Faith Based

Every year. Pew Research Center conducts a study on both governmental restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion. This year's report made for interesting reading.

The report was at pains to point out that it "is not designed to determine which religious group faces the most persecution." Which was a shame, really. Clearly they understood that religious partisans would be combing the report looking for evidence to back up their claims to being The Most Oppressed, presumably in the service of demanding more resources and protection for themselves. Granted, the report offers the opportunity to indulge in a sense of victimization. It notes that Denmark requires that animals be stunned prior to being killed for meat production, and that this makes it more difficult to obtain Kosher or Halal meat, but it doesn't specify why this is about government harassment of a religious group, as opposed to an animal welfare/anti-cruelty measure. Similarly, it calls out restrictions on the ability to claim conscientious objector status (or be exempted from otherwise mandatory military service) or to hold in-person gatherings in the face of public-health orders to the contrary to be examples of government interference in worship. This gives the impression that simply having to follow the same rules as everyone else can be viewed as governmental restriction on religion.

Likewise, the report seems to code simple disputes between religious communities, and communities that happen to have different religious beliefs as a form of social religious hostility. For example, it was noted that Bolivia's social hostility score went down because "there were no reports coded in 2021 that Protestant pastors and missionaries were expelled from Indigenous communities for not observing Andean spiritual beliefs." (This raises an interesting question; when one group wants to proselytize, but the leadership of another group does not want their community proselytized to, who can claim the hostility? While the expulsion of missionaries seems like a clear case, it's worth noting that for many missionaries, the end of other religious beliefs is their stated goal.) In Nigeria, conflicts between “predominantly” (quotes in original) Christian farmers and Moslem herders are framed as sectarian social hostility, despite the fact that conflicts between herders and farmers have been taking place for nearly the whole of human history.

None of this is to say that the situations and incidents mentioned aren't religiously motivated (especially the expulsion of missionaries) but I did find myself questioning what the expectation of religious entitlement was. Governments enact laws with disparate impacts due to other factors all the time, and fighting between groups is pretty much the one constant to be found in human history. Why people should expect that, for example, only secular buildings should be subject to vandalism, or that clergy of faiths that claim an exclusive understanding of truth would refrain from public criticism of attempts to propagate "incorrect" teachings is never addressed.

Religion is often viewed as being a higher-stakes enterprise than other aspects of one's daily life. If I attempt to convince someone that they might also enjoy building plastic model kits, someone close to them might object on the grounds that it can be expensive or time-consuming. But were I to attempt to convince someone that their deity isn't real, I could be seen as attempting to set them up for a punishing, rather than pleasant, afterlife, or some other form of real spiritual harm. Not everyone believes that all religions are equally valid. (Or, as the late Christopher Hitchens has put it, equally demented.)

And that might be the most curious thing about the report. It posits a world in which no-one ever fights over religion; one in which immoral teaching and leading people away from true faith may be possible in the abstract, but aren't seen as worthy of any real-world actions. The stakes are not simply low, they're non-existent. But that's not how religion in the world actually works. And it's unlikely to ever do so.