Report finds rising tide of religious restrictions around the world
The Layman, September 24, 2012
In a recently issued press release, the Pew Forum said that “Even before the recent turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa – including attacks on U.S. embassies and the killing of an American ambassador – the region was experiencing increasing hostilities and tensions involving religion.”
A new report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that as of mid-2010, the Middle East and North Africa had “by far the world’s highest levels of social hostilities involving religion as well as government restrictions on religious beliefs and practices.”
The study is part of a larger effort called the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project.
The study “finds that the share of countries with high or very high restrictions on religion rose from 31 percent in the year ending in mid-2009 to 37 percent in the year ending in mid-2010.” Notably, as some of the most intolerant countries are also some of the world’s most population dense, “three-quarters (75 percent) of the world’s approximately 7 billion people live in countries with high government restrictions on religion or high social hostilities involving religion.”
According to the report, all “five major regions of the world” showed a rise in the limitation of religious freedom. “In three regions – Europe, the Middle East-North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa – the median levels of both government restrictions and social hostilities increased from mid-2009 to mid-2010. In the Americas, the median level of government restrictions increased, while in the Asia-Pacific region, the median level of social hostilities increased.”
The report reveals that “Restrictions Also Increasing in United States”
According to the press release, “restrictions on religion rose not only in countries that began the year with high or very high restrictions or hostilities, such as Indonesia and Nigeria, but also in many countries that began with low or moderate restrictions or hostilities, such as Switzerland and the United States.”
“In the year ending in mid-2010, there was an increase in the number of incidents in the U.S. at the state and local level in which members of some religious groups faced restrictions on their ability to practice their faith. This included incidents in which individuals were prevented from wearing certain religious attire or symbols,” and “some religious groups in the U.S. also faced difficulties in obtaining zoning permits to build or expand houses of worship, religious schools or other religious institutions.”
Findings indicate that “The U.S. also experienced an increase in social hostilities involving religion.” The press release says that “a key factor behind the increase was a spike in religion-related terrorist attacks in the U.S.”
The full report – including a summary of results, index scores by region, results by country, the methodology and an interactive graphic showing the levels of restrictions in the worlds’ 25 most populous countries – is available on the Pew Forum’s website.
The Pew Forum’s work on global restrictions on religion is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, an effort funded by the The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation to analyze religious change and its impact on societies around the world.
The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life conducts surveys, demographic analyses and other social science research on important aspects of religion and public life in the U.S. and around the world. As part of the Washington-based Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy organization, the Pew Forum does not take positions on policy debates or any of the issues it covers.