Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me: Why Governments Discriminate against Religious Minorities. By Jonathan Fox

Abstract

In this book, Jonathan Fox uses the RAS3 (Religion and State) dataset, covering the 1990–2014 timeframe, to analyze government-based religious discrimination (GRD) against religious minorities. In addition to compiling GRD data with the state as the unit of analysis, an innovative contribution of the RAS3 dataset is societal religious discrimination (SRD) data with religious minorities as the unit of analysis. With data tabulated throughout the book and graphs facilitating visual comparison, this work is a major empirical study. Along with an introduction and conclusion, the book is organized into nine chapters. After examining GRD and SRD in two separate chapters, the two chapters that follow address Muslim-majority countries in Africa and Asia as well as Christian-majority (Catholic and Protestant) democracies in Western Europe, North America, and Australia. The next chapter looks at Orthodox Christian, Buddhist, and Communist states. The last two chapters explore the rest of the democracies and nondemocracies, respectively.