politics. In 2000, a plurality of them supported Republican George W. Bush against Democrat Al Gore; in the next election, in 2004, over 75 percent of them voted for Democrat John Kerry against George W. Bush. Of course, in the intervening years, Bush led post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that most Muslims construed as attacks not on terror but on Islam—so the turnaround, while dramatic, is possible to understand.

  But Americans take note: Muslims are swing voters in their own community, too.

  In 2004, the Michigan-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding surveyed mosque-goers in metropolitan Detroit, one of the most concentrated Muslim communities in the U.S. It found that of the 65,000 or so mosque-goers, 38 percent “prefer a flexible approach” in their religious practice. About the same number—36 percent—were “conservative” (including the 8 percent who identified as Salafi, the most reactionary group, which practices gender discrimination as a matter of divine law, and believes that all non-Muslims will go to hell).

  The significance here, though, is that the remaining quarter of mosque-going Muslims are open to persuasion—to go either “flexible” or “conservative.” M. A. Muqtedar Khan, a political scientist who publicized the study and who is a chief advocate for moderate Islam, calls them “freelancers.” As a political pollster, I would call them “swings.”

  The future of Islam in America likely depends on them. If they decide to go conservative, Muslims in America may start actually matching up more with the stereotype—segregated by sex, and unwelcoming toward other religions. But if the Swing Muslims go “flexible,” there could be the seeds of a genuine Islamic reformation in this country that could work to bridge Muslims and non-Muslims not only in America, but throughout the world.

  And they’re probably a much bigger group than the survey suggested, since that survey reached only mosque-goers. Presumably the two-thirds who don’t regularly go to a mosque are even more open to moderation. So if you add the non-mosque-goers, the flexible mosque-goers, and the swing mosque-goers, and you assume 4 or 5 million Muslims (halfway between the experts’ estimates)—you easily get over 3 million Moderate Muslims.

  Some institutions are trying to rally them. The American Islamic Congress was formed after 9/11 to denounce Islamic terrorism and promote a greater presence of Muslim moderates in the U.S. A self-styled “Martin Luther for the Muslims” named Kamal Nawash has started the Free Muslims Coalition, intended to denounce religious violence and terrorism more fervently than he felt Muslim organizations were doing post-9/11.

  The Pentagon itself has begun a concentrated effort to recruit American Muslims to the U.S. armed forces, hiring imams as chaplains, celebrating Muslim holidays, and ensuring that there are Muslim prayer rooms at West Point and other service academies.

  I don’t know who will capture the hearts of the Moderate Muslims in America. But whoever does may swing American Islam, potentially shifting American perceptions of the Muslim community and perhaps even creating future international leaders to help bridge East and West. Perhaps Muslims who settle in America have self-selected in ways that make them friendlier to Western culture than is happening in Europe (see below). Or, perhaps, American Muslims remember gratefully how America took strongly anti-Serb, pro-Muslim military positions in Bosnia and Kosovo. Whatever the reason, the difference between the Muslim communities in America and in Europe is striking. But the future course of American Islam is by no means predetermined, and how Moderate Muslims view both domestic integration and American foreign policy could be critical to peace both at home and abroad.

  THE INTERNATIONAL PICTURE

  While many Muslims in the United States can be characterized as moderate, that is less true in Europe.

  Muslims make up about 5 percent of the European Union’s population, or 15 to 18 million people—many times the number of Muslims estimated to live in the United States. But that number is growing fast, due to both high immigration rates and the fact that the Muslim birthrate is three times that of non-Muslim Europeans. By 2015, the European Muslim population is projected to nearly double, and Muslims may soon become majorities in several major European cities.

  Unfortunately, Muslim population growth may divide Europe, more than enrich it. According to a Pew Global Attitudes Project study on Europe’s Muslims, although European Muslims express far more positive views of the West than do Muslims living in Muslim countries, sizable Muslim groups who make their homes in France, Spain, and Germany describe Westerners as “selfish,” “arrogant,” “violent,” “greedy,” “immoral,” and “fanatical.” And the feeling is mutual: Some 83 percent of Spaniards, and 78 percent of Germans, regard Muslims as “fanatical.” (The U.K. and France agree at lower rates, about 50 percent.)

  The roots of tension are economic as well as cultural. The Turkish community in Germany is unemployed at a rate of 24 percent—two and a half times the national rate. North Africans in France have a 30 percent unemployment rate—three times France’s national rate.

  And terrorism looms large. Again according to the Pew study, the Muslim majorities of France, Germany, and Spain are evenly divided on whether or not Arabs were responsible for flying planes into the World Trade Center on 9/11—and 56 percent of Muslims in Britain say they were not. Perhaps most disturbingly, more than 1 in 7 Muslims in France, Great Britain, and Spain believe that suicide bombings can be justified in defense of Islam.

  It makes sense that U.S. Muslims might be more moderate—those who come all the way here may start with a greater affinity for American values than those who travel the shorter geographic and cultural distance to Western Europe. But it might make Americans all the more interested in affirmatively reaching out to the Muslims who are here, especially the swing, moderate ones.

  PART IV

  Health and Wellness

  Sun-Haters

  For millennia, humans have worshipped the sun. We used to do it as an actual god, but now it’s more like a cultural obsession, especially on the beaches of Hawaii, New Jersey, Florida, and California. We flock to it for vacation, we turn our faces to it at lunch hour, and if work or school keeps us from getting to it for real, we pretend we’ve gotten it by lying in tanning beds or spraying ourselves orange. Today in America, there are three times as many professional tanning parlors as there are Starbucks.

  And this is even though Americans know how dangerous the sun is. According to a 2002 survey, 93 percent of Americans know that too much exposure to the sun is unhealthy, and yet 81 percent still think they look good after having been out in the sun. One in ten vacations in America still involves a beach, with Hawaii our most popular vacation spot. Indoor-tanning is a $5 billion per year industry, with about 30 million Americans having done it—including over 2 million teenagers. According to another study, 1 in 10 children aged 12–18 uses a sunlamp, and only 1 in 3 uses sunscreen.

  Unlike smoking, which also grabs us when we’re young, we’re hard-pressed to say that sun worship involves physical addiction (although remarkably, some are trying). No, it seems that consciously damaging your skin to look better in the short run is just pure vice—the deliberate choice of short-term gratification over long-term pain.

  But amid the general brigades of Sun-Worshippers, there is a burgeoning group of dissidents who are on a mission to change all that. They are the Sun-Haters. These are the people who greet summer sunshine with floppy hats that look like Snoopy’s World War I bomber gear (complete with earflaps), grudgingly show up at pool parties in full-body wetsuits, and slather on fourteen layers of 50+ sunscreen just to go to work. In an office.

  Not that they’re wrong. Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States today, with more than a million new cases diagnosed each year. The mortality rate from skin cancer has increased 50 percent since the 1970s. Between 1980 and 1987, the number of melanomas (the really dangerous skin cancer) increased 83 percent. Skin cancer in teenagers, unheard of a generation ago, is on the rise.

  While skin cancer is much more common in light-skinned people, it is more likely to be deadly when it occurs in Hispanics or African-Americans. (One of the most famous people to die from melanoma was Bob Marley.)

  And at least 25 percent—although it’s been widely reported to be higher—of skin damage occurs before a person is 18 years old. Talk about vice—it’s virtually child abuse to take your kid to the beach.

  So Sun-Haters are out to protect America, and not just with a sun protection factor number stamped on the side of a bottle. Like anti-smokers in the 1970s and organic-food-eaters in the 1980s, they are early adopters of what they hope will soon be a national passion.

  So far, they’ve spawned an industry for sun-safe clothing, which means long-sleeved shirts and pants that are woven more tightly than regular clothes. (A white T-shirt, commonly worn in the summer, provides an ultraviolet protection factor, or UPF, of only 5.) Some of the clothes are fortified with the products in sunscreen, or chemicals like titanium dioxide, which deflect the sun’s rays. From a virtually nonexistent industry in 2000, sun-protective clothing now does about $180 million worth of business per year. Not huge potatoes, sure. But ready to grow, especially if the sun-safe manufacturers can figure out a way to make those earflap attachments look less like World War I bomber gear.

  The Sun-Haters are also triggering innovations that build sun protection into our daily lives. Just coming onto the market is a product called SunGuard, a laundry aid that washes sun protection right into clothes, boosting their UPF level from about 5 to 30. In the cosmetic industry, no one ever heard of sunscreen in makeup until the 1990s. Now the majority of foundations and skin creams contain UPF or SPF of at least 15.

  The fastest-growing sun-care product is self-tanners, which work with the skin to alter color. This is apparently the only true way to tan without risk of UV exposure. Sales of these products increased nearly 80 percent between 1997 and 2005. Spray-on tans jumped 67 percent in sales in the early 2000s.

  Maybe someone will develop Permanent Sunscreen, much as they developed Permanent Makeup.

  How big is the Sun-Hater crowd? If you count all the dermatologists in America (about 14,000), plus their families; the families of people who recently died of skin cancer (about 80,000 deaths between 1997 and 2006); current skin cancer victims (about 500,000), plus their families; and America’s Generally Cautious (people who heed dermatologists’ warnings the first time, eat only the safest foods, and drive the safest cars)—you get at least 2 million Sun-Hating, fedora-in-August-wearing Americans.

  Can they animate public policy?

  So far, the U.S. government has not been aggressive about regulating our exposure to the sun. (Given the constant association of suntanning with worship, maybe they fear a First Amendment challenge.) But Australia did, once their skin cancer rates hit astronomical levels, and the American Academy of Dermatology has said that if current trends continue, sun-related cancers could outpace lung cancer as the nation’s number one cancer-killer.