It's extremely bad form to disregard the most important historical evidence for the period,
plus the most important English-language scholar in the field, just because "it feels wrong." The Ottoman hearth censuses are taken as generally reliable for everywhere, including the Balkans, which suggests an overwhelming (>80%) Christian majority corroborated by every other source, or Constantinople (58.2% Muslim, 31.6% Christian), which corresponds almost exactly to what more literary sources imply.
If you'd done more research, you'd realize that things aren't nearly as clear-cut as you make it out. It's well-known that the Christian population of many areas of Anatolia
increased under the Ottomans. Smyrna/Izmir, for example, was 86% Muslim in the 1520s. It became Greek-majority due to large-scale immigration from the early seventeenth to the nineteenth century (and, one assumes, the fact that the Greeks were richer and possessed an enviable economic position due to their European connections).
But sure, ignore historical evidence based on flawed assumptions.
Some more evidence:
- The Muslim proportion of Crete fell from around 50% to around 30% in the nineteenth century (Doumanis, Before the Nation)
- "By 1914 the ratio of Christians to the general population of Palestine had risen... [to] the highest proportion since the Crusades" (Newberg, The Pentecostal Mission of Palestine)
- "The nineteenth century saw a different trend in urban population expansion... We find an obviously disproportionate increase in Christian citizens" (Sahara, "The Ottoman City Council")
- "During the period between 1831 and 1881, the Greek population grew by 2 percent per year, whereas during the same period the Muslim population remained roughly the same... In the city of Izmir, the Greek population grew from 20,000 in 1830 to 200,000 in 1910." (Chenoweth, Rethinking Violence)
- "The rate of growth among Christian and Muslim groups showed considerable variation in the 19th century. The Christian groups, especially the Greeks, followed by Bulgarians, Serbians, and Armenians showed a far more rapid rate of increase than the Muslims... [because of] the establishment of a quasi-capitalist system, imposed by Europe, which turned a substantial part of the Muslim population into an exploited rural class... [that had to] sustain economically a non-Muslim middle class which acquired rapidly wealth, education, and political consciousness." (Karpat, "The Ottoman Demography in the Nineteenth Century")
You see how the 1914 demographics are hardly representative of Ottoman history.