I have an answer that the CIA can use

Submitted by Michael S (United States), Jan 5, 2015 at 15:35

Information such as this is very difficult to pin down. Try, for instance, to get any figures at all on the ethnic composition of French Guiana. The French government intentionally suppresses such data. Even in the US, where ethnicity questions have been incorporated into censuses, it's a tricky matter. "Germans", for instance, are presumably the predominant ethnic group here; and the "British" population is divided between groups such as "English", "Scottish", "Scotch-Irish", "American" and others.

Nevertheless, there is little evidence of German culture here: The Lutheran Church, presumably the predominant religion of the Germans when they came here, accounts for only about 5% of Americans. Catholics vastly outnumber Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists; and the Anglican Communion, which was the official state religion of the majority of the colonies at the time of independence, is barely big enough to be mentioned. What happened to all the "Yankees", who once made up the majority of Americans? No satisfactory figures are available. And why are the Mormons the chief non-Catholic religion in the West, when they account for perhaps only 10% of the population? Collecting meaningful statistics is difficult here, in a free country deluged with information. Can we really expect good data to come from secretive Iran?

Perhaps the CIA can cut/paste this post of mine, and mail it to you.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".