The Unfree Exercise of Religion

Reviews / Votes

'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 'Political scientist Jonathan Fox brings his characteristic blend of analytic acuity, encyclopedic coverage, and moral concern to the phenomenon of religious discrimination. Drawing from the extraordinary dataset that he has constructed over several years, he brings striking results to bear: all across the globe, religious discrimination is widespread and is getting worse.' Daniel Philpott, Center for Civil and Human Rights