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Freedom of Religion?
For 5 Billion People, It’s a Forbidden Dream
Violations of religious freedom will be a major theme in the speech that Pope Benedict XVI will give on January 11 — as at the beginning of every year — to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. The theme is not a new one. But never before has it been analyzed with the scientific precision achieved by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in Washington, in the study from which the chart is taken. The study includes 198 countries, leaving out North Korea, because of the insurmountable scarcity of data, and covers the two-year period from the middle of 2006 to the middle of 2008. A summary of the study and the complete 72-page report can be downloaded for free from the website of the Pew Forum: Global Restrictions on Religion, December 2009 In the chart, the size of the circles is proportional to the population of each country. As can be seen, among the countries with more restrictions on religious freedom, a huge impact is made by India and China, each with a population of well over one billion. With the addition of other densely populated, illiberal countries, it ends up that 70 percent of the 6.8 billion people in the world live in countries with severe or extremely severe limitations on freedom of religion. Conversely, only 15 percent of the global population lives in countries with acceptable levels of religious freedom. Naturally, religious freedom encounters different obstacles in the various countries. In China and Vietnam, for example, the populations do not show hostility toward one religion or another. It is the government that imposes severe limitations on expressions of faith. In China, the restrictions affect the Buddhists of Tibet, the Uyghur Muslims, the Christians without government recognition, and the followers of Falun Gong. The opposite happens in Nigeria and Bangladesh. There, the governments opt for moderation, while it is in civil society that acts of violence are exploding against one religion or another. In India as well, hostility is more the work of social factions than of the authorities, although they also impose heavy restrictions. Among the 198 countries, there is only one in which the levels of hostility against “enemy” religions reach the highest points both on the part of the government and on the part of the population. And it is Saudi Arabia. But Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, and Iran also have overall levels that are very negative, on a par with India. In Egypt, restrictions of religious freedom mainly affect the Coptic Christians, who are about ten percent of the population. On a map of the world included with the report, with the individual countries colored according to the level of restriction of religious freedom, it is immediately clear that the areas with greater freedom are those in which Christianity is more present: Europe, the Americas, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa. But there are some restrictions even here. In Greece, only Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims can organize as such and own property. The Christians of other confessions cannot. In France, the law that prohibits Muslim girls from wearing the veil in schools also bans Christians from wearing a cross that is too visible, and Sikhs from wearing the turban. In Great Britain, even though the head of state is also head of the Church of England, a ruling has permitted a company to require its Christian employees to conceal the symbols of their faith in the workplace, while leaving members of the other religions free to wear their symbols. Source: chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it, posted January 8, 2010. |
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Copyright 2012 Miles Jesu. All rights reserved. | |
The chart reproduced to the right classifies the fifty most populous nations in the world on the basis of their respective restrictions on religious freedom: both the restrictions imposed by governments, increasing from left to right, and those produced by violence on the part of persons or groups, increasing from bottom to top. 