Religious freedom is also not confined to any one area or continent. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia are freer than France and Belgium. Latin America also has relatively high scores. There are absolutely no grounds for thinking that religious freedom is an exclusively Western concern or achievement. Proponents of these views should be challenged with the fact that several Asian countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan, which have a background of poverty and exploitation, and with Confucian traditions as strong as China and Vietnam, both value and successfully defend religious freedom, and that desperately poor African countries can do the same.
Religious freedom is desired throughout the world and has been achieved throughout the world.
It is a moral travesty of the highest order to pretend that because people are hungry and cold it is legitimate to repress and persecute them as well. While high levels of religious freedom occur in every area, there are still large regional variations. The Western European and North Atlantic area countries covered in this survey all score from 1 to 3 and thus show a high level of religious freedom. The countries of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union cover a very wide spread, from Estonia, rated a 1, to Turkmenistan, rated a 7. Other Freedom House surveys indicate that these countries are in transition, cannot remain at an intermediate level, and are likely to move to higher or lower levels.