Rising Restrictions on Religion
One-third of the world's population experiences an increase
Executive Summary
Navigate this page:
- Harassment and Anti-Blasphemy Laws
- About the Report
- Situation as of Mid-2009
- Changes in Government Restrictions
- Changes in Social Hostilities
- Government Restrictions or Social Hostilities
- Other Findings
Restrictions on
religious beliefs and practices rose between mid-2006 and mid-2009 in 23 of the
world’s 198 countries (12%), decreased in 12 countries (6%) and remained
essentially unchanged in 163 countries (82%), according to a new study by the
Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Because several
countries with increasing restrictions on religion are very populous, however,
the increases affected a much larger share of people than of states. More than
2.2 billion people – nearly a third (32%) of the world’s total population of
6.9 billion – live in countries where either government restrictions on
religion or social hostilities involving religion rose substantially over the
three-year period studied. Only about 1% of the world’s population lives in
countries where government restrictions or social hostilities declined.Among the world’s
25 most populous countries – which account for about 75% of the world’s total
population – restrictions on religion substantially increased in eight
countries and did not substantially decrease in any. In China, Nigeria, Russia,
Thailand, the United Kingdom and Vietnam, the increases were due primarily to
rising levels of social hostilities involving religion. In Egypt and France,
the increases were mainly the result of government restrictions. The rest of
the 25 most populous countries, including the United States, did not experience
substantial changes in either social hostilities or government-imposed
restrictions.This is the second
time the Pew Forum has measured restrictions on religion around the globe. Like
the baseline report, the new study scores 198 countries and territories on two
indexes:
The Government Restrictions Index measures government laws, policies and
actions that restrict religious beliefs or practices. This includes efforts by
governments to ban particular faiths, prohibit conversions, limit preaching or
give preferential treatment to one or more religious groups.- The Social Hostilities Index measures acts of religious hostility by
private individuals, organizations and social groups. This includes mob or
sectarian violence, harassment over attire for religious reasons and other
religion-related intimidation or abuse.Among the five geographic regions covered in the study,
the Middle East-North Africa region had the largest proportion of countries in
which government restrictions on religion increased, with nearly a third of the
region’s countries (30%) imposing greater restrictions. Egypt, in particular,
ranked very high (in the top 5% of all countries, as of mid-2009) on both government
restrictions and social hostilities involving religion. Egypt was one of just
two countries in the world – Indonesia was the other – that had very high
scores on both measures as of mid-2009.Europe had the largest proportion of countries in which social
hostilities related to religion were on the rise from mid-2006 to mid-2009.
Indeed, five of the 10 countries in the world that had a substantial increase
in social hostilities were in Europe: Bulgaria, Denmark, Russia, Sweden and the
United Kingdom. The study also finds that social hostilities involving religion
have been rising in Asia, particularly in China, Thailand and Vietnam.Overall, 14 countries had a substantial increase in government
restrictions on religion, while eight had a substantial decline. In terms of
social hostilities involving religion, 10 countries had a substantial increase,
while five had a substantial decline. No country rose or declined substantially
in both categories over the three-year period. Just one country, Kyrgyzstan,
showed a substantial increase in one category (government restrictions) along
with a decrease in the other category (social hostilities); consequently, it is
treated as having no overall change.Changes in Restrictions Among the 25 Most Populous Countries
Among the world’s most populous countries, government restrictions or social hostilities substantially increased in eight countries – China, Egypt, France, Nigeria, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam and the United Kingdom – and did not substantially decrease in any. Countries in the upper right have the most restrictions and hostilities. Countries in the lower left have the least. The countries with substantial increases in restrictions are labeled in bold below.
In general, most of the countries that had substantial increases in
government restrictions or social hostilities involving religion already had
high or very high levels of restrictions or hostilities. By contrast, nearly
half of the countries that had substantial decreases in restrictions or
hostilities already scored low. This suggests that there may be a gradual
polarization taking place in which countries that are relatively high in
religious restrictions are getting higher while those that are relatively low
are getting lower.Specifically, among the 62 countries with high or very
high scores on either or both indexes as of mid-2008, restrictions or
hostilities increased substantially in 14 countries (23%) and decreased
substantially in five (8%). Among the 42 countries that started out with
moderate scores on either or both indexes, increases occurred in seven
countries (17%) and decreases in two (5%). In contrast, among the 94 countries
that started out with low scores on both indexes, the level of government
restrictions and/or social hostilities involving religion decreased in five
countries (5%) and increased in two (2%).During the three-year period covered by the study, the extent of
violence and abuse related to religion increased in more places than it
decreased. The number of countries in which governments used at least some
measure of force against religious groups or individuals rose from 91 (46%) in
the period ending in mid-2008 to 101 (51%) in the period ending in mid-2009.
This violence was wide-ranging, including individuals being killed, physically
abused, imprisoned, detained or displaced from their homes, as well as damage
to or destruction of personal or religious properties.In nearly three-quarters of all countries, private citizens or groups
committed crimes, malicious acts or violence motivated by religious hatred or
bias. Such acts occurred in 142 countries (72%) in the period ending in
mid-2009, about the same as in the previous reporting period. The number of countries that experienced mob
violence related to religion rose from 38 (19%) as of mid-2008 to 52 (26%) as
of mid-2009.Harassment and Anti-Blasphemy Laws
Adherents
of the world’s two largest religious groups, Christians and Muslims, who
together comprise more than half of the global population, were harassed in the
largest number of countries.1 Over the three-year period studied, incidents of
either government or social harassment were reported against Christians in 130
countries (66%) and against Muslims in 117 countries (59%). Buddhists and
Hindus – who together account for roughly one-fifth of the world’s population
and who are more geographically concentrated than Christians or Muslims – faced
harassment in fewer places; harassment was reported against Buddhists in 16
countries (8%) and against Hindus in 27 countries (14%).In
proportion to their numbers, some smaller religious groups faced especially
widespread harassment. Although Jews comprise less than 1% of the world’s
population, government or social harassment of Jews was reported in 75
countries (38%). Incidents of harassment involving members of other world
religions – including Sikhs, ancient faiths such as Zoroastrianism, newer faith
groups such as Baha’is and Rastafarians, and localized groups that practice
tribal or folk religions – were reported in 84 countries (42%). (For more
details, see Harassment of Particular Religious Groups .)In addition, the study finds that restrictions on religion are
particularly common in countries that prohibit blasphemy, apostasy or
defamation of religion. While such laws are sometimes promoted as a way to
protect religion, in practice they often serve to punish religious minorities
whose beliefs are deemed unorthodox or heretical. (For more details, see Laws Against Blasphemy, Apostasy and Defamation of Religion.)These
are among the key findings of Rising Restrictions on Religion, the Pew Forum’s second report on global restrictions
on religion. The 198 countries and self-administering territories covered by
the study contain more than 99.5% of the world’s population. Each country was
scored on a total of 33 measures phrased as questions about government
restrictions or social hostilities involving religion. (For the full question
wording, see the Summary of Results.) The Government Restrictions Index is comprised of 20 questions; there are 13
questions on the Social Hostilities Index.
To
answer the questions that make up the indexes, Pew Forum researchers combed
through 18 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. (For the complete list of
sources, see the Methodology.) Many of the examples cited in this
report were drawn from the State Department’s annual International Religious
Freedom reports.The researchers involved in this process recorded only
concrete reports about specific government laws, policies and actions, as well
as incidents of religious violence or intolerance by social groups; they did
not rely on the commentaries or opinions of the sources. (For a more detailed
explanation of the coding and data verification procedures, see the
Methodology.) The goal was to devise a battery of quantifiable, objective
measures that could be analyzed individually as well as combined into two
comprehensive indexes, the Government Restrictions Index and the Social
Hostilities Index.The
Forum’s baseline report on global restrictions on religion calculated each
country’s average scores on the Government Restrictions Index and Social
Hostilities Index for the two-year period from mid-2006 to mid-2008. This
report assesses changes over time by comparing each country’s original scores
with its average scores for the overlapping two-year period from mid-2007 to
mid-2009.2 Comparing rolling averages for overlapping time
periods reduces the impact of year-to-year fluctuations and helps identify
consistent trends.This
report focuses on changes in countries’ scores on the indexes that are deemed
to be “substantial.” (The report refers to a change in a country’s score as
substantial only if it is at least 1.5 standard deviations above or below the
mean amount of change among all 198 countries on each index. The change also
had to be in the same direction over the two periods studied, meaning that it
had to rise or fall both in the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008 and in the
overlapping period from mid-2007 to mid-2009. See the Methodology for more
details.)
The Pew Forum
characterizes each country’s place on the Government Restrictions Index and the
Social Hostilities Index by percentile. Countries with scores in the top 5% are
characterized as “very high.” The next highest 15% of scores are categorized as
“high,” and the following 20% are characterized as “moderate.” The bottom 60%
of scores are characterized as “low.”As
of mid-2009, government restrictions on religion were high or very high in 42
countries, about one-in-five worldwide. The 10 countries that had very high
government restrictions as of mid-2009 were Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Uzbekistan, China, Maldives, Malaysia, Burma (Myanmar), Eritrea and Indonesia.
Government restrictions were in the moderate range in 39 countries. A much
larger number of countries – 117 – had low levels of government restrictions.
But because many of the more restrictive countries (including China and India)
are very populous, more than half of the world’s population (59%) was living
with high or very high government restrictions as of mid-2009. (For a complete
list of all countries in each category, see the Government Restriction Index table.)As
of mid-2009, social hostilities involving religion were high or very high in 40
countries, about one-in-five worldwide. The 10 countries that had very high
hostilities as of mid-2009 were Iraq, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia,
Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Israel and Egypt. Social hostilities were in
the moderate range in 43 countries. A much larger number of countries – 115 –
had low levels of social hostilities. But because many of the countries with
high or very high social hostilities (including India, Indonesia, Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Nigeria) are very populous, nearly half of the world’s
population (48%) was living with high or very high social hostilities involving
religion as of mid-2009. (For a complete list of all countries in each
category, see the Social Hostilities Index table.)Government
restrictions or social hostilities were high or very high in about one-third of
the countries as of mid-2009. But because some of the most restrictive
countries are very populous, nearly 70 percent of the world’s 6.9 billion
people were living in countries where governments imposed high restrictions on
religion or where there were high levels of religious hostilities in
society.Changes in Government Restrictions
Comparing
the Pew Forum’s first set of scores (for the two-year period from mid-2006 to
mid-2008) with the second set of scores (for the two-year period from mid-2007
to mid-2009), the study finds that 14 countries had a substantial increase in
government restrictions and eight had a substantial decline.Six
of the 14 countries where government restrictions rose substantially were in
the Middle East-North Africa region: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Qatar, Syria and
Yemen. In Egypt, for example, the government maintained a longstanding ban on
the Muslim Brotherhood, an influential Islamic organization, and discriminated
against Christians in various ways, including in public-sector hiring. In
Yemen, government officials reportedly sought to intimidate Baha’is and
converts to Christianity, including arresting people for promoting Christianity
and distributing Bibles.Most
of the countries with substantial decreases in government restrictions (seven
of the eight countries) had low levels of restrictions to begin with. The
exception was Greece, which started out with high government restrictions but
moved to the moderate level by mid-2009. While the government of Greece
continued to restrict proselytizing, for example, there were fewer reported
cases where the police detained people for proselytizing.
Ten
countries had substantial increases in social hostilities involving religion
and five had a substantial decline.As
noted above, the level of social hostilities involving religion rose
substantially in five European nations: Bulgaria, Denmark, Russia, Sweden and
the United Kingdom. Much of the tension in Europe focused on the region’s
rapidly growing Muslim population, but in some cases it also reflected rising
anti-Semitism and antagonism toward Christian minorities, such as Jehovah’s
Witnesses.3Social
hostilities also rose in several Asian countries, including China, Mongolia,
Thailand and Vietnam. In China, for example, an August 2008 terrorist attack
attributed by Chinese authorities to a militant Muslim separatist group, known
as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, caused more than a dozen casualties in
Xinjiang Province, and riots in Tibet in March 2008 pitted ethnic Tibetans
(mainly Buddhists) against ethnic Han Chinese.Three
of the five countries where social hostilities declined are in sub-Saharan
Africa: Chad, Liberia and Tanzania. But social hostilities involving religion
rose in Nigeria, the region’s most populous country, where there were a number of violent clashes between
Christians and Muslims.Government Restrictions or Social Hostilities
Looking at the countries that had a substantial increase
in either government restrictions or social hostilities, most (14 out of 23, or 61%) previously had high or very
high levels of restrictions or hostilities. By contrast, among the countries
that had substantial declines in either government restrictions or social
hostilities, most (seven out of 12, or 58%) previously had low or moderate
levels of restrictions or hostilities. And of the countries that stayed roughly
the same, most (120 out of 163, or 74%) previously had low or moderate levels
of restrictions or hostilities. Once again, this suggests that there may be a
gradual polarization taking place in which restrictions are rising
predominantly in countries that already have high or very high restrictions or
hostilities, and are declining or staying the same predominately in countries
that already have low or moderate restrictions or hostilities.Other
key findings from the study include:
- Among the five
geographic regions covered in this report, the Middle East-North Africa had the
highest government and social restrictions on religion, while the Americas were
the least restrictive region on both measures. The Middle East-North Africa region
also had the greatest number of countries where government restrictions on
religion increased from mid-2006 to mid-2009, with about a third of the
region’s countries (30%) imposing greater restrictions.
In contrast, no country in the Americas registered a substantial increase on
either index.- Prior
to the recent uprising in Egypt, government restrictions on religion were
already very high there. By mid-2009, Egypt also had joined the 5% of countries
with the most intense social hostilities involving religion. However, the
increase in social hostilities in Egypt fell just short of being a substantial
increase, as defined in this study.- Government
restrictions on religion increased substantially in two European countries,
France and Serbia. In France, members of Parliament began discussing whether
women should be allowed to wear the burqa, and President Nicolas Sarkozy said
the head-to-toe covering was “not welcome” in French society. The French
government also put pressure on religious groups it considers to be cults,
including Scientologists. For example, the lead prosecutor in a fraud case
involving the Church of Scientology sought to have the group declared a
“criminal enterprise.” In Serbia, meanwhile, the government refused to legally
register Jehovah’s Witnesses and several other minority religious groups. There
also were reports that some government officials referred to minority religious
groups as “sects” or other pejorative terms.- Government
restrictions also increased substantially in Malaysia, which, like Egypt,
already had very high restrictions to begin with. Although the country’s
constitution recognizes freedom of religion, Malaysia restricts the observance
of Islamic beliefs and practices that do not conform to Sunni Islam. Indeed,
the Malaysian government monitors more than 50 Muslim groups that it considers
unorthodox, including the Ahmadiyya movement.- In China,
there was no change in the level of government restrictions on religion, which
remained very high. But social hostilities involving religion, which had been
relatively low, increased substantially from mid-2006 to mid-2009. During that
time period protests erupted among the predominantly Buddhist population in
Tibet and among Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang Province over what they saw as
cultural and economic domination by ethnic Han Chinese.- In some other
Asian countries, social hostilities also involved ethnic and religious
minorities, such as Malay Muslim separatists in southern Thailand, who were
involved in several violent clashes with the majority Buddhist population.- Social
hostilities involving religion in the United States remained at a moderate
level. In recent years, the U.S. annually has had at least 1,300 hate crimes
involving religious bias, according to FBI reports. (Most of the recent
controversies over the construction of mosques and Islamic centers in New York
City and other communities across the country took place after the period
covered in this report. )- Religion-related terrorist groups
were active in 74 countries around the world in the period ending in mid-2009.
The groups carried out acts of violence in half of the 74 countries. (In the
other half, their activities were limited to recruitment and fundraising.) In
Russia, for example, more than 1,100 casualties resulted from religion-related
terrorist attacks during the two-year period ending in mid-2009. This was more
than double the number of casualties recorded in the previous reporting period.
This includes people who were killed, wounded, displaced from their homes,
kidnapped or had their property destroyed in religion-related terrorist
attacks.Return to Table of Contents at top to continue reading the Full Report.
Footnotes:
1 As of 2010, Muslims made up nearly a
quarter (23.4%) of the world’s population, according to the Pew Forum’s January
2011 report The Future of the Global Muslim Population.
The Pew Forum is currently compiling population data on other world religions
and intends to publish a series of reports on the demography of religion in
2011-2012. In the meantime, the population figures used in this section are
from the World Religion Database at Boston University, which estimates that
Christians comprise about a third (32.9%) of the world’s population. (return to text)2 Answers to Questions 1 and 2 in the
Government Restrictions Index were recoded for the period from mid-2006 to
mid-2008 to match the coding conventions used for the period from mid-2007 to
mid-2009. After the recoding, two fewer countries scored in the high or very
high category for the period ending in mid-2008. As a result, this report lists
62 countries as having high or very high restrictions as of mid-2008 rather
than the 64 countries listed in the 2009 baseline report, Global Restrictions on Religion. (return to text)3 For background on Europe’s growing
Muslim population, see the Pew Forum’s January 2011 report The Future of the Global Muslim
Population. (return to text)
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