Rising Restrictions on Religion: A Global Overview

About seventy percent of the world's population lives in countries where governments impose high restrictions on religion or where there were once high levels of religious hostilities in society, according to a global study by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life. Additionally, die study finds that about a third of the world's population live in countries where restrictions or hostilities are increasing. There are several intriguing patterns. First, hostilities substantially increased in countries where restrictions and hostilities were already high but tended to decrease in countries where they were already low. Also, rising restrictions were associated with contradictory constitutional protections for religious freedom and with the presence of anti-blasphemy laws. Next, Christians and Muslims, the world's two largest religious groups, were harassed in the greatest number of countries. But while Jews comprise less than one percent of the world's population, they were harassed in seventyfive countries (38%). The Middle East and North Africa saw the largest increases in government restrictions, but Europe had the largest proportion of countries in which social hostilities related to religion rose. Finally, government restrictions in Egypt were increasing well before the ongoing revolutions known as Arab Spring. Given such trends, it's unarguable that changes in religious restrictions are a part of the larger social and political forces shaping the world today. I. Introduction to the Study For more than half a century, the United Nations and numerous international organizations have affirmed the principle of religious freedom.1 For just as many decades, journalists and human rights groups have reported on persecution of minority faiths, outbreaks of sectarian violence, and other pressures on religious individuals and communities in many countries. But until the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life published Global Restrictions on Religion in 2009 ,2 there was no quantitative study that reviewed an extensive number of sources to measure how governments and private actors infringe on religious beliefs and practices around the world. At the Pew Forum, to assess and compare restrictions on religion we used a methodology that I developed in consultation with other members of the Pew Research Center staff, built on the methodology that Roger Finke and I developed at Penn State University's Association of Religion Data Archives.3 Our goal was to devise quantifiable, objective, and transparent measures of the extent to which governments and societal groups impinge on the practice of religion. We used the findings to rate 198 countries and selfgoverning territories on two reproducible indexes that can be periodically updated. This Article summarizes key findings from Rising Restrictions on Religion, the Pew Forum's second report on global restrictions on religion, released in August 201 1.4 The study covered 198 countries and self-administering territories, which collectively contain more than 99.5% of the world's population. We scored each country on a total of thirty-three measures phrased as questions about government restrictions or social hostilities involving religion.5 The Government Restrictions Index is made up of twenty questions; the Social Hostilities Index is made up of thirteen. To answer the questions that make up the indexes, Pew Forum researchers combed through eighteen widely cited, publicly available sources of information, including reports by the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, the Council of the European Union, the United Kingdom's Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, the Hudson Institute, Freedom House, and Amnesty International.6 We drew many of die examples in this report from the State Department's annual International Religious Freedom reports. …