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%), according to a new study by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Because several countries with increasing restrictions on religion are very populous, however, the increases affected 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. Only about 1% of the world’s population lives in countries where government restrictions or social hostilities declined.

Among the world’s 25 most populous countries – which account for about 75% of the world’s total population – restrictions on religion substantially increased in eight countries and did not substantially decrease in any. In China, Nigeria, Russia, Thailand, the United Kingdom and Vietnam, the increases were due primarily to rising levels of social hostilities involving religion. In Egypt and France, the increases were mainly the result of government restrictions. The rest of the 25 most populous countries, including the United States, did not experience substantial changes in either social hostilities or government-imposed restrictions.

This is the second time the Pew Forum has measured restrictions on religion around the globe. Like the baseline report, the new study scores 198 countries and territories on two indexes:

• The Government Restrictions Index measures government laws, policies and actions that restrict religious beliefs or practices. This includes efforts by governments to ban particular faiths, prohibit conversions, limit preaching or give preferential treatment to one or more religious groups.
• The Social Hostilities Index measures acts of religious hostility by private individuals, organizations and social groups. This includes mob or sectarian violence, harassment over attire for religious reasons and other religion-related intimidation or abuse.

Among the five geographic regions covered in the study, the Middle East-North Africa region had the largest proportion of countries in which government restrictions on religion increased, with nearly a third of the region’s countries (30%) imposing greater restrictions. Egypt, in particular, ranked very high (in the top 5% of all countries, as of mid-2009) on both government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion. Egypt was one of just two countries in the world – Indonesia was the other – that had very high scores on both measures as of mid-2009.

Europe had the largest proportion of countries in which social hostilities related to religion were on the rise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Indeed, five of the 10 countries in the world that had a substantial increase in social hostilities were in Europe: Bulgaria, Denmark, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The study also finds that social hostilities involving religion have been rising in Asia, particularly in China, Thailand and Vietnam.

Overall, 14 countries had a substantial increase in government restrictions on religion, while eight had a substantial decline. In terms of social hostilities involving religion, 10 countries had a substantial increase, while five had a substantial decline. No country rose or declined substantially in both categories over the three-year period. Just one country, Kyrgyzstan, showed a substantial increase in one category (government restrictions) along with a decrease in the other category (social hostilities); consequently, it is treated as having no overall change.

In general, most of the countries that had substantial increases in government restrictions or social hostilities involving religion already had high or very high levels of restrictions or hostilities. By contrast, nearly half of the countries that had substantial decreases in restrictions or hostilities already scored low. This suggests that there may be a gradual polarization taking place in which countries that are relatively high in religious restrictions are getting higher while those that are relatively low are getting lower.

Specifically, among the 62 countries with high or very high scores on either or both indexes as of mid-2008, restrictions or hostilities increased substantially in 14 countries (23%) and decreased substantially in five (8%). Among the 42 countries that started out with moderate scores on either or both indexes, increases occurred in seven countries (17%) and decreases in two (5%). In contrast, among the 94 countries that started out with low scores on both indexes, the level of government restrictions and/or social hostilities involving religion decreased in five countries (5%) and increased in two (2%).

During the three-year period covered by the study, the extent of violence and abuse related to religion increased in more places than it decreased. The number of countries in which governments used at least some measure of force against religious groups or individuals rose from 91 (46%) in the period ending in mid-2008 to 101 (51%) in the period ending in mid-2009. This violence was wide-ranging, including individuals being killed, physically abused, imprisoned, detained or displaced from their homes, as well as damage to or destruction of personal or religious properties.

In nearly three-quarters of all countries, private citizens or groups committed crimes, malicious acts or violence motivated by religious hatred or bias. Such acts occurred in 142 countries (72%) in the period ending in mid-2009, about the same as in the previous reporting period.  The number of countries that experienced mob violence related to religion rose from 38 (19%) as of mid-2008 to 52 (26%) as of mid-2009.

Harassment and Anti-Blasphemy Laws

Adherents of the world’s two largest religious groups, Christians and Muslims, who together comprise more than half of the global population, were harassed in the largest number of countries.¹ Over the three-year period studied, incidents of either government or social harassment were reported against Christians in 130 countries (66%) and against Muslims in 117 countries (59%). Buddhists and Hindus – who together account for roughly one-fifth of the world’s population and who are more geographically concentrated than Christians or Muslims – faced harassment in fewer places; harassment was reported against Buddhists in 16 countries (8%) and against Hindus in 27 countries (14%).

In proportion to their numbers, some smaller religious groups faced especially widespread harassment. Although Jews comprise less than 1% of the world’s population, government or social harassment of Jews was reported in 75 countries (38%). Incidents of harassment involving members of other world religions – including Sikhs, ancient faiths such as Zoroastrianism, newer faith groups such as Baha’is and Rastafarians, and localized groups that practice tribal or folk religions – were reported in 84 countries (42%). (For more details, see Harassment of Particular Religious Groups .)

In addition, the study finds that restrictions on religion are particularly common in countries that prohibit blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion. While such laws are sometimes promoted as a way to protect religion, in practice they often serve to punish religious minorities whose beliefs are deemed unorthodox or heretical. (For more details, see Laws Against Blasphemy, Apostasy and Defamation of Religion.)

About the Report

These are among the key findings of Rising Restrictions on Religion, the Pew Forum’s second report on global restrictions on religion. The 198 countries and self-administering territories covered by the study contain more than 99.5% of the world’s population. Each country was scored on a total of 33 measures phrased as questions about government restrictions or social hostilities involving religion. (For the full question wording, see the Summary of Results.) The Government Restrictions Index is comprised of 20 questions; there are 13 questions on the Social Hostilities Index.

To answer the questions that make up the indexes, Pew Forum researchers combed through 18 widely cited, publicly available sources of information, including reports by the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, the Council of the European Union, the United Kingdom’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, the Hudson Institute, Freedom House and Amnesty International. (For the complete list of sources, see the Methodology.) Many of the examples cited in this report were drawn from the State Department’s annual International Religious Freedom reports.

The researchers involved in this process recorded only concrete reports about specific government laws, policies and actions, as well as incidents of religious violence or intolerance by social groups; they did not rely on the commentaries or opinions of the sources. (For a more detailed explanation of the coding and data verification procedures, see the Methodology.) The goal was to devise a battery of quantifiable, objective measures that could be analyzed individually as well as combined into two comprehensive indexes, the Government Restrictions Index and the Social Hostilities Index.

The Forum’s baseline report on global restrictions on religion calculated each country’s average scores on the Government Restrictions Index and Social Hostilities Index for the two-year period from mid-2006 to mid-2008. This report assesses changes over time by comparing each country’s original scores with its average scores for the overlapping two-year period from mid-2007 to mid-2009.² Comparing rolling averages for overlapping time periods reduces the impact of year-to-year fluctuations and helps identify consistent trends.

This report focuses on changes in countries’ scores on the indexes that are deemed to be “substantial.” (The report refers to a change in a country’s score as substantial only if it is at least 1.5 standard deviations above or below the mean amount of change among all 198 countries on each index. The change also had to be in the same direction over the two periods studied, meaning that it had to rise or fall both in the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008 and in the overlapping period from mid-2007 to mid-2009. See the Methodology for more details.)

Situation as of Mid-2009

The Pew Forum characterizes each country’s place on the Government Restrictions Index and the Social Hostilities Index by percentile. Countries with scores in the top 5% are characterized as “very high.” The next highest 15% of scores are categorized as “high,” and the following 20% are characterized as “moderate.” The bottom 60% of scores are characterized as “low.”

As of mid-2009, government restrictions on religion were high or very high in 42 countries, about one-in-five worldwide. The 10 countries that had very high government restrictions as of mid-2009 were Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, China, Maldives, Malaysia, Burma (Myanmar), Eritrea and Indonesia. Government restrictions were in the moderate range in 39 countries. A much larger number of countries – 117 – had low levels of government restrictions. But because many of the more restrictive countries (including China and India) are very populous, more than half of the world’s population (59%) was living with high or very high government restrictions as of mid-2009. (For a complete list of all countries in each category, see the Government Restriction Index table.)

As of mid-2009, social hostilities involving religion were high or very high in 40 countries, about one-in-five worldwide. The 10 countries that had very high hostilities as of mid-2009 were Iraq, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Israel and Egypt. Social hostilities were in the moderate range in 43 countries. A much larger number of countries – 115 – had low levels of social hostilities. But because many of the countries with high or very high social hostilities (including India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria) are very populous, nearly half of the world’s population (48%) was living with high or very high social hostilities involving religion as of mid-2009. (For a complete list of all countries in each category, see the Social Hostilities Index table.)

Government restrictions or social hostilities were high or very high in about one-third of the countries as of mid-2009. But because some of the most restrictive countries are very populous, nearly 70 percent of the world’s 6.9 billion people were living in countries where governments imposed high restrictions on religion or where there were high levels of religious hostilities in society.

Changes in Government Restrictions

Comparing the Pew Forum’s first set of scores (for the two-year period from mid-2006 to mid-2008) with the second set of scores (for the two-year period from mid-2007 to mid-2009), the study finds that 14 countries had a substantial increase in government restrictions and eight had a substantial decline.

Six of the 14 countries where government restrictions rose substantially were in the Middle East-North Africa region: Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Qatar, Syria and Yemen. In Egypt, for example, the government maintained a longstanding ban on the Muslim Brotherhood, an influential Islamic organization, and discriminated against Christians in various ways, including in public-sector hiring. In Yemen, government officials reportedly sought to intimidate Baha’is and converts to Christianity, including arresting people for promoting Christianity and distributing Bibles.

Most of the countries with substantial decreases in government restrictions (seven of the eight countries) had low levels of restrictions to begin with. The exception was Greece, which started out with high government restrictions but moved to the moderate level by mid-2009. While the government of Greece continued to restrict proselytizing, for example, there were fewer reported cases where the police detained people for proselytizing.

Changes in Social Hostilities

Ten countries had substantial increases in social hostilities involving religion and five had a substantial decline.

As noted above, the level of social hostilities involving religion rose substantially in five European nations: Bulgaria, Denmark, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Much of the tension in Europe focused on the region’s rapidly growing Muslim population, but in some cases it also reflected rising anti-Semitism and antagonism toward Christian minorities, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses.³

Social hostilities also rose in several Asian countries, including China, Mongolia, Thailand and Vietnam. In China, for example, an August 2008 terrorist attack attributed by Chinese authorities to a militant Muslim separatist group, known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, caused more than a dozen casualties in Xinjiang Province, and riots in Tibet in March 2008 pitted ethnic Tibetans (mainly Buddhists) against ethnic Han Chinese.

Three of the five countries where social hostilities declined are in sub-Saharan Africa: Chad, Liberia and Tanzania. But social hostilities involving religion rose in Nigeria, the region’s most populous country, where there were a number of violent clashes between Christians and Muslims.

Government Restrictions or Social Hostilities

Looking at the countries that had a substantial increase in either government restrictions or social hostilities, most (14 out of 23, or 61%) previously had high or very high levels of restrictions or hostilities. By contrast, among the countries that had substantial declines in either government restrictions or social hostilities, most (seven out of 12, or 58%) previously had low or moderate levels of restrictions or hostilities. And of the countries that stayed roughly the same, most (120 out of 163, or 74%) previously had low or moderate levels of restrictions or hostilities. Once again, this suggests that there may be a gradual polarization taking place in which restrictions are rising predominantly in countries that already have high or very high restrictions or hostilities, and are declining or staying the same predominately in countries that already have low or moderate restrictions or hostilities.

Other Findings

Other key findings from the study include:

• Among the five geographic regions covered in this report, the Middle East-North Africa had the highest government and social restrictions on religion, while the Americas were the least restrictive region on both measures. The Middle East-North Africa region also had the greatest number of countries where government restrictions on religion increased from mid-2006 to mid-2009, with about a third of the region’s countries (30%) imposing greater restrictions. In contrast, no country in the Americas registered a substantial increase on either index.
• Prior to the recent uprising in Egypt, government restrictions on religion were already very high there. By mid-2009, Egypt also had joined the 5% of countries with the most intense social hostilities involving religion. However, the increase in social hostilities in Egypt fell just short of being a substantial increase, as defined in this study.
• Government restrictions on religion increased substantially in two European countries, France and Serbia. In France, members of Parliament began discussing whether women should be allowed to wear the burqa, and President Nicolas Sarkozy said the head-to-toe covering was “not welcome” in French society. The French government also put pressure on religious groups it considers to be cults, including Scientologists. For example, the lead prosecutor in a fraud case involving the Church of Scientology sought to have the group declared a “criminal enterprise.” In Serbia, meanwhile, the government refused to legally register Jehovah’s Witnesses and several other minority religious groups. There also were reports that some government officials referred to minority religious groups as “sects” or other pejorative terms.
• Government restrictions also increased substantially in Malaysia, which, like Egypt, already had very high restrictions to begin with. Although the country’s constitution recognizes freedom of religion, Malaysia restricts the observance of Islamic beliefs and practices that do not conform to Sunni Islam. Indeed, the Malaysian government monitors more than 50 Muslim groups that it considers unorthodox, including the Ahmadiyya movement.
• In China, there was no change in the level of government restrictions on religion, which remained very high. But social hostilities involving religion, which had been relatively low, increased substantially from mid-2006 to mid-2009. During that time period protests erupted among the predominantly Buddhist population in Tibet and among Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang Province over what they saw as cultural and economic domination by ethnic Han Chinese.
• In some other Asian countries, social hostilities also involved ethnic and religious minorities, such as Malay Muslim separatists in southern Thailand, who were involved in several violent clashes with the majority Buddhist population.
• Social hostilities involving religion in the United States remained at a moderate level. In recent years, the U.S. annually has had at least 1,300 hate crimes involving religious bias, according to FBI reports. (Most of the recent controversies over the construction of mosques and Islamic centers in New York City and other communities across the country took place after the period covered in this report. )
• Religion-related terrorist groups were active in 74 countries around the world in the period ending in mid-2009. The groups carried out acts of violence in half of the 74 countries. (In the other half, their activities were limited to recruitment and fundraising.) In Russia, for example, more than 1,100 casualties resulted from religion-related terrorist attacks during the two-year period ending in mid-2009. This was more than double the number of casualties recorded in the previous reporting period. This includes people who were killed, wounded, displaced from their homes, kidnapped or had their property destroyed in religion-related terrorist attacks.

Return to Table of Contents at top to continue reading the Full Report.

Footnotes:

1 As of 2010, Muslims made up nearly a quarter (23.4%) of the world’s population, according to the Pew Forum’s January 2011 report The Future of the Global Muslim Population. The Pew Forum is currently compiling population data on other world religions and intends to publish a series of reports on the demography of religion in 2011-2012. In the meantime, the population figures used in this section are from the World Religion Database at Boston University, which estimates that Christians comprise about a third (32.9%) of the world’s population. (return to text)

2 Answers to Questions 1 and 2 in the Government Restrictions Index were recoded for the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008 to match the coding conventions used for the period from mid-2007 to mid-2009. After the recoding, two fewer countries scored in the high or very high category for the period ending in mid-2008. As a result, this report lists 62 countries as having high or very high restrictions as of mid-2008 rather than the 64 countries listed in the 2009 baseline report, Global Restrictions on Religion. (return to text)

3 For background on Europe’s growing Muslim population, see the Pew Forum’s January 2011 report The Future of the Global Muslim Population. (return to text)

In December 2009, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life published its first report analyzing the extent to which governments and societies around the world impinge on religious beliefs and practices. The report found that about 70% of the world’s population was living in countries where governments imposed high restrictions on religion or where there were high levels of religious hostilities in society.

As part of the original study, the Pew Forum developed two indexes – a Government Restrictions Index and a Social Hostilities Index – that were used to rate 198 countries and self-governing territories. Using the original study as a baseline, we are now able to assess how government restrictions and social hostilities are changing globally. The new study finds that more than 2.2 billion people – about a third of the world’s population – live in countries where government restrictions or social hostilities involving religion are increasing. About 1% live in countries where government restrictions or social hostilities are decreasing.

Moreover, there is an intriguing pattern in the changes: The substantial increases tend to be in countries where restrictions and hostilities are already high, while the decreases tend to be in countries where restrictions and hostilities are already low. This pattern suggests that a gradual polarization could be taking place, with restrictive countries growing even more so. Whether this is a long-term trend or a short-term phenomenon is not yet clear. But our next round of coding (categorizing and counting) published data on religious restrictions is already under way, and we intend to produce periodic reports tracking these trends over time.

As we noted in the first report, it is important to bear in mind some limitations when reading this study. The indexes of government restrictions and social hostilities are designed to measure obstacles to religious expression and practice. As a result, the report focuses on the constraints on religion in each country. It does not look at the other side of the coin: the amount of religious diversity and activity in particular countries. The study also does not attempt to determine whether particular restrictions are justified or unjustified, nor does it attempt to analyze the many factors – historical, demographic, cultural, religious, economic and political – that might explain why restrictions have arisen. It simply seeks to measure the restrictions that exist in a quantifiable, transparent and reproducible way, based on published reports from numerous governmental and nongovernmental organizations.

One final note: As was the case in the baseline report, North Korea is not included on either of the indexes. The primary sources used in the study indicate that North Korea’s government is among the most repressive in the world, including toward religion. But because independent observers lack regular access to the country, the sources are unable to provide the kind of specific, timely information that formed the basis of this analysis.

The Pew Forum’s work on global restrictions on religion is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world. Previous reports produced under this initiative, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation, include The Future of the Global Muslim Population: Projections for 2010-2030 (January 2011), a comprehensive demographic study that estimates the number of Muslims around the world in 2010 and projects the growth of Muslim populations from 2010 to 2030;Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity inSub-Saharan Africa (April 2010), which is based on a major public opinion survey conducted in 19 African countries; and the Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders (June 2011), which is based on a survey of nearly 2,200 evangelical leaders who were invited to attend the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, held in October 2010 in Cape Town, South Africa.

The principal researcher for this report was Brian J. Grim, a senior researcher and director of cross-national data at the Pew Forum. He was assisted by Peter Henne, a Pew Forum research analyst and doctoral candidate in government at Georgetown University, and by several Georgetown University graduate and undergraduate students who participated in the coding. For helping to recruit these very capable students, we are grateful to Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and its director, Professor Thomas Banchoff

Luis Lugo, Director Alan Cooperman, Associate Director for Research

The Government Restrictions Index (GRI) measures limits imposed by governments on religious beliefs and practices. The 10-point index is based on 20 questions used by the Pew Forum to gauge the extent to which governments at any level – national, provincial or local – try to control religious groups or individuals, prohibit conversions from one faith to another, limit preaching and proselytizing, or otherwise hinder religious affiliation by means such as registration requirements and fines. The questions seek to capture both relatively straightforward efforts to restrict religion – for example, through a nation’s constitution and laws – as well as efforts that are more indirect, such as favoring certain religions by means of preferential funding. (For more information on the index, see the Methodology. The questions are shown in the Summary of Results. Details on how all 198 countries and territories scored on each question are available online, in the Results by Country.)

The Pew Forum categorizes the levels of government restrictions by percentiles. Countries with scores in the top 5% are categorized as “very high.” The next highest 15% of scores are categorized as “high,” and the following 20% are categorized as “moderate.” The bottom 60% of scores are categorized as “low.” (For a complete list of countries in each category, see the Government Restrictions Index table.)

Situation as of Mid-2009

Overall, the study finds that during the period from mid-2007 to mid-2009 government restrictions on religion were high or very high in 42 countries, about one-in-five worldwide.⁴ The 10 countries that had very high restrictions as of mid-2009 were Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, China, Maldives, Malaysia, Burma (Myanmar), Eritrea and Indonesia. Government restrictions were in the moderate range in 39 countries. A much larger number of countries – 117 – had low levels of government restrictions.⁵ But because many of the more restrictive countries (including China and India) are very populous, more than half of the world’s population (59%) was living with high or very high government restrictions on religion as of mid-2009.

As noted in the December 2009 baseline report, the mathematical presentation of scores for individual countries needs to be kept in context. The Pew Forum has deliberately chosen not to attach numerical rankings from No. 1 to No. 198 both because there are many tie scores and because the differences between the scores of countries that are close to each other on the index may not be important.

Overall Changes in Government Restrictions

Comparing the Pew Forum’s index scores for the baseline period (mid-2006 to mid-2008) with the scores for the latest period (mid-2007 to mid-2009), the study finds that government restrictions on religion rose substantially in 14 countries and decreased substantially in eight countries. The scores stayed roughly the same in most (176) countries. (As noted in the Executive Summary, the study refers to a change in a country’s score as “substantial” only if it is at least 1.5 standard deviations above or below the mean amount of change among all 198 countries or territories. The change also had to be in the same direction over the two periods studied, meaning that it had to rise or fall both in the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008 and in the period from mid-2007 to mid-2009. For more details, see Methodology.)

In general, most of the increases in government restrictions occurred in countries that already had very high, high or moderate levels of government restrictions. Most of the decreases were in countries that already scored low. Among the 40 countries that had high or very high government restrictions as of mid-2008, restrictions increased substantially in seven and decreased substantially in one. Among the 40 countries that started out with moderate government restrictions, there were substantial increases in six, and none had substantial decreases. In contrast, among the 118 countries that started out with low restrictions, the level of government restrictions decreased in seven and increased in just one. This suggests that there might be a gradual polarization taking place in which countries that are relatively high in government restrictions are getting higher, while those that are relatively low are stable or getting lower.

Looking at all 198 countries and territories, the average score on the Government Restrictions Index rose from 2.6 for the period ending in mid-2008 to 2.7 for the period ending in mid-2009. The biggest increases were among the countries that started with high or very high government restrictions. There was no change in the average index score among the countries that initially had moderate or low government restrictions.

Changes in Some Key Types of Government Restrictions

During the most recent period studied (mid-2007 to mid-2009), 131 countries (or about two-thirds) interfered with the worship or other religious practices of one or more groups in at least a few cases, up from 128 countries in the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008. (See Summary of Results, GRI Q. 4.) Such interference included instances when local officials refused to grant or made it difficult to obtain zoning permits to build places of worship, which happened in countries ranging from Switzerland to Swaziland. It also included more widespread instances of interference. Indeed, governments in 50 countries (25%) prohibited the religious or worship practices of one or more religious groups as a general policy. This type of restriction was up sharply from the period ending in mid-2008, when 38 countries (19%) fell into this category.

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There was a notable increase in the number of countries that regulate religious symbols, such as head or body coverings for women or facial hair for men. The number of countries that had such restrictions rose from 42 as of mid-2008 to 53 as of mid-2009. (See Summary of Results, GRI Q. 10.) There was a particularly sharp increase in the number of countries that regulate face, head or body coverings for women, which rose from 31 to 42, a 35% increase. In Canada, for instance, an Ontario Superior Court judge ruled in May 2009 that Muslim women do not have a blanket right to wear a face-covering veil (the niqab) while testifying in court, saying judges should decide this on a case-by-case basis. Several countries, including Oman and Algeria, appeared to step up their enforcement of restrictions on wearing face-covering veils. In Oman, women are permitted to wear the hijab (headscarf) in passport and other official photographs, but they are not allowed to wear veils that fully cover the face in official photos. Algeria allows female government employees to wear headscarves or crosses at work, but it forbids them from wearing the niqab.

In France – which in 2004 banned the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols, including head scarves and large crosses, in public schools – some politicians began calling for the establishment of a commission to study the effect of head-to-toe burqas and face-covering Islamic veils on French society. French President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared to endorse the idea in his first state of the nation address on June 22, 2009, saying “the burqa is not welcome in France.” (The French Parliament voted to ban burqas and full-face veils in public places in 2010, outside the period covered in this report; the ban took effect in April 2011.)

The number of countries where the government limits religious literature or broadcasting rose from 80 as of mid-2008 to 87 as of mid-2009. (See Summary of Results, GRI Q. 8.) In Germany, for instance, the Federal Ministry of the Interior announced on Oct.12, 2008, that it was banning broadcasts of Al-Manar TV, a television station based in Beirut, Lebanon. The German ministry said it banned the broadcasts because they contained anti-Semitic propaganda. But governments sometimes restricted religious broadcasting or literature in less direct ways. In April 2009, for example, the Catholic Church reportedly was pressured by the Zambian government to relieve a priest of his duties after he strongly criticized the government on his popular radio program.

Certain government policies that on the surface appear to be neutral can, in practice, result in restrictions on religion. For example, most countries or territories (181 during the period ending in mid-2009) required religious groups to register with the government for one purpose or another, such as to obtain tax-exempt status. (See Summary of Results, GRI Q. 18.) But these registration requirements resulted in major problems for, or outright discrimination against, certain groups in 86 countries as of mid-2009, up from 79 countries in the period ending in mid-2008. For example, because the Serbian government did not allow some religious groups to register – including the League of Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Hare Krishna movement, the Seventh Day Adventist Reform Movement and several evangelical Protestant churches – they could not air programming on public media; the code of conduct of the state’s Republic Broadcasting Agency restricts public media access to registered religious groups.

There was no major change in the number of countries that allow foreign missionaries to operate (see Summary of Results, GRI Q. 9), allow proselytizing (see Summary of Results, GRI Q. 6) or allow public preaching by religious groups (see Summary of Results, GRI Q. 5). But one or more of these activities was limited by governments in 110 of the 198 countries and territories (56%) during the period from mid-2007 to mid-2009.

Countries with Substantial Increases in Government Restrictions

Over the entire three-year period covered in this study (mid-2006 to mid-2009), government restrictions on religion increased substantially in 14 of the 198 countries or territories. (See Executive Summary for a definition of substantial change.)

Seven of the 14 countries already had high or very high government restrictions. Egypt and Malaysia had very high restrictions to begin with, while Algeria, Libya, Tajikistan, Syria and Yemen had high levels of restrictions. By contrast, government restrictions increased substantially in only one country where restrictions were low to begin with – Hong Kong. Despite the increase, Hong Kong remained in the low-government-restrictions category as of mid-2009. (See the list of all countries on the Government Restrictions Index table.)

The level of government restrictions in Egypt was increasing well before the recent uprising that led to the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. During the period ending in mid-2009, the government maintained a longstanding ban on the Muslim Brotherhood, an influential Islamic organization.⁷ Although some of the group’s activities tacitly were tolerated by the government, members of the Brotherhood reportedly were subject to arbitrary detention and other pressure. The Egyptian government also continued to discriminate against Christians in public-sector hiring, including staff appointments at public universities, and continued to bar Christians from studying at Al-Azhar University, a publicly funded institution widely known as a seat of Islamic learning.

Many of the restrictions in Egypt were directed at Coptic Christians, who form one of the largest Christian populations in the Middle East and North Africa.⁸ At the local level, government officials often tried to prevent Coptic Christians from improving existing churches or constructing new ones. Officials in the Arbaeen District of the Assiut governorate in Upper Egypt, for example, have long refused to grant a building permit for a new Coptic church even though Egypt’s president and the Ministry of the Interior approved the project many years ago.

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Five of the countries with substantial increases had high government restrictions to begin with: Algeria, Libya, Tajikistan, Syria and Yemen. The increase in restrictions in these countries often involved religious minorities and/or minority sects of the country’s majority faith. In Yemen, for instance, both Baha’is and Christians were subject to increased government harassment, including imprisonment. Several Yemenis who had converted from Islam to Christianity were arrested in the cities of Sana’a and Hodeida in 2008. They reportedly were arrested for promoting Christianity and distributing Bibles rather than for apostasy, which is a crime punishable by death in Yemen. Members of Yemen’s small Jewish population were threatened on a number of occasions and did not always receive protection from the government. For example, after a prominent member of the Jewish community in Reyda was killed in December 2008, the government “appeared unwilling or unable to increase security for the remaining Jewish population,” the State Department reported.

In Tajikistan, the government in the spring of 2009 arrested hundreds of members of the Islamic missionary movement Tablighi Jama’at, saying the group represented a potential threat to the country’s stability and security. In June 2009, the government also detained 40 people suspected of being members of the Salafi school of Islam, which the government had formally banned in January 2009.⁹ The arrests and detentions were supported by a 2009 religion law that expanded government controls over religious groups. Among other things, the new law made it more difficult for religious groups to comply with the government’s registration requirements.

Six countries with substantial increases in government restrictions started out with moderate levels of restrictions: Somalia, Qatar, Kyrgyzstan, France, Serbia and Uganda. In Uganda, for example, police in February 2008 detained the head of the New Malta Jerusalem Church, Severino Lukoya, and three of his employees for operating an unregistered church. Lukoya is the father of a former rebel leader, and the government has cited national security concerns as the reason for prohibiting the church from registering.

In several countries with moderate levels of restrictions, governments appeared to step up restrictions that were already in place. Qatar, for example, reportedly began enforcing restrictions on the length and content of sermons in mosques in order to monitor content that might incite listeners to violence.

Government restrictions also increased substantially in Hong Kong, which overall still has low government restrictions on religion. For example, practitioners of the spiritual discipline known as Falun Gong were often turned down by Hong Kong authorities when they asked to use public facilities or spaces for their functions, even though other religious groups were routinely granted such permission. Falun Gong practitioners also reportedly were attacked by security personnel employed by the liaison office of China’s central government during an August 2008 protest. And several people with ties to Falun Gong were prevented from entering the territory, including a U.S. citizen, Leeshai Lemish, who said he was denied entry on July 27, 2008. News reports suggested that Lemish was denied entry because he was serving as a translator and assistant to someone who was researching the persecution of Falun Gong.

Countries with Substantial Decreases in Government Restrictions

Government restrictions on religion decreased substantially in eight countries from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Most of the countries with substantial decreases in restrictions (seven of the eight countries) had low levels of government restrictions to begin with. Only one of the eight countries – Greece – started out with high government restrictions.

The decline in government restrictions in Greece was not the result of any changes to the country’s laws or policies. Rather, there were fewer reports of restrictive actions by various levels of the government. For example, while Greece continued to restrict proselytizing, there were fewer reported cases where the police detained people for proselytizing. Minority religious groups in Greece continued to face administrative hurdles when trying to obtain permits to operate houses of worship. But during the latest reporting period, they faced fewer hurdles than they had in previous years.

In the seven countries that initially had low government restrictions, there were fewer reports of attempts to restrict the activities of certain sects or religions. For instance, during the period covered by this study, the attorney general of Guinea Bissau overturned efforts to ban the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect, declaring that the ban had no legal basis. In the Pacific island nation of Nauru, ministers and missionaries from minority Christian groups that once were banned from the country – including Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses – have been able to operate with less hindrance in recent years.

Restrictions on public preaching decreased in three of the eight countries with substantial declines in government restrictions: Nauru, Togo and Nicaragua. None of the eight countries had an increase on this measure. In Catholic-majority Nicaragua, for example, the government stopped enforcing a 2006 law – known as the “noise law” – that some evangelical Christian groups claimed was restricting their ability to organize outdoor worship services.

Religious groups faced fewer problems registering in four of the eight countries with substantial declines in government restrictions: Guinea Bissau, Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste and Togo. The government of Togo, for instance, did not reject any group’s registration application in the latest period studied.

Use of Government Force against Religious Groups or Individuals

One measure included in the Government Restrictions Index is the level of force governments used against religious groups or individuals. This measure tallies the number of countries in which individuals were killed, physically abused, imprisoned, detained or displaced from their homes for religion-related reasons. It also counts incidents in which individuals had their personal or religious property damaged or destroyed as a result of government actions. The number of countries in which governments used at least some measure of force against religious groups or individuals rose from 91 (46%) in the period ending in mid-2008 to 101 (51%) in the period ending in mid-2009. (See Summary of Results, GRI Q. 19.)

Although scores on the Government Restrictions Index were calculated based on the number of cases of government force in each country, the Pew Forum coders also examined the different types of force governments used. For instance, government force against religious groups led to individuals being killed in 24 countries (12%) in the period ending in mid-2009, about the same number of countries as in the previous reporting period.

In China, for example, police in Beijing stopped musician Yu Zhou and his wife, poet Xu Na, for speeding on Jan. 26, 2008. After finding Falun Gong materials in their car, the police detained the couple. Yu died in custody 11 days later. He was reportedly tortured, but the police refused to allow an autopsy. His wife was sentenced to three years in prison. In Laos, a Christian man died in July 2008 in the village of Katan in the province of Salavan after authorities reportedly forced him to drink alcohol. His relatives were later fined for conducting a Christian burial service. In Iran, security officers in Isfahan Province on July 17, 2008, raided the home of two Iranian Christians, who later died of injuries inflicted during the raid. And in Syria, human rights activists said at least nine Islamist inmates were killed by prison guards during riots at Sednaya Military Prison near Damascus in July 2008.

Detentions or imprisonments for religious reasons were reported in 78 countries (39%) during the most recent period studied, up from 70 countries (35%) in the period ending in mid-2008. In the East African country of Eritrea, for example, police arrested 22 Jehovah’s Witnesses on June 28, 2009, for holding an unapproved worship service in the city of Asmara. Jehovah’s Witnesses are frequently imprisoned or detained in Eritrea for refusing to do compulsory military service, which is against their religious beliefs. In Afghanistan, where misinterpretation of Islam is a punishable offense, two people were sentenced by a Kabul court in September 2008 to 20 years in prison for publishing a Dari-language translation of the Koran that did not include the parallel Arabic verses for comparison purposes. The court’s decision affirmed arguments made by religious scholars in Afghanistan that the translation misinterpreted verses in the Koran about alcohol, begging, homosexuality and adultery.

Religious groups or individuals had their personal or religious property damaged or destroyed as a result of government actions in 50 countries (25%) in the period ending in mid-2009, up from 29 countries (15%) as of mid-2008. In Vinh Long, Vietnam, for instance, the government tore down the Catholic convent of the Sisters of the Congregation of St. Paul of Chartre in January 2009 and converted the property into a park. In the Iranian city of Isfahan, government authorities used bulldozers to raze the house of worship of a group of Gonabadi (or Sufi) dervishes in February 2009.¹⁰ The authorities arrested all of the Sufi Muslims who were present and destroyed all Sufi books and publications on the premises. In Brazil, the municipal government of Salvador de Bahia in 2008 destroyed an Afro-Brazilian Candomblé temple that had been illegally constructed on public land. After reviewing the case, the mayor of Salvador publicly apologized, dismissed the official responsible and had the temple rebuilt.

Tens of thousands of people remained displaced from their homes at least in part because of government policies toward religious groups. Displacements were reported in 45 countries (23%) in the period ending in mid-2009, up from 38 countries (19%) as of mid-2008. In some cases, the number of people displaced reflected the continuing effects of earlier conflicts. In India, for example, an estimated 55,000 Kashmiri families, most of them Hindu, remained in refugee camps as a result of the long-standing conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. Many Hindus reportedly were reluctant to return to their homes because they were afraid they would not be protected by the police, who are primarily Muslim.

Constitutional Protections for Religious Freedom

Nearly all of the 198 countries included in this study either call for freedom of religion in their constitutions or basic laws (143 countries) or protect at least some religious practices (an additional 48 countries). But not all governments fully respect the religious rights written into their laws. More than half of the countries (111, or 56%) include stipulations in their constitution or basic laws that appear to substantially contradict the concept of religious freedom. Afghanistan’s Constitution, for instance, appears to protect its citizens’ right to choose and practice a religion other than Islam. However, the constitution also stipulates that “no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam” and instructs judges to rule according to sharia law if no specific Afghan law applies to a case.

Seven countries – Algeria, Eritrea, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – do not include any provisions for religious freedom in their constitutions or basic laws.¹¹ The Algerian Constitution, for example, establishes Islam as the state religion and forbids practices that are contrary to Islamic ethics.

There appears to be at least some relationship between constitutional protections for religious freedom and overall changes in government restrictions on religion. Among the countries with the least robust constitutional protections for religious freedom – that is, countries whose constitutions contain one or more substantial contradictions concerning religious freedom or provide no protection for it at all – index scores increased in 11 and decreased in only two (more than a five-fold difference). In contrast, among the countries whose constitutions provide for religious freedom without substantial contradictions (including those with limited qualifications), index scores increased in three countries and decreased in six (a two-fold difference).

More specifically, among the countries whose constitutions or basic laws do not provide for religious freedom, government restrictions on religion substantially increased in three (Algeria, Libya and Yemen) and did not decrease in any. In the 111 countries that provide for religious freedom but have substantial contradictions in their constitutions or basic laws (such as limiting religious freedom in order to protect “public morals” or making the nation’s laws conform to one particular religion), government restrictions substantially increased in eight countries (Somalia, Syria, France, Malaysia, Egypt, Qatar, Hong Kong and Serbia) and substantially decreased in two countries (Greece and Nauru).

However, the pattern is reversed among the 41 countries whose constitutions or basic laws provide for religious freedom without qualification or contradiction. Among these countries, government restrictions decreased in three countries (Timor-Leste, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of Macedonia) and increased in one (Kyrgyzstan). This pattern is also seen, though more faintly, among the 39 countries whose constitutions or basic laws provide for religious freedom but include limited qualifications, such as the right to limit religious freedom to protect “public order.” Restrictions decreased in three of these countries (Togo, Guinea Bissau and Nicaragua) and increased in two of them (Uganda and Tajikistan).  (The level of government restrictions stayed roughly the same in the vast majority of cases.)

Government Restrictions on Religion by Region

There are major differences among the five regions of the world – Asia-Pacific, Middle East-North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Americas – when it comes to government restrictions on religion. On average, government restrictions are highest in the Middle East-North Africa. The median score on the Government Restrictions Index for the 20 countries in the region rose from 5.0 as of mid-2008 to 5.4 as of mid-2009. Sixteen of the 20 countries in the region (80%) had high or very high government restrictions as of mid-2009, and no country had low government restrictions. Six countries in the region (Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Qatar) had substantial increases in government restrictions from mid-2006 to mid-2009, and no country had a substantial decrease.

The situation in the Asia-Pacific region was more mixed. Overall, the region’s median score on the Government Restrictions Index was 3.7 as of mid-2009, up from 3.3 as of mid-2008. Nineteen of the 51 countries in the region (37%) had high or very high restrictions as of mid-2009, while 23 countries (45%) had low government restrictions. Government restrictions increased substantially in four countries in the region (Hong Kong, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia and Tajikistan) and decreased substantially in two (Nauru and Timor-Leste).

Seven of the 10 countries in the world with very high government restrictions as of mid-2009 were in the Asia-Pacific region: Burma (Myanmar), China, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives and Uzbekistan. Twelve of the 32 countries in the world with high government restrictions also were in this region (Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, India, Laos, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Vietnam). At the same time, some of the least restrictive governments in the world also were found in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, Taiwan and Australia.

Europe’s median index score for the period ending in mid-2009 (1.9) was slightly higher than its median score for the period ending in mid-2008 (1.8). Europe’s median score also remained higher than the scores for sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas. This was due in part to former Communist countries in Europe that have replaced state atheism with state-favored religions that are accorded special protections or privileges. All of the European countries with high government restrictions as of mid-2009 were in the East, including Belarus, Bulgaria, Moldova and Russia. (No European country had very high restrictions.) France and Greece had the highest levels of government restrictions in Western Europe, and both fell in the moderate category. France and Serbia were the only European countries to have substantial increases in government restrictions from mid-2006 to mid-2009.

The median level of government restrictions in sub-Saharan Africa is the next-to-lowest of the world’s five major regions. Overall, the median level of government restrictions in sub-Saharan Africa dropped from 1.4 in the period ending in mid-2008 to 1.2 in the period ending in mid-2009. Government restrictions in the region decreased substantially in three countries (Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Togo) and increased substantially in two (Somalia and Uganda). Eritrea had the highest level of restrictions in the region; it was the only sub-Saharan African country with very high restrictions as of mid-2009.

Of the five regions, the Americas had the lowest median level of government restrictions on religion. Nearly 90% of the countries in the region (31 of the 35 countries) had low government restrictions as of mid-2009. Four countries in the region (Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela and Costa Rica) were in the moderate category. No country in the region had a substantial increase in restrictions from mid-2006 to mid-2009, and restrictions decreased substantially in Nicaragua. Cuba, which continued to have the highest level of government restrictions in the Americas, had a slight but not substantial drop in its score. Canada, the United States and Brazil all continued to have relatively low government restrictions on religion.

Footnotes:

4 Answers to Questions 1 and 2 in the Government Restrictions Index, which deal with constitutional provisions, were recoded for the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008 to match the coding conventions used from mid-2007 to mid-2009. (For question wording, see Summary of Results.) After the recoding, 40 countries scored in the top 20% on the GRI as of mid-2008 (meaning they had high or very high restrictions) rather than the 43 countries that were listed in the December 2009 baseline report. See Methodology for more details. (return to text)

5 Because the Pew Forum categorized the levels of government restrictions by percentiles, the variance in the number of countries at each level from one period to another is not a meaningful one. The differences reflect how many tie scores there are at different break points. Without the tie scores, the number of countries in each category would be the same from period to period (e.g., the top 20% of scores would equal 40 countries, the bottom 60% of scores would equal 119 countries, etc.). (return to text)

6 For more information on Hizb ut-Tahrir, see the Pew Forum’s September 2010 report Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe. (return to text)

7 For more information on the Muslim Brotherhood, see the Pew Forum’s September 2010 report Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe. (return to text)

8 The best available census and survey data indicate that Christians now number roughly 5% of the Egyptian population, or about 4 million people. See the Pew Research Center’s “Ask the Expert” entry for Feb. 16, 2011. (return to text)

9 For more information on the Tablighi Jama’at and Salafism, see the Pew Forum’s September 2010 report Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe. (return to text)

10 For more information on Sufism, see the Pew Forum’s September 2010 report Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe. (return to text)

11 The Eritrean Constitution that was ratified by the National Assembly in 1997 provides for religious freedom, but the government has not yet implemented the constitution. Therefore, there is no effective constitutional protection for religious freedom in Eritrea. (return to text)

The following table shows all 198 countries and territories in descending order of their scores on the Pew Forum’s index of social hostilities involving religion as of mid-2009. The Pew Forum has not attached numerical rankings to the countries because there are numerous tie scores and the differences between the scores of countries that are close to each other on this table are not necessarily meaningful. This is particularly the case at the low end of the scale: The range of scores among the 40 countries in the Very High (top 5%) and high (next 15%) categories is greater than the range of scores among the 115 countries in the Low (bottom 60%) category.

Very High top 5% of scores

Scores from 7.2 to 8.3
Egypt	China	Eritrea
Iran	Maldives	Indonesia
Saudi Arabia	Malaysia
Uzbekistan	Burma (Myanmar)

High Next 15% of scores

Scores from 4.7 to 7.1
Pakistan	Yemen	Azerbaijan
Algeria	Afghanistan	Iraq
Tajikistan	Brunei	Bangladesh
Turkmenistan	Laos	Western Sahara
Russia	Sudan	Bulgaria
Syria	Tunisia	Oman
Libya	Kuwait	Moldova
Belarus	Somalia*	Bhutan
Turkey	Morocco	Qatar
Mauritania	India	Israel
Vietnam	Jordan

Moderate Next 20% of scores

Scores from 2.5 to 4.6
Kazakhstan	Comoros	Tanzania
Kyrgyzstan	Mexico	Georgia
Singapore	Chad	Tuvalu
Armenia	Thailand	United Kingdom
France	Belgium	Slovakia
United Arab Emirates	Zimbabwe	Venezuela
Greece	Austria	Cambodia
Cuba	Uganda	Denmark
Serbia	Palestinian territories**	Monaco
Bahrain	Kenya	Costa Rica
Nigeria	Central African Republic	Lebanon
Romania	Angola
Sri Lanka	Ethiopia
Nepal	Germany

Low Bottom 60% of scores

Scores from 0.0 to 2.4
Rwanda	Chile	Netherlands
Mongolia	South Korea	Haiti
Ukraine	Seychelles	Cameroon
Lithuania	Ireland	Luxembourg
Kazakhstan	Nepal	Ethiopia
Latvia	Malta	Andorra
Italy	Mauritius	Dominican Republic
Hong Kong	Montenegro	Botswana
Madagascar	Antigua and Barbuda	Mali
Ivory Coast	Djibouti	Samoa
Argentina	Switzerland	Ghana
Iceland	Papua New Guinea	Solomon Islands
Northern Cyprus	Finland	Fiji
Croatia	Republic of Macedonia	Hungary
Colombia	Nauru	Taiwan
Cyprus	Gambia	Australia
Kosovo	Nicaragua	Lesotho
Niger	Poland	Republic of Congo
Macau	Slovenia	St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Bosnia-Herzegovina	Ecuador	Guyana
Honduras	Jamaica	Liberia
Equatorial Guinea	Philippines	Portugal
Peru	Brazil	St. Kitts and Nevis
Czech Republic	South Africa	Grenada
Swaziland	Dominica	Palau
Tonga	Togo	Suriname
Sweden	Mozambique	Suriname
Bahamas	Estonia	New Zealand
United States	St. Lucia	Japan
Zambia	Vanuatu	Benin
Spain	Trinidad and Tobago	Guinea Bissau
Canada	Senegal	Cape Verde
Paraguay	Panama	Marshall Islands
Norway	Guatemala	Namibia
Liechtenstein	Belize	Federated States of Micronesia
Congo	Burkina Faso	Timor-Leste
Guinea	Kiribati	Burundi
Gabon	Bolivia	Sao Tome and Principe
El Salvador	Barbados	San Marino
Albania	Malawi	Sierra Leone

Footnotes:

Denotes a substantial increase from mid-2006 to mid-2009.

Denotes a substantial decrease from mid-2006 to mid-2009.

NOTE: The number of countries in each percentile range may be slightly more or less than the actual percentage because of tie scores. Substantial increase or decrease is defined as a change of at least 1.5 standard deviations above or below the mean amount of change among all 198 countries on each index. The change also had to be in the same direction over the periods studied. (See Methodology for more details.)

North Korea: The sources clearly indicate that the government of North Korea is among the most repressive in the world with respect to religion as well as other civil liberties. But because North Korean society is effectively closed to outsiders, the sources are unable to provide the kind of specific and timely information that the Pew Forum coded in this quantitative study. Therefore, the report does not include a score for North Korea on either index.

* Somalia: The level of government restrictions in Somalia is difficult to assess due to the lack of a functioning national government; the social hostilities index may be a more reliable indicator of the situation in Somalia.

** Palestinian Territories: The Palestinian territories’ score on government restrictions reflects the policies of the Palestinian Authority government (headed by Mahmoud Abbas and headquartered in the West Bank) rather than the actions of Hamas in Gaza (which is not recognized by most of the sources for this report as a legitimate government).

The Social Hostilities Index (SHI) measures hostile acts by private individuals, organizations and social groups that restrict religious beliefs and practices. The 10-point index is based on 13 questions used by the Pew Forum to gauge the level of hostilities both between and within religious groups, including mob or sectarian violence, crimes motivated by religious bias, physical conflict over conversions, harassment over attire for religious reasons and other religion-related intimidation and violence, including terrorism and war. (For more information on the index, see the Methodology. The questions are shown in the Summary of Results. Details on how all 198 countries and territories scored on each question are available online, in the Results by Country.)

The Pew Forum categorizes the levels of social hostilities by percentile. Countries with scores in the top 5% are categorized as “very high.” The next highest 15% of scores are categorized as “high,” and the following 20% are categorized as “moderate.” The bottom 60% of scores are categorized as “low.” (For a complete list of countries in each category, see the Social Hostilities Index table.)

Situation as of Mid-2009

Overall, the study finds that during the period from mid-2007 to mid-2009 social hostilities involving religion were high or very high in 40 countries, about one-in-five worldwide. The 10 countries that had very high hostilities as of mid-2009 were Iraq, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Israel and Egypt. Social hostilities were in the moderate range in 43 countries. A much larger number of countries – 115 – had low levels of social hostilities.¹² But because many of the countries with high or very high social hostilities (including India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria) are very populous, nearly half of the world’s population (48%) was living with high or very high social hostilities involving religion in the period ending in mid-2009.

As with the index of government restrictions, the mathematical presentation of scores for individual countries on the Social Hostilities Index needs to be kept in context. The Pew Forum has chosen not to attach numerical rankings from No. 1 to No. 198 both because there are many tie scores and because the differences between the scores of countries that are close together on the index may not be very important.

Overall Changes in Social Hostilities Involving Religion

Comparing the Pew Forum’s index scores for the baseline period (mid-2006 to mid-2008) with the scores for the latest period (mid-2007 to mid-2009), the study finds that social hostilities involving religion rose substantially in 10 countries and decreased substantially in five. The level of social hostilities stayed roughly the same in most (183) countries. (As noted earlier in the report, the study refers to a change in a country’s score as “substantial” only if it is at least 1.5 standard deviations above or below the mean amount of change among all 198 countries or territories. The change also had to be in the same direction over the two periods studied, meaning that it had to rise or fall both in the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008 and in the period from mid-2007 to mid-2009. For more details, see the Methodology.)

In general, most of the increases in social hostilities occurred in countries that had moderate levels of social hostilities to begin with, while most of the decreases were in countries that initially had high scores. This is a different pattern than the one observed for government restrictions on religion, where most of the increases occurred among countries that already had very high or high restrictions and most of the decreases were among countries that started with low restrictions. Among the 40 countries that started out in the moderate range, social hostilities increased substantially in six and decreased substantially in one. Among the 30 countries that started out in the high category, hostilities decreased substantially in four and increased substantially in two. There were no substantial changes in index scores among the countries that already had very high social hostilities. Among the 117 countries that had low levels of social hostilities as of mid-2008, there were substantial increases in just two: China and Sweden.

Looking at all 198 countries and territories, the average score on the Social Hostilities Index rose from about 2.0 for the period ending in mid-2008 to about 2.1 for the period ending in mid-2009. Among the 5% of countries that started with very high hostilities, the average score on the index rose from 7.8 to 8.0. The average score for countries in the high category went from 4.6 to 4.7. Among the 20% of countries that had moderate hostilities to begin with, the average index score declined from 2.5 as of mid-2008 to 2.4 as of mid-2009. There was no change in the average index score among the 60% of countries that initially had low scores on the Social Hostilities Index.

Changes in Some Key Types of Social Hostilities

Crimes, malicious acts or violence motivated by religious hatred or bias were reported in 142 countries (72%) in the period from mid-2007 to mid-2009, about the same as in the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008. (See Summary of Results, SHI Q. 1.) The most common types of hostilities were harassment and intimidation (reported in 132 countries in the period ending in mid-2009); property damage (reported in 85 countries); and physical assaults (reported in 77 countries). At least one of these types of malicious acts, for example, was reported in 39 of the 45 European countries, where many of the victims were members of religious minorities, notably Jews and Muslims.¹³ In some European countries, crimes or malicious acts motivated by religious bias appeared to increase relative to other types of hate crimes. In the Netherlands, for instance, attacks on Muslims and Islamic institutions increased by about 25% from 2006 to 2007 (from 62 to 82) while the overall number of racist and right-wing extremist acts in the country decreased slightly over the same period.¹⁴

During the latest reporting period, there was an uptick in the number of countries that experienced mob violence related to religion. Religion-related mob violence occurred in 52 countries in the period ending in mid-2009, compared with 38 countries in the period ending in mid-2008. (See Summary of Results, SHI Q. 2.) In the Southeast Asian country of Timor-Leste, for instance, a group of Catholics attacked a newly built Protestant church in the Aileu District on Nov. 20, 2008, and demanded that the Protestant missionaries operating the church leave. Although no one was injured, the attack represented an escalation of tensions, since no documented incidents of religion-related mob violence were reported in the country from mid-2006 to mid-2008.

In sub-Saharan Africa, accusations of witchcraft triggered several incidents of mob violence. The belief that some people are able to call on demons or other supernatural forces to harm others is common in parts of the region.¹⁵ In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, a fight broke out at a soccer match in the city of Butembo in September 2008 over allegations that some players were using witchcraft to fix the game. The violence spread to the stands, and 11 people died as the spectators stampeded. In the Central African Republic, where witchcraft is a criminal offense, members of a rebel group known as the Popular Army for the Restoration of the Republic reportedly were involved in a number of attacks on people suspected of practicing witchcraft. For example, the group allegedly tortured a man near Kaga Bondoro in June 2009 after the man was accused of bewitching his nephew. The group also was implicated in an incident that occurred in the same month in the village of Ngoumourou, where a woman was tied to a tree and then beaten for allegedly practicing witchcraft.

The number of countries in which individuals or groups used violence or the threat of violence, including so-called honor killings, to try to enforce religious norms remained about the same. Such hostilities occurred in 47 countries – about one-in-four – in the period ending in mid-2009, compared with 50 countries in the period ending in mid-2008. (See Summary of Results, SHI Q. 9.) In Germany, for example, a Hamburg District Court on Feb. 13, 2009, found a German-Afghan man guilty of killing his sister in 2008 because he was angry over her perceived “Western” lifestyle, including how she dressed.

Religion-related terrorist groups were active in 74 countries around the world in the period ending in mid-2009, up from 63 countries in the period ending in mid-2008. (See Summary of Results, SHI Q. 4.) In half of the 74 countries, the groups carried out acts of violence. In the other half, their activities were limited to recruitment and fundraising. Some of the apparent increase in religion-related terrorism could reflect the use of new source material that provided greater detail on terrorist activities than the sources used in the 2009 baseline report.¹⁶ (For more details, see the Methodology.) Nevertheless, terrorist violence resulting in injuries or deaths is known to have increased in some countries. (For the purposes of this report, religion-related terrorist violence is defined as politically motivated acts against noncombatants by sub-national groups or clandestine agents with a religious justification or intent.) For instance, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a militant Muslim separatist group based in China’s Xinjiang Province, carried out a series of bombings across China in 2008, including in the eastern city of Shanghai, the southern city of Guangzhou and the south-central city of Kunming. Just days before the 2008 Olympics, 16 police officers were killed and a number of others were injured in a grenade attack and assault by ETIM in the far western city of Kashgar (also known as Kashi). There were no confirmed attacks in China by ETIM prior to 2008.

Countries with Substantial Increases in Social Hostilities

Over the three-year period covered in this study, social hostilities involving religion rose substantially in 10 of the 198 countries or territories. (See the Executive Summary for a definition of substantial change.)

Two of the countries with substantial increases – Nigeria and Russia – had high levels of social hostilities to begin with. As of mid-2009, Nigeria had very high levels of hostilities, while Russia remained in the high category. Six of the 10 countries that had substantial increases in religion-related social hostilities began with moderate levels of hostilities. By mid-2009, five of the six countries had high levels of social hostilities: Bulgaria, Denmark, Thailand, the United Kingdom and Vietnam. (Mongolia remained in the moderate category.) The two countries that began with low levels of social hostilities – China and Sweden – had moderate levels by mid-2009. (See the Social Hostilities Index table.)

In Nigeria, hostilities between Christians and Muslims were on the rise well before the April 2011 presidential election that saw Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from the South, defeat Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim from the North. In November 2008, for instance, at least 300 people were killed and hundreds of others were injured during three days of religious rioting in the city of Jos. A number of churches and mosques were destroyed and at least 10,000 people were temporarily displaced from their homes as a result of the violence. On Feb. 20, 2009, violence erupted in the town of Bauchi after Muslim worshippers parked their cars outside a nearby Christian church. Nearly a dozen people died and at least 100 were injured. The rioters also burned about 200 properties, including six churches and three mosques.

In Russia, more than 1,100 casualties resulted from religion-related terrorist attacks during the two-year period ending in mid-2009. This was more than double the number of casualties recorded in the previous reporting period. (This includes people who were killed, wounded, displaced, kidnapped or had their property destroyed in religion-related terrorist attacks.)

While not all militant separatist groups operating in Russia are religiously motivated, some apparently are, including a relatively new group known as the Caucasus Emirate. Founded in 2007 by a veteran of the first and second Chechen wars, Doku Umarov, the group reportedly has consolidated the efforts of previously disparate militant groups throughout the Caucasus region and has carried out a number of large-scale violent attacks.¹⁷ On June 22, 2009, for example, a female suicide bomber linked to the group drove into a motorcade carrying the president of the Republic of Ingushetia. The attack, which occurred in the Ingush city of Nazran, killed three people and wounded the president and four others.

Among the other countries that had substantial increases in social hostilities during the period studied were Denmark and the United Kingdom. In February 2008, for example, riots broke out in Muslim neighborhoods in Copenhagen and other Danish cities after the country’s major newspapers republished a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad by Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. The papers reprinted the cartoon – which had prompted riots around the world when it first was published in 2005 – to protest a recently disclosed plot by three Muslims to assassinate Westergaard.¹⁸ During the period studied, tensions also were reported between Denmark’s Muslim and Jewish communities. In January 2009, for example, a man of Palestinian descent shot and injured two Israeli Jews, allegedly in response to the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip in late 2008 and early 2009.

Tensions created by the conflict in Gaza also were linked to an increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom during the first half of 2009. The Community Security Trust (CST), an organization that has monitored anti-Semitism in the U.K. since 1984, said there were 628 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.K. in the first six months of 2009, an “unprecedented rise” from the first half of 2008, when 277 incidents were reported. Moreover, the monthly totals for both January 2009 (288 incidents) and February 2009 (114 incidents) exceeded the previous monthly high of 105 incidents recorded by CST in October 2000.¹⁹ More than half of the anti-Semitic incidents recorded by CST in January 2009 included some reference to the fighting in Gaza.

During the period covered in this study, Muslims in the U.K. also were victims of abuse and other types of social hostilities. On Nov. 29, 2008, for example, soccer fans in Newcastle reportedly shouted anti-Muslim slurs at a member of an opposing team. On May 5, 2009, a suspected arson fire gutted an Islamic center in Bedfordshire. On May 10, 2009, authorities at a Nottinghamshire jail discovered an undetonated bomb that had been placed in a Muslim worship area.

As noted earlier, two of the countries with substantial increases in social hostilities involving religion – China and Sweden – previously had low levels of social hostilities. As of mid-2009, both countries had moved into the moderate category. The increase in hostilities in Sweden was due in part to a rise in tensions between the general population and the country’s growing Muslim minority.²⁰ In December 2008, for example, Muslim youths in a suburb of Malmo, Sweden’s third most populous city, clashed with police over a three-week period. The violence was triggered by a city official’s decision not to renew the lease on a property that had been used for many years as an Islamic cultural center and also housed a mosque. The State Department, citing a June 2009 report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, noted that hate crimes against Muslims increased by about a third from 2007 to 2008, from 206 to 272 cases. In August 2008, for instance, a mosque was set ablaze on the day it was set to open in the small northern town of Strömsund. There also were several instances in which Muslim women reportedly faced discrimination for wearing religious head coverings. Sweden also experienced an uptick in anti-Semitic incidents. In March 2009, the mayor of Malmo decided not to let the public attend a Davis Cup tennis match between Sweden and Israel because of security concerns.

Countries with Substantial Decreases in Social Hostilities

Social hostilities involving religion decreased substantially in five countries from mid-2006 to mid-2009: Chad, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Liberia and Tanzania. Four of the five countries – all except Tanzania – had high levels of social hostilities to begin with. Tanzania started out with moderate levels of social hostilities.

Social hostilities in Lebanon had spiked during the summer of 2006, when Israeli and Hezbollah forces waged war in Lebanon, Northern Israel and the Golan Heights.²¹ Tensions among religious groups in Lebanon remained high after the fighting ended – particularly between the government of then Prime Minister Fouad Siniora (a Sunni Muslim) and the opposition led by Hezbollah (a Shia Muslim group) – but tensions in recent years were not as high as they had been immediately following the war. In the most recent period examined, there also were fewer acts of violence linked to Christian-Muslim rivalries in the country. Nevertheless, Lebanon continued to have high levels of social hostilities in the period ending in mid-2009.

Kyrgyzstan, a predominantly Muslim nation in Central-Western Asia, also continued to have high social hostilities in the period ending in mid-2009. But there were fewer attacks on Christian converts and churches than in the past. There had been a series of such attacks in 2006 and 2007, including a July 2006 incident in which a Baptist preacher in Osh Oblast was attacked by a mob of 80 Muslims. The attackers physically assaulted the preacher and burned his Bibles and other religious materials. In a second incident, in November 2006, a mob threw Molotov cocktails at the pastor’s church, but the staff was able to extinguish the flames, and the fire caused little damage to the structure.

The African nation of Chad was the only country that went from having high social hostilities as of mid-2008 to having low social hostilities as of mid-2009. There had been a number of Muslim-Christian clashes in 2006 and 2007, but there were far fewer incidents in 2008 and the first part of 2009. Also, there were no incidents of violence in any of the years covered in this study on the scale of the 2004 Muslim-Christian riot in the southern town of Bebedja that left about a dozen people dead and nearly two dozen wounded. The riot continued to be a source of tension in the country for many years.

In the West African nation of Liberia, which had moderate social hostilities as of mid-2009, there were fewer reports of societal abuses or discrimination due to religion in the period from mid-2007 to mid-2009 than there had been in the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008. In the later period, for instance, there were no incidents like the one that occurred in 2006 in the north-central county of Nimba, where 37 suspected witches and witchdoctors were held captive for two months with the blessing of local chiefs and subjected to beatings and torture.

During the most recent reporting period, there were fewer reported incidents of violence toward people alleged to be practicing witchcraft in Tanzania. Although there continued to be some tensions between Muslims and Christians, there was a decline in public altercations between the two religious groups. Tanzania had low levels of social hostilities as of mid-2009.

Social Hostilities Involving Religion by Region

When it comes to social hostilities involving religion, there are major differences among the five regions of the world – Asia-Pacific, Middle East-North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Americas. On average, social hostilities are highest in the Middle East-North Africa. The median score on the Social Hostilities Index for the 20 countries in the region was 4.4 (in the high range) both in the period ending in mid-2008 and in the period ending in mid-2009. More than half of the countries in the Middle East-North Africa (11 of 20 countries, or 55%) had high or very high social hostilities as of mid-2009. No country in the region had a substantial increase in social hostilities over the periods studied, and one country – Lebanon – had a substantial decrease in hostilities.

The Asia-Pacific region had the second highest level of social hostilities as of mid-2009. Overall, the region’s median score on the Social Hostilities Index increased from 1.7 as of mid-2008 to 1.9 as of mid-2009. Slightly more of the region’s 51 countries had high or very high social hostilities as of mid-2009 (27%) than in the period ending in mid-2008 (25%). Fewer countries in the region had low hostilities as of mid-2009 (49%, compared with 53% as of mid-2008). Hostilities substantially increased in four countries: Vietnam, Thailand, China and Mongolia. They substantially decreased in one country: Kyrgyzstan.

Five of the 10 countries in the world with very high social hostilities as of mid-2009 were in the Asia-Pacific region: Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh. Ten of the 30 countries with high social hostilities also were in Asia-Pacific, including populous countries such as Iran, Turkey, Burma, Vietnam and Thailand. These numbers are disproportionately high given that Asia-Pacific accounts for about a quarter of the 198 countries and territories included in the study.

Europe’s median score on the Social Hostilities Index was higher in mid-2009 (1.9) than it was in mid-2008 (1.7). Europe’s 2009 median score also was higher than sub-Saharan Africa’s. Five of the 10 countries in the world with substantial increases in social hostilities were in Europe: Russia, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria and Sweden. No country in Europe had a substantial decrease in social hostilities during the period studied.

Five of the seven European countries with high social hostilities as of mid-2009 were in the East: Russia, Serbia, Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria. The other European countries with high social hostilities were Denmark and the United Kingdom.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s median level of social hostilities in mid-2009 was the next-to-lowest of the world’s five major regions. Overall, the region’s median score on the Social Hostilities Index dropped from 1.3 in the period ending in mid-2008 to 1.2 in the period ending in mid-2009. Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas were the only regions to have an overall decline. Social hostilities substantially decreased in three countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Liberia, Chad and Tanzania. They increased substantially in only one: Nigeria, the region’s most populous country. Nigeria and Somalia both had very high social hostilities as of mid-2009.

Of the five regions, the Americas had the lowest median score on the Social Hostilities Index. The region’s median score dropped from 0.6 as of mid-2008 to 0.5 as of mid-2009. About 90% of the countries in the Americas (32 of 35 countries) had low social hostilities as of mid-2009. Two countries in the region (Columbia and the United States) were in the moderate category, while one country (Mexico) had high social hostilities. No country’s level of hostilities changed substantially over the period examined. Mexico, which had the highest level of hostilities in the Americas across the periods studied, had a slight but not substantial drop in its score.

In the United States, social hostilities involving religion remained at a moderate level during the period studied. According to FBI crime reports, the U.S. had more than 1,300 hate crimes involving religious bias in all of 2009.²² Most of these crimes involved anti-Jewish violence (931 of the 1,303 crimes, or about 71%). About 8% of the crimes (107 of the 1,303) were motivated by anti-Islamic bias. (Most of the recent controversies over the construction of mosques and Islamic centers in New York City and other communities across the country took place after the period covered in this report.²³)

Footnotes

12 Because the Pew Forum categorized the levels of social hostilities by percentile, the variance in the number of countries at each level from one period to another is not a meaningful one. The differences reflect how many tie scores there are at different break points. Without the tie scores, the number of countries in each category would be the same from period to period, (e.g., the top 20% of scores would equal 40 countries, the bottom 60% of scores would equal 119 countries, etc.). (return to text)

13 See European Network Against Racism, 2008 Shadow Report on Racism in Europe, pages 3 and 18. (return to text)

14 See University of Leiden and the Anne Frank Foundation, Monitor Racisme & Extremisme, edited by Jaap van Donselaar and Peter R. Rodrigues, pages 27 and 35. (The report is in Dutch.) (return to text)

15 For background on African traditional religions, see the Pew Forum’s April 2010 report Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa. (return to text)

16 In coding terrorist activities during the period from mid-2008 to mid-2009, the Pew Forum’s coders used the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS), a publicly available database maintained by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, a U.S. government organization that is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The WITS database provides greater detail than the State Department’s International Religious Freedom reports and the U.S. State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism, which were the primary sources used to code terrorist activities in the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008. All three sources were used to code incidents from mid-2007 to mid-2009. (return to text)

17 See “The Caucasus Emirate” by Scott Stewart and Ben West, STRATFOR, April 15, 2010. When Umarov founded the Caucasus Emirate in 2007, he reportedly called for the formation of an Islamic entity in the region and the adoption of Sharia law. (return to text)

18 The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten first published Westergaard’s depiction of the Prophet Muhammad on Sept. 30, 2005.Another attempt was made on his life on Jan. 1, 2010, after the period covered in this study. (return to text)

19 Community Security Trust, Anti-Semitic Incidents Report 2009, 2010. The Trust reported that there were a total of 924 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.K. in 2009, the highest annual total since it began reporting anti-Semitic incidents in 1984, and 55% higher than the previous record of 598 incidents in 2006. (return to text)

20 For background, see the Pew Forum’s January 2011 report The Future of the Global Muslim Population. (return to text)

21 The war began on July 12, 2006, when Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel and ambushed an Israeli patrol. It lasted until a U.N.-brokered cease fire went into effect on Aug. 14, 2006. (return to text)

22 See Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program’s Hate Crime Statistics Program, Table 1: Incidents, Offenses, Victims, and Unknown Offenders by Bias Motivation, 2009. (return to text)

23 See the Pew Forum’s Sept. 24, 2010, analysis “Controversies Over Mosques and Islamic Centers Across the U.S..” (return to text)

The following table shows all 198 countries and territories in descending order of their scores on the Pew Forum’s index of social hostilities involving religion as of mid-2009. The Pew Forum has not attached numerical rankings to the countries because there are numerous tie scores and the differences between the scores of countries that are close to each other on this table are not necessarily meaningful. This is particularly the case at the low end of the scale: The range of scores among the 40 countries in the Very High (top 5%) and high (next 15%) categories is greater than the range of scores among the 115 countries in the Low (bottom 60%) category.

Very High top 5% of scores

Scores from 7.2 to 8.3
Iraq	Somalia	Israel
India	Indonesia	Egypt
Pakistan	Nigeria
Afghanistan	Bangladesh

High Next 15% of scores

Scores from 4.7 to 7.1
Yemen	Comoros	Denmark
Palestinian territories	Kenya	Burma (Myanmar)
Sri Lanka	Russia	Moldova
Saudi Arabia	Turkey	Thailand
Sudan	Mexico	Lebanon
Nepal	Serbia	Bulgaria
Iran	Ethiopia	United Kingdom
Algeria	Kyrgyzstan	Congo
Syria	Romania	Ghana
Jordan	Vietnam	Timor-Leste

Moderate Next 20% of scores

Scores from 2.5 to 4.6
Mongolia	Maldives	Sierra Leone
Colombia	Slovakia	Montenegro
Germany	Italy	Kuwait
Georgia	Liberia	Tuvalu
Philippines	Morocco	Spain
Bosnia-Herzegovina	Sweden	Djibouti
China	Azerbaijan	Cyprus
Greece	Central African Republic	United States
Armenia	Switzerland	Australia
Kosovo	Kazakhstan	Burkina Faso
Belarus	Uzbekistan	Republic of Macedonia
France	Libya
Ukraine	Zimbabwe
Bahrain	Papua New Guinea
Ivory Coast	Poland

Low Bottom 60% of scores

Scores from 0.0 to 2.4
Croatia	Argentina	Palau
Canada	Liechtenstein	Qatar
Brunei	Slovenia	Solomon Islands
Hungary	Zambia	Peru
Angola	Chile	Gabon
Belgium	Swaziland	Botswana
Chad	Portugal	El Salvador
South Africa	Cameroon	Republic of Congo
Tajikistan	Gambia	Singapore
Austria	Benin	Senegal
Tanzania	Bolivia	Andorra
Venezuela	Samoa	Bahamas
Brazil	Laos	Jamaica
Burundi	Bhutan	Marshall Islands
Guinea	Ireland	Oman
Malaysia	United Arab Emirates	Cape Verde
Trinidad and Tobago	New Zealand	Malta
Iceland	St. Vincent and the Grenadines	Belize
Netherlands	Eritrea	Dominican Republic
Japan	Latvia	Equatorial Guinea
Kiribati	Costa Rica	Federated States of Micronesia
Western Sahara	Paraguay	Grenada
Mauritania	Finland	Guyana
Cuba	Nauru	Lesotho
Czech Republic	Antigua and Barbuda	Macau
Norway	St. Kitts and Nevis	Monaco
St. Lucia	Madagascar	Panama
Uganda	Estonia	Rwanda
Lithuania	Guinea Bissau	San Marino
Fiji	Honduras	Sao Tome and Principe
Malawi	Albania	Seychelles
Namibia	Mali	South Korea
Guatemala	Nicaragua	Suriname
Niger	Cambodia	Taiwan
Mozambique	Ecuador	Togo
Turkmenistan	Hong Kong	Tonga
Haiti	Uruguay
Vanuatu	Barbados
El Salvador	Dominica
Northern Cyprus	Luxembourg

Footnotes:

Denotes a substantial increase from mid-2006 to mid-2009.

Denotes a substantial decrease from mid-2006 to mid-2009.

NOTE: The number of countries in each percentile range may be slightly more or less than the actual percentage because of tie scores. Substantial increase or decrease is defined as a change of at least 1.5 standard deviations above or below the mean amount of change among all 198 countries on each index. The change also had to be in the same direction over the periods studied. (See Methodology for more details.)

North Korea: The sources clearly indicate that the government of North Korea is among the most repressive in the world with respect to religion as well as other civil liberties. But because North Korean society is effectively closed to outsiders, the sources are unable to provide the kind of specific and timely information that the Pew Forum coded in this quantitative study. Therefore, the report does not include a score for North Korea on either index.

During the three-year period from mid-2006 to mid-2009, national, provincial or local governments harassed or attempted to intimidate religious groups in 142 of the 198 countries or territories included in this study (72%). Harassment of religious groups by individuals or groups in society was even more widespread, occurring in 153 countries (77%).

Harassment and intimidation take many forms, including physical assaults, arrests and detentions, the desecration of holy sites and discrimination against religious groups in employment, education or housing. Harassment and intimidation also include such things as verbal assaults on members of one religious group by other groups or individuals in society.²⁴

This section of the report looks at the harassment and attempted intimidation of particular religious groups. It is based on specific, publicly reported acts motivated by religious hatred or bias. It is important to note, however, that these data do not measure the severity of the harassment or intimidation, so it is not possible to say whether one religious group is harassed to a greater or lesser extent than other religious or ethnic minorities.

Adherents of the world’s two largest religious groups, Christians and Muslims, who together comprise more than half of the global population, were harassed or intimidated in the largest number of countries.²⁵ Over the three-year period studied, governmental or social harassment of Christians was reported in a total of 130 countries (66%), while harassment targeting Muslims was reported in 117 countries (59%). Buddhists and Hindus – who together account for roughly one-fifth of the world’s population – faced harassment or intimidation in fewer places; harassment of Hindus was reported in 27 countries (14%) and harassment of Buddhists in 16 (8%).

In proportion to their numbers, some smaller religious groups faced especially widespread hostility. Although Jews comprise less than 1% of the world’s population, government or social harassment of Jews was reported in 75 countries (38%). Members of other world religions – including Sikhs, ancient faiths such as Zoroastrianism, newer faith groups such as Rastafarians and groups that practice tribal or folk religions – were harassed in 84 countries (42%).

Some religious groups were more likely to be harassed by governments, while others were more likely to be harassed by individuals or groups in society. Muslims, for example, were harassed by government officials or organizations in 100 countries (51%) and by social groups or individuals in 84 countries (42%). Jews, on the other hand, experienced social harassment in many more countries than they faced government harassment. Harassment of Jews by individuals or groups was reported in 71 countries (36%), while government harassment of Jews was reported in 28 countries (14%).

Christians experienced governmental and social harassment in about the same number of countries; they were harassed by government officials or organizations in 104 countries (53%) and faced social harassment in 100 countries (51%).

Regional Patterns in the Harassment of Religious Groups

During the period from mid-2006 to mid-2009, harassment of religious groups was most widespread in the Middle East-North Africa, the region that also has the highest levels of government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion. There were reports of government and/or social harassment of religious groups and individuals in all 20 countries in the region. Religious groups also faced some form of harassment in 93% of the countries in Europe (42 of 45 countries); 90% of the countries in the Asia-Pacific region (46 of 51 countries); 85% of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa (40 of 47 countries); and 77% of the countries in the Americas (27 of 35 countries).

Harassment of Christians, Muslims and Jews was highest in the Middle East-North Africa. Although this is a predominantly Muslim region, followers of Islam were harassed in an even higher percentage of countries in the region than were Jews or Christians. Buddhists and Hindus faced the most harassment in the Asia-Pacific region, the part of the world with the largest concentrations of these two religious groups.

Muslims were harassed in 80% of the countries in Europe and more than half of the countries in Asia-Pacific (59%) and sub-Saharan Africa (57%). Christians were harassed in more than two-thirds of the countries in Europe (69%) and sub-Saharan Africa (68%). Christians also faced harassment in nearly four-in-ten countries in the Americas (37%). Jews were harassed in more countries in the Americas (31%) than Muslims (14%).

In each region of the world, members of other world religions and groups that practice tribal or folk religions faced harassment in a substantial number of countries. Indeed, these groups were harassed in at least four-in-ten countries in the Asia-Pacific region (49%), the Americas (46%), sub-Saharan Africa (40%) and the Middle East-North Africa (40%). In Europe, such harassment was reported in a third of the countries (36%).  In the Americas, followers of Native American faiths and adherents of other world religions were harassed in a larger share of countries (46%) than Christians (37%), Muslims (14%), Jews (31%), Hindus (6%) or Buddhists (3%).

Footnotes:

24 This section is drawn from Question 11 on the Government Restrictions Index (“Was there harassment or intimidation of religious groups by any level of government?”) and Question 1 on the Social Hostilities Index (“Were there crimes, malicious acts or violence motivated by religious hatred or bias?”). The latter was a summary question that included several sub-components, including a question specifically asking about harassment and intimidation. (return to text)

25 As of 2010, Muslims made up nearly a quarter (23.4%) of the world’s population, according to the Pew Forum’s January 2011 report The Future of the Global Muslim Population. The Pew Forum is currently compiling population data on other world religions and intends to publish a series of reports on the demography of religion in 2011-2012. In the meantime, the population figures used here are from the World Religion Database at Boston University, which estimates that Christians comprise about a third (32.9%) of the world’s population. (return to text)

Restrictions on religious beliefs and practices occur in a variety of circumstances, but this study finds that they are particularly common in countries that prohibit blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion. While such laws are sometimes promoted as a way to protect religion and reduce social hostilities involving religion, in practice they often serve to punish religious minorities whose beliefs are deemed unorthodox or heretical, and who therefore are seen as threatening religious harmony in the country.

As of mid-2009, 59 countries (30%) had a law, rule or policy at some level of government forbidding blasphemy (remarks or writings considered to be contemptuous of God), apostasy (abandoning one’s faith) or defamation (disparagement or criticism) of particular religions or religion in general. Penalties for violating these laws, ranging from fines to imprisonment to death, were enforced in 44 of the 59 countries.

This is the first time the Pew Forum has included laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion in its ongoing study of global restrictions on religion. For consistency’s sake, the results are not incorporated into the scores for each country on the Government Restrictions Index or the Social Hostilities Index. Instead, the newly collected data are analyzed separately here.

Globally, countries that have laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion were more likely to have high government restrictions or social hostilities than countries that do not have such laws. A solid majority (59%) of countries that enforce such laws had high or very high restrictions on religion (government or social) as of mid-2009. Among countries that do not have such laws, by contrast, 58% had low restrictions or hostilities.

Not only were government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion generally higher in countries with laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion, but restrictions also rose in many of these countries. From mid-2006 to mid-2009, restrictions or hostilities increased substantially in 10 (23%) of the 44 countries where governments actively enforce penalties for blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion; restrictions or hostilities decreased substantially in just one country in that category (2%).²⁶ In the 15 countries where such laws are on the books but are not actively enforced, restrictions or hostilities increased substantially in four (27%) and decreased substantially in just one (7%). By contrast, among the 139 countries that do not have laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion, restrictions or hostilities rose in nine (6%) and fell in 10 (7%). (See graphic on facing page.)

These findings do not mean that laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion necessarily cause higher restrictions on religion. But they do suggest that the two phenomena often go hand-in-hand: governments that impose laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion also tend to have higher restrictions on religion.

Government Restrictions on Religion

As of mid-2009, government restrictions on religion were high or very high in 23 (52%) of the 44 countries that enforce laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion and six (40%) of the 15 countries that have such laws but do not enforce them. Among the 139 countries that do not have such laws, restrictions were high or very high in 13 (9%).

Government restrictions on religion increased substantially in seven (16%) of the 44 countries where some level of government penalizes blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion and in two (13%) of the 15 countries where such laws exist but are not enforced. In contrast, restrictions rose substantially in five (4%) of the 139 countries with no penalties. Government restrictions on religion decreased substantially in seven (5%) of the 139 countries with no laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion and in one (2%) of the 44 countries that enforce such laws.

Governments in countries that actively enforce such laws engaged in a variety of practices that demonstrated hostility toward religious groups. This included harassment of religious groups and the use of force against religious groups, including actions that resulted in individuals being killed, physically abused, imprisoned, detained or displaced from their homes.

During the two-year period from mid-2007 to mid-2009, governments in 37 (84%) of the 44 countries that actively enforce laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion engaged in actions classified as harassment in this report.²⁷ The share of governments engaging in harassment was even higher (93%) in the 15 countries that have but do not actively enforce such laws. In three-fourths of the 44 countries that enforce these laws (33 of the 44), government at some level used force against religious groups. Harassment and the use of force were less common in the 139 countries that do not have such laws; 60 (43%) of the countries in that category used force against religious groups and 76 (55%) harassed religious groups.

Similar patterns were seen for other types of government restrictions on religion. For example, the share of national governments that showed hostility toward minority religions involving physical violence was much higher in countries where laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion are actively enforced than in countries without such laws (55% versus 22%). A similar gap is seen among governments that characterized one or more religious groups as dangerous “cults” or “sects.” In countries that enforce such laws, nearly a quarter of the governments (23%) characterized certain religions as “cults.” In countries without such laws, 9% of governments engaged in this practice.

A similar difference occurred among countries where the national government attempted to eliminate an entire religious group’s presence. Countries that enforce laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion were more than five times as likely to engage in such attempts as those that do not have such laws (32% vs. 6%).

Social Hostilities Involving Religion

As of mid-2009, social hostilities involving religion were high or very high in 19 (43%) of the 44 countries that enforce laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion and four (27%) of the 15 countries that have such laws but do not enforce them. Among the 139 countries that do not have such laws, social hostilities were high or very high in 17 (12%).

This pattern generally held true for different indicators of social hostilities. For example, mob violence related to religion occurred in a greater share of countries that enforce penalties for blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion than in countries where there are no such laws (45% vs. 19%). The share of countries in which women were harassed for violating religious dress codes was considerably higher among those that enforce such laws (48%) than among those without such laws (6%).

Social hostilities involving religion increased substantially in three (7%) of the 44 countries that enforce laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion and in two (13%) of the 15 where such laws exist but are not actively enforced. In contrast, social hostilities increased substantially in five (4%) of the 139 countries with no such laws.

Regional Patterns

Eight-in-ten countries in the Middle East-North Africa region have laws against blasphemy, apostasy or defamation of religion, the highest share of any region.  These penalties are enforced in 60% of the countries in the region. In Europe, nearly four-in-ten countries (38%) have such laws and nearly a third (31%) actively enforces them. Nearly three-in-ten countries in the Asia-Pacific region have such laws and about a quarter (24%) enforces the penalties. Relatively few countries in sub-Saharan Africa (15%) or the Americas (11%) have such laws or policies.  In the United States, a few state legal codes still contain anti-blasphemy laws, but they generally are not enforced.

Footnotes:

26 This report refers to a change in a country’s score on either the Government Restrictions Index or Social Hostilities Index as “substantial” only if it is at least 1.5 standard deviations above or below the mean amount of change among all 198 countries or territories. The change also had to be in the same direction over the two periods studied, meaning that it had to rise or fall both in the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008 and in the overlapping period from mid-2007 to mid-2009. See Methodology for more details. (return to text)

27 Harassment and intimidation take many forms, including physical assaults, arrests and detentions, the desecration of holy sites and discrimination against religious groups. Harassment and intimidation also include such things as verbal assaults on the members of one religious group by other groups or individuals in society. (return to text)

This report on global restrictions on religion follows the same methodology as the baseline report, with one major difference. This report also tracks changes over time in the extent to which governments and societal groups around the world restrict religious beliefs and practices.

Measuring Change

As part of its original study on global restrictions on religion, the Pew Forum developed two indexes – the Government Restrictions Index (GRI) and the Social Hostilities Index (SHI) – that were used to rate 198 countries and self-governing territories on their levels of restrictions during the two-year period from July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2008. (For more information on the indexes, see below.) Using the original study as a baseline, this study assesses increases and decreases in government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion by comparing each country’s baseline scores on the two indexes with its scores for an overlapping two-year period from July 1, 2007, to June 30, 2009. Comparing rolling averages for overlapping time periods reduces the impact of year-to-year fluctuations and helps identify significant trends (see below).

Determining When Changes on an Index Indicate a Substantial Change

This report highlights changes in a country’s average scores on the Government Restrictions Index and Social Hostilities Index that are deemed to be “substantial.” Unlike in public opinion surveys, there is no statistically determined margin of error that can be used to determine whether observed differences in index scores are significant. Instead, this study defines a change in a country’s score as substantial according to two criteria.

First, to be characterized as a substantial change in this study, the change had to be at least 1.5 standard deviations above or below the mean amount of change among all 198 countries or territories on each index. As shown in the chart on page 74, 16 countries had changes on the Government Restrictions Index that were 1.5 standard deviations or more above the mean amount of change, and 14 countries had changes that were 1.5 standard deviations or more below the mean amount of change.

As shown in the chart above, 16 countries had changes on the Social Hostilities Index that were 1.5 standard deviations or more above the mean amount of change, and 11 countries had changes that were 1.5 standard deviations or more below the mean amount of change.

Second, to be characterized as “substantial,” the change also had to be consistent throughout the full three-year period studied, meaning the change had to be in the same direction both in the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008 and in the overlapping period from mid-2007 to mid-2009. This criterion helps to avoid highlighting short-term spikes that might be due to variability in the coding or information in the primary sources. (For information on the primary sources, see Primary Sources below.)

When both criteria were applied to changes on the GRI, the study found that government restrictions on religion rose substantially in 14 countries and decreased substantially in eight. The scores stayed roughly the same in most (176) countries. When both criteria were applied to changes on the SHI, the study found that social hostilities involving religion rose substantially in 10 countries and decreased substantially in five. The scores stayed roughly the same in most (183) countries.

Forum staff carefully reviewed the coding and primary sources for all countries that did not meet the consistent change criterion on either the Government Restrictions Index or the Social Hostilities Index. The review confirmed that countries eliminated by that criterion were ones where the changes were not drastic, dramatic or substantive.

Advantage of Using the Mean Amount of Change as the Point for Comparison

As noted above, the starting point for measuring changes on the indexes for individual countries is the mean (average) amount of change among all 198 countries and territories. Using the mean for all countries as the starting point is a more conservative approach than using “0” as the starting point, especially for assessing increases in restrictions. This approach does not assume that the overall global increase of .12 points on the Government Restrictions Index and the .02 increase on the Social Hostilities Index were necessarily true increases. Instead, this approach takes into account that those increases might have resulted from variability in the methodology or more detailed information in the primary sources.

In practical terms, using the mean amount of change as the starting point from which changes are assessed means that a country’s index score had to have numerically increased by more than 1.5 standard deviations above its previous score to be considered substantial. In the case of the Government Restrictions Index, a country’s score had to have increased by at least .68 points, which is 1.5 standard deviations (.56) above the mean amount of change (.12). Similarly, a country’s score on the Social Hostilities Index had to have increased by .82 points, which is 1.5 standard deviations (.80) above the mean amount of change (.02) on that index. By this standard, the majority of the increases that met the standard-deviation criterion for a substantial change also met the criterion that it be a consistent change. Indeed, 14 of the 16 countries met both criteria for a substantial increase on the Government Restriction Index, and 10 of the 16 countries met both criteria for a substantial increase on the Social Hostilities Index.

Conversely, for a decrease to be counted as substantial, the decline needed to be less than 1.5 standard deviations below its previous score, since the average change over time was positive (+.12). In the case of the Government Restrictions Index, a country’s score had to have decreased by at least .44 points, which is 1.5 standard deviations (.56) below the mean amount of change (+.12). A country’s score on the Social Hostilities Index had to have decreased by least .78 points, which is 1.5 standard deviations (.80) below the mean amount of change (+.02). By this standard, only eight of the 14 countries that met the first criterion for a substantial decrease on the Government Restriction Index also met the second criterion. Five of the 11 countries that met the first criterion for a substantial decrease on the Social Hostilities Index also met the second criterion.

Advantage of Using Rolling Averages

This three-year study averages the middle year with the first and third years in order to give greater weight to consistent patterns of change on the individual questions that make up the indexes. For example, consider a hypothetical example using one of the 20 questions that make up the Government Restrictions Index: GRI Q.11, “Was there harassment or intimidation of religious groups by any level of government?” In hypothetical Scenario 1, there was a consistent increase in GRI Q.11 across the three individually coded years of data from the lowest intensity score (“No” = 0) in the first year, to the middle level of intensity (“Yes, there was limited harassment” = .250) in the second year, and then to the highest intensity (“Yes, there was widespread harassment” = .500)²⁸ in the third year. The average of the second and third years in Scenario 1 is .375, an increase of .250 points from the average of .125 for the first and second years.

The same scores are present in Scenario 2 in the table above, but in an inconsistent order. Instead of consistently increasing from low to high across the three years as in Scenario 1, the first year in Scenario 2 has the middle level of intensity (“Yes, there was limited harassment” = .250), then drops to low intensity (“No” = 0) in the second year, but ends with high intensity (“Yes, there was widespread harassment” = .500) in the third year. This inconsistent pattern of change results in an overall smaller amount of change between rolling averages (an increase of .125 in Scenario 2 compared with .250 in Scenario 1). This is because the lowest level in Scenario 2 occurred in the second year instead of the first year in Scenario 1, making the average for the period ending in June 2009 in Scenario 2 (.250) smaller than the average in Scenario 1 (.375). However, the rolling average in both Scenarios for the period ending June 2008 (.125) is unaffected because the middle level of intensity on GRI Q.11 still occurred, just in the first year instead of the second.

Similarly, the importance of a consistent pattern of change can be seen when looking at a hypothetical example using one of the 13 questions from the Social Hostilities Index (SHI Q.2, “Was there mob violence related to religion?”).²⁹ In SHI Q.2 Scenario 1, when the intensity of hostilities consistently increased across the three individually coded years of data, the amount of change was greater than when the same scores were present but in an inconsistent order (.385 versus .287).

Overview of Procedures

The methodology used by the Pew Forum to assess and compare restrictions on religion was developed by Senior Researcher and Director of Cross-National Data Brian J. Grim in consultation with other members of the Pew Research Center staff, building on a methodology that Grim and Prof. Roger Finke developed while at Penn State University’s Association of Religion Data Archives.³⁰ The goal was to devise quantifiable, objective and transparent measures of the extent to which governments and societal groups impinge on the practice of religion. The findings were used to rate 198 countries and self-governing territories on two indexes that are reproducible and can be periodically updated.

This research goes beyond previous efforts to assess restrictions on religion in several ways. First, the Pew Forum coded (categorized and counted) data from 18 published cross-national sources, providing a high degree of confidence in the findings. The Pew Forum’s coders looked to the sources only for specific, well-documented facts, not for opinions or commentary.

Second, the Pew Forum’s staff used extensive data-verification checks that reflect generally accepted best practices for such studies, such as double-blind coding (coders do not see each other’s ratings), inter-rater reliability assessments (checking for consistency among coders) and carefully monitored protocols to reconcile discrepancies between coders.

Third, the Pew Forum’s coding took into account whether the perpetrators of religion-related violence were governmental or private actors. The coding also identified how widespread and intensive the restrictions were in each country.

Fourth, one of the most valuable contributions of the indexes and the questions is their ability to chart change over time, as discussed earlier in the methodology.

Countries and Territories

The Pew Forum study covers a total of 198 countries and territories. These include all 192 states that were members of the United Nations during the period under examination (mid-2006 to mid-2009) with the exception of North Korea, for which sufficiently precise and timely data was not available. In addition, the study includes seven territories: Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, the Palestinian territories, Kosovo, Western Sahara and Northern Cyprus. These are treated as separate entities, for various reasons, by some or all of the primary information sources for this study. The U.S. State Department, for example, reports separately on Northern Cyprus because it has been administered by Turkish Cypriot authorities since 1974.

Although the 198 countries and territories vary widely in size, population, wealth, ethnic diversity, religious makeup and form of government, the study does not attempt to adjust for such differences. Poor countries are not scored differently on the indexes than wealthy ones. Countries with diverse ethnic and religious populations are not “expected” to have more social hostilities than countries with more homogeneous populations. And democracies are not assessed more leniently or harshly than authoritarian regimes.

Information Sources

The Pew Forum identified 18 widely available, frequently cited sources of information on government restrictions and social hostilities involving religion around the world. This study includes three sources that were not used in the baseline report on religious restrictions. (See below for more details on the new information sources.)

The primary sources, which are listed below, include reports from U.S. government agencies, several independent, nongovernmental organizations and a variety of European and United Nations bodies. Although most of these organizations are based in Western countries, many of them depend on local staff to collect information across the globe. As previously noted, the Pew Forum did not use the commentaries, opinions or normative judgments of the sources; the sources were combed only for factual information on specific policies and actions.

Primary Sources

1. Country constitutions

2. U.S. State Department annual reports on International Religious Freedom

3. U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom annual reports

4. U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief reports

5. Human Rights First reports in first and second years of coding; Freedom House reports in     third year of coding

6. Hudson Institute publication: Religious Freedom in the World (Paul Marshall)

7. Human Rights Watch topical reports

8. International Crisis Group country reports

9. United Kingdom Foreign & Commonwealth Office annual report on human rights

10. Council of the European Union annual report on human rights

11. Amnesty International reports

12. European Network Against Racism Shadow Reports

13. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports

14. U.S. State Department annual Country Reports on Terrorism

15. Anti-Defamation League reports

16. U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices

17. U.S. National Counterterrorism Center’s Worldwide Incident Tracking System

18. Uppsala University’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program, Armed Conflict Database

U.S. government reports with information on the situation in the United States

19. Dept. of Justice Report on Enforcement of Laws Protecting Religious Freedom 2000-2006

20. Department of Justice “Religious Freedom in Focus” newsletters

21. FBI Hate Crime Reports

As noted above, this study includes three sources that were not included in the Pew Forum’s first report on global restrictions on religion: Freedom House reports; Uppsala University’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program, Armed Conflict Database; and the Worldwide Incident Tracking System (WITS), a publicly available database maintained by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, a U.S. government organization that is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The new sources were used for the most recent year of coding included in this study, July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2009.

The Freedom House reports replaced the Human Rights First reports, which have not been updated since mid-2008. The Uppsala Armed Conflict Database provided a more reliable source of information on the number of people affected by religion-related armed conflicts. While other primary sources report the effects of such conflicts, they sometimes provide only ballpark estimates on the number of people affected by such conflicts.

Some of the apparent increase in religion-related terrorism noted in this study could reflect the use of the WITS database, which provided greater detail on the number of people affected by religion-related terrorism than the State Department’s International Religious Freedom reports or the U.S. State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism, which were the primary sources used to code terrorist incidents in the baseline report.

As explained in more detail below, the Pew Forum’s staff developed a battery of questions similar to a survey questionnaire. Coders consulted the primary sources in order to answer the questions separately for each country. While the U.S. State Department’s annual reports on International Religious Freedom generally contained the most comprehensive information, the other sources provided additional factual detail that was used to settle ambiguities, resolve contradictions and help in the proper scoring of each question.

The questionnaire, or coding instrument, generated a set of numerical measures on restrictions in each country. It also made it possible to see how government restrictions intersect with broader social tensions and incidents of violence or intimidation by private actors. The coding instrument with the list of questions used for this report is shown in the Summary of Results.

The coding process required the coders to check all the sources for each country. Coders determined whether each source: provided information critical to assigning a score; had supporting information but did not result in new facts; or had no available information on that particular country. Multiple sources of information were available for all countries and self-administering territories with populations greater than 1 million. More than three-in-four of the countries and territories analyzed by the Pew Forum were multi-sourced; only small, predominantly island, countries had a single source, namely, the U.S. State Department reports.

Coding the United States presented a special problem since it is not included in the State Department’s annual reports on International Religious Freedom. Accordingly, the Pew Forum’s coders also looked at reports from the Department of Justice and the FBI on violations of religious freedom in the United States, in addition to consulting all of the primary sources, including reports by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, the International Crisis Group and the U.K. Foreign & Commonwealth Office, many of which do contain data on the United States.

The Coding Process

The Pew Forum employed strict training and rigorous coding protocols to make its coding as objective and reproducible as possible. Coders worked directly under a senior researcher’s supervision, with additional direction and support provided by other Pew Forum researchers. The coders underwent an intensive training period that included a thorough overview of the research objectives, information sources and methodology.

Countries were double-blind coded by two coders (coders did not see each other’s ratings), and the initial ratings were entered into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The coders began by filling out the coding instrument for each country using the information source that had the most comprehensive information, typically the U.S. State Department reports. The protocol for each coder was to answer every question on which information was available in the initial source. Once a coder had completed that process, he or she then turned to the other sources. As new information was found, this was also coded and the source duly noted. Whenever ambiguities or contradictions arose, the source providing the most detailed, clearly documented evidence was used.

After two coders had separately completed the coding instrument for a particular country, their scores were compared by a senior researcher. Areas of discrepancy were discussed at length with the coders and were reconciled in order to arrive at a single score on each question for each country. The Excel worksheets for each country were then combined into a master file, which was imported into SPSS.

Throughout this process, the coding instrument itself was continually monitored for possible defects. The questions were designed to be precise, comprehensive and objective so that, based on the same data and definitions, the coding could be reliably reproduced by others with the same results.

Pew Forum staff generally found few cases in which one source contradicted another. When contradictions did arise – such as when sources provided differing estimates of the number of people displaced due to religion-related violence – the source that cited the most specific documentation was used. The coders were instructed to disregard broad, unsubstantiated generalizations regarding abuses and to focus on reports that contained clear, precise documentation and factual detail, such as names, dates and places where incidents occurred.

Inter-rater reliability statistics were computed by comparing the coders’ independent, blind ratings. The Pew Forum took scores from one coder for the 198 countries and compared them with another coder’s scores for the same questions, computing the degree to which the scores matched. These measures were very high, with an average score of .8 or above on the key variables. Scores above .8 on a 0-to-1 scale are generally considered very good, and scores around .7 are generally acceptable. The Pew Forum’s overall inter-rater reliability average across all the variables coded was greater than .8 for each year.

The data-verification procedures, however, went beyond the inter-rater reliability statistics. They also involved comparing the answers on the main measures for each country with other closely related questions in the dataset. This provided a practical way to test the internal reliability of the data.

Pew Forum staff also checked the reliability of the Pew Forum’s coded data by comparing them with similar, though more limited, religious restrictions datasets. In particular, published government and social regulation of religion index scores are available from the Association of Religion Data Archives (for three years of data) and the Hudson Institute (for one year of data), which makes them ideal measures for cross validation. The review process found very few significant discrepancies in the coded data; changes were made only if warranted by a further review of the primary sources.

Restriction of Religion Indexes

The Government Restrictions Index is based on 20 indicators of ways that national and local governments restrict religion, including through coercion and force. The Social Hostilities Index is based on 13 indicators of ways in which private individuals and social groups infringe on religious beliefs and practices, including religiously biased crimes, mob violence and efforts to stop particular religious groups from growing or operating. The study also counted the number and types of documented incidents of religion-related violence, including terrorism and armed conflict.

Government Restrictions Index

Coding multiple indicators makes it possible to construct a Government Restrictions Index of sufficient gradation to allow for meaningful cross-national comparisons. An additional advantage of using multiple indicators is that it helps mitigate the effects of measurement error in any one variable, providing greater confidence in the overall measure.

The Pew Forum coded 20 indicators of government restrictions on religion (see the Summary of Results). In two cases, these items represent an aggregation of several closely related questions: Measures of five types of physical abuses are combined into a single variable (GRI Q.19); and seven questions measuring aspects of government favoritism are combined into an overall favoritism scale (GRI Q.20 is a summary variable showing whether a country received the maximum score on any one or more of the seven questions). These 20 items were added together to create the GRI.

A test of whether the 20 items were statistically reliable as a single index produced a scale reliability coefficient of greater than .9 for each year. Since coefficients of .7 or higher are generally considered acceptable, it was appropriate to combine these 20 items into a single index.

The GRI is a fine-grained measure created by adding the 20 items on a 0-to-10 metric, with 0 indicating very low government restrictions on religion and 10 indicating extremely high restrictions. This involved two general calculations. First, the 20 questions that form the GRI were standardized so that each variable had an identical maximum value of 1 point, while gradations among the answers allowed for partial points to be given for lesser degrees of the particular government restriction being measured. Second, the overall value of the index was proportionally adjusted so that it had a maximum value of 10 and a possible range of 0 to 10 by dividing the sum of the variables by 2.

Social Hostilities Index

In addition to government restrictions, violence and intimidation in societies also can limit religious beliefs and practices. Accordingly, Pew Forum staff tracked more than a dozen indicators of social impediments on religion. Once again, coding multiple indicators made it possible to construct an index that shows gradations of severity or intensity and allows for comparisons between countries. The Summary of Results contains the 13 items used by Pew Forum staff to create the Social Hostilities Index.

As with the Government Restrictions Index, various types of violence and intimidation were combined. A test of whether these 13 items were statistically reliable as a single index produced a scale reliability coefficient of .9 or higher for each year. Since coefficients of .7 or higher are generally considered acceptable, it was statistically appropriate to combine these items into a single index.

The SHI was constructed by adding together the 13 indicators based on a 0-to-10 metric, with 0 indicating very low social impediments to religious beliefs and practices and 10 indicating extremely high impediments. This involved two general calculations. First, the various questions that form the index were standardized so that each variable had an identical maximum value of 1 point, while gradations among the answers allowed for partial points to be given for lesser degrees of the particular hostilities being measured. Second, the indicators were added together and set to have a possible range of 0 to 10 by dividing the sum of the variables by 1.3.

Levels of Restrictions

The Pew Forum categorized the levels of government restrictions and social hostilities by percentiles. Countries with scores in the top 5% on each index are categorized as “very high.” The next highest 15% of scores are categorized as “high,” and the following 20% are categorized as “moderate.” The bottom 60% of scores are categorized as “low.” Readers should note that since the indexes measure the accumulated impact and severity of restrictions, distinctions among the scores of the countries in the bottom 60% of scores are less significant than distinctions made at the upper end of the indexes, where differences in the number and severity of restrictions between countries are greater. This is evident by the fact that the range of difference between scores of countries in the entire bottom 60% (0.1-2.4 on the GRI and 0-1.8 on the SHI) is about the same as the range of differences between scores in just the top 5% (7.2-8.3 on the GRI and 7.2-9 on the SHI).

Notes on Changes in Questions

Readers should be cautioned that some differences on individual measures may not be as significant as they appear due to minor fluctuations in coding procedures. This was especially the case for GRI Q.3 and SHI Q.5. As shown in the Summary of Results for GRI Q.3 (“Taken together, how do the constitution/basic law and other national laws and policies affect religious freedom?”), the number of countries where coders answered “0” on that question increased from 53 countries in the two-year period ending in mid-2008 to 75 countries in the two-year period ending in mid-2009.³¹ However, as noted in the Summary of Results, this change was likely attributable to a slight variation in the coding procedures across the years. During the first year coded (July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2007), the coders were more likely to give a “1” on this question than in either of the two subsequent years.³² A post-coding analysis suggests that this was because the coders in that year were more likely to code the presence of a few restrictions on religious freedom by the government as a “1”. In subsequent years the coders had a higher bar for coding “1”: the presence of restrictions alone was not sufficient, there also had to be clear harassment or abuses toward religious groups or their members.

As noted earlier in the methodology, some of the increase in religion-related terrorism (SHI Q.5) found in this study could reflect the use of new source material that provided greater detail on terrorist activities than the sources used in the baseline report. Specifically, in coding terrorist activities during the period from July 1, 2008, to June 30, 2009, coders used the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS) database, which is the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center’s database of terrorist incidents.

Changes in two other questions are important to note. The first two variables in the Government Restrictions Index on the presence of laws protecting religious freedom (GRI Q.1) and constitutional qualifications or contradictions of those protections (GRI Q.2) were back-coded so that the coding protocols for the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008 matched the protocols for the period from mid-2007 to mid-2009. This resulted in small changes to the mid-2008 Government Restrictions Index scores reported in this study from those reported in the baseline study (the mid-2008 index scores reported in this study reflect the revised coding). While some countries changed or amended their constitutions during the three-year period covered by this study, none of those changes affected the results of the coding, and any differences between the revised results and those reported in the baseline study do not represent changes but rather a slight revision in the methodology.

Finally, it is important to note that situations within countries may have changed since the end of the periods studied. One significant change that occurred outside the time frame of this study, for example, is the division of Sudan into two separate countries. Subsequent Pew Forum reports on global restrictions on religion will assess the South and the North separately; in this report, however, Sudan’s score represents the overall country in which the government in Khartoum was dominant.

New Questions Added to the Study

This report includes one new question that is not part of the indexes and was not included in the baseline report: the number of countries with laws penalizing blasphemy, apostasy or the defamation of religion. This question was coded only in the last year of the study (mid-2008 to mid-2009), but all the laws and policies coded predated July 1, 2008. This question is analyzed separately in the section beginning on page 67.

Additionally, this study reports on the number of countries where specific religious groups faced government or social harassment. This is essentially a cross-tabulation of GRI Q.11 (“Was there harassment or intimidation of religious groups by any level of government?”) and SHI Q.1a. (“Did individuals face harassment or intimidation motivated by religious hatred or bias?”). For purposes of this study, the definition of harassment includes any mention in the primary sources of an offense against an individual or group based on religious identity. Such offenses may range from physical attacks and direct coercion to more subtle forms of discrimination. But merely prejudicial opinions or attitudes, in and of themselves, do not constitute harassment unless they are acted upon in a palpable way.

As noted above, this study provides data on the number of countries in which different religious groups are harassed or intimidated. But the study does not assess either the severity or the frequency of the harassment in each country. Therefore, the results should not be interpreted as gauging which religious group faces the most harassment or persecution around the world.

Religion-Related Terrorism and Armed Conflict

Terrorism and war can have huge direct and indirect effects on religious groups, destroying religious sites, displacing whole communities and inflaming sectarian passions. Accordingly, the Pew Forum tallied the number, location and consequences of religion-related terrorism and armed conflict around the world, as reported in the same primary sources used to document other forms of intimidation and violence. However, war and terrorism are sufficiently complex that it is not always possible to determine the degree to which they are religiously motivated or state sponsored. Out of an abundance of caution, this study does not include them in the Government Restrictions Index. They are factored instead into the index of social hostilities involving religion, which includes one question specifically about religion-related terrorism and one question specifically about religion-related war or armed conflict. In addition, other measures in both indexes are likely to pick up spillover effects of war and terrorism on the level of religious tensions in society. For example, hate crimes, mob violence and sectarian fighting that occur in the aftermath of a terrorist attack or in the context of a religion-related war would be counted in the Social Hostilities Index, and laws or policies that clearly discriminate against a particular religious group would be registered on the Government Restrictions Index.

For the purposes of this study, the term religion-related terrorism is defined as premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents that have some identifiable religious ideology or religious motivation. It also includes acts carried out by groups that have a non-religious identity but target religious personnel, such as clergy. Readers should note that it is the political character and motivation of the groups, not solely the type of violence, that is at issue here. For instance, a bombing would not be classified as religion-related terrorism if there was no clearly discernible religious ideology or bias behind it unless it was directed at religious personnel. Religion-related war or armed conflict is defined as armed conflict (a conflict that involves sustained casualties over time or more than 1,000 battle deaths) in which religious rhetoric is commonly used to justify the use of force, or in which one or more of the combatants primarily identifies itself or the opposing side by religion.

Potential Biases

As noted in the report, the primary sources indicate that the North Korean government is among the most repressive in the world, including toward religion. Because of independent observers’ lack of regular access to North Korea, however, the sources are unable to provide the kind of specific, timely information that forms the basis of this report. Therefore, North Korea is not included on either index.

This raises two important issues concerning potential information bias in the sources. The first is whether other countries that limit outsiders’ access and that may seek to obscure or distort their record on religious restrictions were adequately covered by the sources. Countries with relatively limited access have multiple primary sources of information that the Pew Forum used for its coding. Each is also covered by other secondary quantitative datasets on religious restrictions that have used a similar coding scheme, including earlier years of coded data from U.S. State Department reports previously produced by Grim at Penn State’s Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) project (three datasets); independent coding by experts at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Liberty using indexes also available from ARDA (one dataset); and content analysis of country constitutions conducted by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (one dataset). Pew Forum staff used these for cross-validation. Contrary to what one might expect, therefore, even most countries that limit access to information tend to receive fairly extensive coverage by groups that monitor religious restrictions.

The second key question – the flipside of the first – is whether countries that provide freer access to information receive worse scores simply because more information is available on them. As described more fully in the methodology from the baseline report, Forum staff compared the length of U.S. State Department reports on freer-access countries with those of less-free countries. The comparison found that the median number of words was approximately three times as large for the limited-access countries as for the open-access countries. This confirms that problems in freer-access countries are generally not overreported in the U.S. State Department reports.

Only when it comes to religion-related violence and intimidation in society do the sources report more problems in the freer-access countries than in the limited-access ones. However, the Social Hostilities Index includes several measures – such as SHI Q.8 (Did religious groups themselves attempt to prevent other religious groups from being able to operate?) and SHI Q. 11 (Were women harassed for violating religious dress codes?) – that are less susceptible to such reporting bias because they capture general social trends or attitudes as well as specific incidents of violence. With these limitations in mind, it appears that the coded information on social hostilities is a fair gauge of the situation in the vast majority of countries and a valuable complement to the information on government restrictions.

Data on social impediments to religious practice can more confidently be used to make comparisons between countries with sufficient openness, which includes more than nine-in-ten countries covered in the Pew Forum’s coding. An analysis by Grim and Richard Wike, Associate Director of the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, tested the reliability of the State Department reports on social impediments to religious practice by comparing public opinion data with data coded from the reports in previous years by Grim and experts at Penn State. They concluded that “the understanding of social religious intolerance embodied in the State Department reports is comparable with the results of population surveys and individual expert opinion.”³³

Finally, the 2010 population figures used in this report are estimates from the United Nations World Population Prospects, 2008 Revision. A new revision was released in April 2011, after most of the analysis for this report was completed.

Footnotes:

28 Note that the maximum value for a question on the 20-question, 10-point Government Restrictions Index is .500 (20 x .500 = 10). (return to text)

29 Note that the maximum value for a question on the 13-question, 10-point Social Hostilities Index is .770 (13 questions x .770 = 10 points). (return to text)

30 See Brian J Grim and Roger Finke, “International Religion Indexes: Government Regulation, Government Favoritism, and Social Regulation of Religion,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, Volume 2, Article 1, 2006. (return to text)

31 0 = “National laws and policies provide for religious freedom, and the national government respects religious freedom in practice.” (return to text)

32 1 = “National laws and policies provide for religious freedom, and the national government generally respects religious freedom in practice; but there are some instances, e.g., in certain localities, where religious freedom is not respected in practice.” (return to text)

33 See Brian J Grim and Richard Wike, “Cross-Validating Measures of Global Religious Intolerance: Comparing Coded State Department Reports With Survey Data and Expert Opinion,” Politics and Religion, Volume 3, Issue 1, pages 102-129, April 2010. (return to text)

Scores in the table express the levels of religious restrictions according to the Pew Forum’s Government Restrictions Index (GRI) and Social Hostilities Index (SHI).

Download the Religious Restriction Index Scores by Region (4-page PDF)

Download the summary of results with questions: Summary of Results with questions PDF (1.03 MB 21 Pages)

Government Restrictions on Religion

To assess the level of restrictions on religion by governments around the world, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life selected the following 20 questions for the Government Restrictions Index (GRI). The Pew Forum’s staff then combed through 18 published sources of information, including reports by the U.S. State Department, the United Nations and various nongovernmental organizations, to answer the questions on a country-by-country basis. (For more details, see the Methodology.)

This summary shows the questions, followed by various possible answers and the number and percentage of countries that fell into each category. For example, on Question No. 5 – “Is public preaching by religious groups limited by any level of government?” – the study found that for the period ending in mid-2009, 135 countries (68%) had no reported limits on preaching, 39 countries (20%) had limits on preaching by some religious groups and 24 countries (12%) had limits on preaching by all religious groups.

To see how each country scored on each question, see the Results by Country.

This summary covers two overlapping periods: July 1, 2006, through June 30, 2008, and July 1, 2007, through June 30, 2009. The summary shows whether particular religious restrictions occurred at any time during the periods according to the multiple sources analyzed by the Pew Forum.

Some differences from year to year might not be as significant as they appear due to minor changes in coding procedures and changes in the amount of information available between years. For example, sources for the most recent period studied sometimes had more information on incidents in a country than sources previously had reported. Such additional information may reflect either an actual increase in restrictions in a country, improved reporting for that country or both. For additional information, see the notes on individual questions and the Methodology.

Percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding.

Summary of Results with questions PDF (1.03 MB 21 Pages)

Social Hostilities Involving Religion

To assess the level of social hostilities involving religion around the world, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life used the following 13 questions for the Social Hostilities Index (SHI). The Pew Forum’s staff then combed through 18 published sources of information, including reports by the U.S. State Department, the United Nations and various nongovernmental organizations, to answer the questions on a country-by-country basis. (For more details, see the Methodology.)

This summary shows the questions, followed by various possible answers and the number and percentage of countries that fell into each category. For example, on Question No. 12 – “Were there incidents of hostility over proselytizing?” – the study found that for the period ending in mid-2009, 127 countries (64%) had no reported incidents of hostility over proselytizing, 39 countries (20%) had incidents that fell short of physical violence and 32 countries (16%) had incidents involving violence.

To see how each country scored on each question, see the Results by Country.

In general, this summary covers two overlapping periods: July 1, 2006, through June 30, 2008, and July 1, 2007, through June 30, 2009. The summary shows whether particular religious hostilities occurred at any time during the periods according to the multiple sources analyzed by the Pew Forum. In some questions (SHI Q.6-13), events going back to the previous year (mid-2005 for the period from mid-2006 to mid-2008, or mid-2006 for the period from mid-2007 to mid-2009) are also included in the findings if they were having an ongoing impact.

Some differences from year to year might not be as significant as they appear due to minor changes in coding procedures and changes in the amount of information available between years. For example, sources for the most recent period studied sometimes had more information on incidents in a country than sources previously had reported. Such additional information may reflect either an actual increase in restrictions in a country, improved reporting for that country or both. For additional information, see the notes on individual questions and the Methodology.

Percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding.

Summary of Results with questions PDF (1.03 MB 21 Pages)

The tables below show the results for each of 198 countries and territories on the 20 questions that comprise the Pew Forum’s Government Restrictions Index and the 13 questions that comprise the Social Hostilities Index. There also is a table showing the results for one additional government question that was only coded for the period ending in mid-2009 on whether any level of government penalizes blasphemy, apostasy or the defamation of religion.

Although each question is weighted equally, many of the questions contain gradations, allowing partial scores depending on intensity or severity. For example, on SHI Question No. 2 – Was there mob violence related to religion? – a country that had no religion-related mob violence would receive 0 points, a country that had mob violence in which no deaths were reported would receive 1/2 point (0.50), and a country that had mob violence in which deaths were reported would receive a full point (1.00).

The scores are based on two overlapping periods of data (July 1, 2006, through June 30, 2008, and July 1, 2007, through June 30, 2009) that were coded independently by separate groups of coders at the Pew Forum.

Both the GRI and the SHI are scales of 0 to 10. Readers wishing to independently calculate a country’s index score from the tables below should note that the sum total of a country’s scores on all 20 GRI questions must be divided by two and the sum total of its scores on all 13 SHI questions must be multiplied by 10/13 (0.77) to convert them to the 10-point scale. For more detail on the indexes, see the Methodology.

Download the full Results by Country PDF (1.01MB, 48 pages)

This report was produced by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. The Pew Forum delivers timely, impartial information on issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs. The Pew Forum is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy organization and does not take positions on policy debates. Based in Washington, D.C., the Pew Forum is a project of the Pew Research Center, which is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

This report is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, which is jointly and generously funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation. The project analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world.

The report is a collaborative effort based on the input and analysis of the following individuals:

Primary Researcher Brian J. Grim, Senior Researcher and Director of Cross-National Data, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

Pew Forum Luis Lugo, Director

Research Alan Cooperman, Associate Director, Research Peter Henne, Research Analyst Andrew J. Gully, Noble Kuriakose, Elizabeth A. Lawton and Elizabeth Podrebarac, Research Assistants Charles Joyce, Thomas Kearney, Anastasia Kolivas, Lewis McCrary, Megan Neville, David Nicol, Mariella Regh and Ryan Sprouls, Coders

Editorial Sandra Stencel, Associate Director, Editorial Diana Yoo, Graphic Designer Tracy Miller, Editor Hilary Ramp and Sara Tisdale, Assistant Editors

Communications and Web Publishing Erin O’Connell, Associate Director, Communications Stacy Rosenberg, Digital Project Manager Mary Schultz, Communications Manager Liga Plaveniece and Jemila Woodson, Communications Associates Joseph Liu, Web Associate

Pew Research Center Andrew Kohut, President Paul Taylor, Executive Vice President Elizabeth Mueller Gross, Vice President Scott Keeter, Director of Survey Research