Abstract
This study examines patterns in societal and government-based religious discrimination (SRD and GRD) against 307 religious minorities in 67 Christian-majority democracies using the Religion and State-Minorities round 3 (RASM3) dataset. Despite expectations that all forms of religious discrimination, especially GRD, should be lower in Western liberal democracies, it is, in fact, lower in developing countries. I argue that three factors explain this discrepancy. Economically developed countries have more resources available for discrimination. Western democracies have higher levels of support for religion than Christian-majority developing countries and countries which more strongly support religion are more likely to discriminate against religious minorities. Finally levels of SRD are higher in the West and SRD is posited to be a cause of GRD. Empirical tests support these propositions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 285-308 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Politics and Religion Journal |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| State | Published - 11 Nov 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2019 Authors. Center for Study of Religion and Religious Tolerance, Belgrade, Serbia.This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Funding
2 This project was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 23/14), The German-Israel Foundation (Grant 1291-119.4/2015) and the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this study are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any of the funders.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| German–Israel Foundation | 1291-119.4/2015 |
| John Templeton Foundation | |
| Israel Science Foundation | 23/14 |
Keywords
- Christianity
- Democracy
- Governmental Religious Discrimination
- Societal Religious Discrimination