According to Pew Research, there are 800,000–900,000 Muslims in Sweden, and other studies put the number at around one million. That would mean that about 10 percent of Sweden’s slightly more than 10 million residents are Muslims. Is that correct?
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There are no official statistics on religious affiliation in Sweden, which means the field is wide open to speculation.
Those who cite a figure of around one million Muslims often rely on studies based on the country of origin—if you come from a Muslim country, you are automatically assumed to be Muslim. But this overlooks a crucial point: you cannot be granted asylum in Sweden on economic grounds; the basis must be political or religious persecution. If you are fleeing a country with a religious regime, it often means you are being persecuted precisely because you are not a Muslim, or because you belong to a minority such as Christians. But in the statistics, a Christian refugee from a Muslim country is routinely classified as a Muslim. You can see for yourselves how skewed this makes the data.
Novus surveys are likely the only representative polls that actually ask about religious self-identification. We ask this question as part of our voter barometer. There, we see that approximately 2.6 percent—which corresponds to around 200,000 people—state that they belong to Islam. Just over 60 percent identify as Christian, and about 30 percent state no religion at all.
This aligns well with the only hard indicator we have in Sweden: membership in a Muslim religious community. Religious communities receive government grants based on their membership numbers, and if you add up the members of all Muslim religious communities, the total comes to just over 200,000—a figure that also includes children.
When Statistics Sweden (SCB) states that there are 10.6 million residents in Sweden, it counts only those registered in the population register (people with residence permits or citizenship). Asylum seekers are not included. But how large is this group, really? It consists of approximately 10,000 asylum seekers and an estimated 30,000–50,000 people who have received deportation orders but have not left the country—a total of around 50,000–60,000 people.
So, if we’re to reach one million Muslims, that means there’s a shortfall of 800,000 people in addition to the 200,000 that Novus surveys and that religious communities register. Those people simply don’t exist, and they couldn’t possibly be hiding among the tens of thousands waiting for asylum decisions or deportation orders. Even if we make an extremely generous estimate, we end up with a maximum of around 250,000 Muslims in Sweden.
So how religious are Muslims in Sweden?
I have analyzed data from Novus in which we ask how devout people are and which religion they consider themselves to belong to. In my previous post on how religious people vote, I based my analysis on 5,600 interviews. Here, the analysis is based on an even larger sample: 22,926 unique interviews.
As a reminder: 2.6 percent identify as Muslim and 64 percent as Christian. Here’s how the level of religious belief breaks down within each group:
We see a clear difference in the percentage of people who say they are “somewhat religious.” This is likely due to the fact that, for a long time in Sweden, we automatically became members of the Church of Sweden, so the link between religious affiliation and faith is becoming weaker.
One important point to note is that 14% of very religious Christians amount to just under 700,000 adults. However, 16% of very religious Muslims amount to 32,000 people
We must not forget that Islam is a small minority (2.6%), Christianity is a large majority (64%), and about one in three Swedes (30%) are not religious at all.
But since Muslims make up only a few percent of the population, this has virtually no impact on the overall picture in Sweden—just as it does not alter the overall picture regarding party allegiances. With or without Muslims, Sweden looks essentially the same when it comes to the population’s overall religiosity and the size of the political parties in the parliamentary election.
I started Globeknot because we need to have a more fact-based discussion. The desire for social change is a good thing, but it must be grounded in empirical evidence and reality. If we stray from reality, we quickly end up with manipulation and myths—and neither Sweden nor the rest of the world should find itself in that situation.
Torbjörn Sjöström, Founder of Globeknot