Is Globalization Leading to More Restrictions on Religion? By Joshua Keating.

Globalization Leading to More Restrictions on Religion? By Joshua Keating. Foreign Policy, August 5, 2013. Also here.

Keating:

In a report last year, the Pew Research Center noted a marked increase in legal restrictions on the practice of religion around the world. The report found that “The share of countries with high or very high restrictions on religious beliefs and practices rose from 31% in the year ending in mid-2009 to 37% in the year ending in mid-2010” and that three quarters of the world’s population live in countries with “high government restrictions on religion.” (That stat’s due largely to China, but still.) These included not just laws in theocratic or autocratic regimes, but new restrictions in democracies such as Switzerland’s 2009 minaret ban.

 

A new paper in the journal Political Studies by three Israeli political scientists suggests that this trend is an ironic byproduct of globalization, which has “has increased interpersonal contact between individuals from culturally diverse backgrounds.” Rather than increasing tolerance, this new interaction actually “induces perceived threat to a hegemonic religion, which leads to more restrictions on religious freedom.”

 

Using globalization indicators including communications, trade, tourism, and diplomatic contact for 147 countries, they find a correlation between a country’s global oppenness and legal restrictions on religion.

 

One would assume that there’s a saturation level at which religious minorities are no longer perceived as a threat by the majority, or at which religious minorities are simply more integrated into their communities, but things may get significantly worse on this front before they get better.


Rising Tide of Restrictions on Religion. Pew Research, September 20, 2012.

Religion can both hurt and enhance democratic attitudes. By Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom and Gizem Arikan. The London School of Economics and Political Science, May 21, 2013.

Religion and Support for Democracy: A Cross-National Test of the Mediating Mechanisms. By Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom and Gizem Arikan. British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 43, No. 2 (April 2013).

Globalization, Threat and Religious Freedom. By Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom, Gizem Arikan, and Udi Sommer. Political Studies, published first online, July 11, 2013.

Abstract:

While arguably central to the human experience, religion is a largely understudied component of social life and of politics. The comparative literature on religion and politics is limited in scope, and offers mostly descriptions of trends. We know, for example, that restrictions on freedom of religion are on the rise worldwide. In our theoretical framework, the recently higher universal levels of globalization combine with other sources of threat to account for the trend away from religious freedom. As threat to the majority religion increases, due to globalization and an increasing number of minority religions, freedom of religion is on the decline. Data for two decades from 147 nations are used to test hypotheses. Time-series cross-sectional and mediation models estimated at different levels of analysis with data from two independent sources confirm that threat systematically accounts for changes in religious freedom, with globalization playing a key role.