Abstract
The study of religious freedom has not received sufficient empirical attention from sociologists of religion, despite significant theoretical discussion of the governance of religious freedom. This article suggests empirical findings about the views on religious freedom in Belarus and Norway from the international research project “Religion and Human Rights.” The authors explore the effects of religiosity, spirituality, and cultural diversity on young people’s views of religious freedom in two countries. The comparative data from Belarus (N = 677) and Norway (N = 1001) examine patterns of attitudes towards religious freedom considering the effect of trust in institutions within democratic and non-democratic regimes. This two-country analysis reveals that religiosity, cultural diversity and trust in institutions exert a notable influence on religious freedom views in different ways in Belarus and Norway, on both non-religious young people and those from religious minorities.
Highlights
As Finke and Martin (2012) have noted, the study of religious freedom from a sociological perspective is a comparatively new enterprise
Based on previous research on human-rights attitudes, applying a single-country model of analysis (Breskaya and Döhnert 2018; Botvar 2018) and a multiple-country comparison (Breskaya et al 2019), we discovered that levels of religiosity, secularism, and trust in institutions affected human-rights cultures both in Eastern-European
The empirical data show that support for the three dimensions of religious freedom (RF1, RF2 and RF3) was stronger among Belarusian young people, while RF4 was more strongly appreciated in the Norwegian sample
Summary
As Finke and Martin (2012) have noted, the study of religious freedom from a sociological perspective is a comparatively new enterprise. During the last three decades social scientists have investigated religious freedom in contexts of varying religious diversity and pluralism, governance systems and human-rights cultures How are we to compare views of religious freedom in various cultural and political contexts when differences are historically rooted and embedded in legal traditions? Giordan (2016) by measuring whether levels of religiosity and/or spirituality influence views on religious freedom alongside religious affiliation. To answer these research questions, we have used frequency analysis, t-test, ANOVA, ANCOVA and regression analysis
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