The Unfree Exercise of Religion

Jonathan Fox is a Professor of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel and Director of the Religion and State project.

• 1. Introduction; 2. What is religious discrimination?; 3. The causes and consequences of religious discrimination; 4. Christian majority states 1 - Western democracies and the former Soviet bloc; 5. Christian majority countries 2 - the Third World; 6. Muslim majority countries; 7. Other countries; 8. Conclusions.

'The Unfree Exercise of Religion, Jonathan Fox's latest global analysis of the status of religions, solidifies his standing as the leading empirical scholar on the subject. He shows that discrimination against the practices and institutions of 597 minority religions is ubiquitous. More than six out of ten minorities in this new study faced discrimination on one and usually many of 29 indicators. Causal analyses show that no one or handful of conditions can explain why. Whether the state has an official religion, and whether the minority is seen as a security threat, are relevant but so are many other factors. It may be unsurprising that discrimination against religious minorities of every major sect, in every world region, has increased since 1990. But who would have thought that the prosperous Christian democracies would be more discriminatory than their democratic counterparts in the Third World? Could we have anticipated that, globally, Christian religious minorities are most likely to be subject to discrimination and Muslim minorities least so? Unfree Exercise is a remarkable data-based study that spans the entire range of questions, both descriptive and casual, about the nature, causes, and impact of discrimination against religious minorities in 177 countries.' Ted Robert Gurr, University of Maryland, College Park