A ‘rising tide’ of threats to religious freedom

“Speaking to politicians, diplomats and religious leaders (including representatives of all four major branches of Islam in Lebanon — Sunni, Shi’ite, Druze and Alawite), the pope insisted that “religious freedom is the basic right on which many others depend.”

“A new report [3] released Thursday by the Pew Forum illustrates why, at least in this case, it’s impossible to argue that the concern is misplaced.

“Based on analysis of 197 countries and territories, here’s the sobering conclusion: “A rising tide of restrictions on religion spread around the world between mid-2009 and mid-2010.” Key findings include:

• Restrictions on religion rose in each of the five major regions of the world, including in the United States. (America was one of 16 nations whose scores for restrictions, both government-imposed and social, jumped by more than a point. That conclusion, by the way, has nothing to do with the controversy between the U.S. bishops and the White House over insurance mandates, which wasn’t on the radar screen during the period covered in the report. Instead, it cites new restrictions in prison systems on religious practice, zoning hassles faced by churches, legislative attempts to ban sharia law, and an effort in a Tennessee community to ban construction of a mosque on the grounds that Islam is an ideology rather than a religion.)
• 37 percent of nations in the world have high or very high restrictions on religion, up from 31 percent a year ago — a six-point spike in just 12 months.
• Three-quarters of the world’s population of 7 billion, meaning 5.25 billion people, live in countries with high or very high restrictions on religion. That’s up from 70 percent a year ago.
• Restrictions rose not just in countries that already had a tough climate for religious freedom, but even in places that began with a fairly good track record, such as Switzerland.
• In the period ending mid-2010, Christians faced harassment in a larger number of countries, a total of 111, than any other religious group. They also led the pack for the highest number of countries in which they had faced harassment any time between 2006 and 2010, a total of 139.

“The Pew report assesses both government restrictions and “social hostility,” meaning acts of harassment against religion by private individuals, organizations and social groups, or what one might think of as the difference between restrictions de jure and de facto.

Three reflections seem in order.

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First, the report does not distinguish between restrictions on religiously based institutions, such as where a religious charity can operate or what services it can deliver, and limits on the freedom of individual believers, such as the right to convert from one religion to another without harassment or legal penalties, such as the “blasphemy laws” in some majority Muslim states.

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Second, we should recall that behind the statistics cited in the Pew report are real flesh-and-blood people. I met some of them last weekend, including a group of Christian refugees from Syria now in a camp in Lebanon because they’re terrified about their prospects in a post-Bashar Assad society. (The fact that elements of the rebel forces have adopted the motto “Christians to Lebanon, Alawites to the grave!” obviously hasn’t helped calm those anxieties.)

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Third, the Pew report is more concerned with documenting this “rising tide” of restrictions on religion than with explaining what’s driving it. However, societies often lash out at something when they’re either afraid of it or mad at it, and so religions might profitably ask to what extent they’re giving people good reason to be either scared or angry.

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If nothing else, Thursday’s Pew report is a wake-up call. The threat to religious freedom isn’t phony, and it isn’t just politics. Instead, it’s the human drama of the early 21st century.

For our purposes, the burning question becomes: What would a thoughtful, unified, constructive Catholic response look like? Whoever offers a convincing answer will have a great deal to say about the Catholic future.