The Unfree Exercise of Religion: A World Survey of Discrimination against Religious Minorities. By Jonathan Fox

Abstract

The Unfree Exercise of Religion is a well-conceived, empirically grounded, and potentially important study of the contemporary status of religious discrimination around the world by a leading scholar of religion in both domestic and international politics. The central question Fox investigates using his extensive dataset is: What countries discriminate against what religious minorities? To find out, he assembled and analyzed the data on 29 different types of religious discrimination against 597 minorities in 177 countries between 1990 and 2008, which distinguishes his work from previous large-N studies in that none of them go below the national level and examine how different groups within a given state are subject to various levels (and types) of unequal treatment. While religious freedom has become a significant scholarly and policy issue in the United States and abroad in recent decades, it is still severely contested. Some even argue that it is impossible to promote religious freedom mainly because we do not know how to define and measure it to everyone’s satisfaction. Fox partially sidesteps this conceptual minefield by focusing on religious discrimination, which he defines as “restrictions placed by the state on the religious practices, clergy, or institutions of minority religions that are not placed on the majority religion” (p. 11). Simply put, you know there is religious discrimination when a certain religious group is treated differently than others. Admittedly, this still leaves unresolved the question of what counts or should count as religious freedom, but after reviewing a number of existing standards adopted by various scholars, Fox shows most of them agree that religious restriction must be applied equally even when it becomes necessary.