Rising hostility against religion worldwide
Published: Saturday, Aug. 27, 2011 1:03 a.m. MDT
By
Michael De Groote, Deseret News
WASHINGTON — No matter how you slice it, religious freedom around the world is in trouble.
The Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life released a
study back in 2009 that found 70 percent of the world's population lived in countries that had high levels of hostility or restrictions on religion. This month, Pew's latest report,
"Rising Restrictions on Religion," does not offer much comfort: Things are getting worse...
China, Nigeria, Russia, Thailand, the United Kingdom and Vietnam had increases in social hostility against religion. The countries with the worst social hostilities against religion were Iraq, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia. The number of countries experiencing mob violence over religion increased from 38 countries in 2008 to 52 in 2009...
"Government restrictions and social hostilities somewhat go in tandem," Grim said. "Where they are high on one they tend to be high on the other." Egypt, for example, ranked very high in both categories. Only Kyrgyzstan had an in increase in one and a decrease in the other (government restrictions went up, social hostilities went down).
But Pew didn't just find problems abroad. Closer to home in the United States, the study found there is some moderate social hostility against religion in the U.S. One measure used by Pew was the FBI's
Hate Crime Statistics. In 2009 there were 1,303 incidents of religion-related hate crime in the United States, including 931 against Jewish people...
Pew found that Christians were harassed in 130 countries, Muslims in 117 countries and Jews in 75 countries. Hindus and Buddhists, who are less spread throughout the world, were harassed in 27 and 16 countries, respectively...
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The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
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The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life is a project of the Pew Research Center, a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Rising Restrictions on Religion
One-third of the world's population experiences an increase
ANALYSIS August 9, 2011
Rising Restrictions on Religion, a recent report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, finds that 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%). [graphics are included in this report]
Because several countries with increasing restrictions on religion are very populous, however, the increases affect 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.
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