Abstract
In their fascinating and important book, The Price of Freedom Denied, Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke show that violent religious persecution is nearly ubiquitous in contemporary societies, not exclusive to any religion, country, or region of the world. The dominant paradigm in the sociology of religion for the last two decades has been the “religious economies” model, which posits that a wide array of religions will flourish in countries where the government promotes religious freedoms, while the opposite is true in countries where the government limits such freedoms or establishes a state church. Grim and Finke extend the scope of this paradigm beyond religious activity to include violent religious persecution and beyond efforts of the state to restrict freedoms to include efforts by other actors—social movements, religious cartels, predominant cultural attitudes, and so on. States, by extending religious freedoms, reduce the hostility of religions toward each other and inhibit the ability of any single religion to advance its interests through the state against those of other faith traditions. The authors hypothesize that to the extent that (1) governments and (2) social forces deny religious freedoms, religious persecution and conflict will increase.
Grim and Finke contrast their argument with Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis that religious conflict and persecution result when fundamentally different world views of civilizations (e.g., Western, Orthodox, Eastern, Muslim) come into contact as adjacent nations or as groups within nations. Grim and Finke find that civilizational divides only minimally affect religious persecution and that religious homogeneity within nations is no guarantee of unity and peace.
The authors show that many states, despite promising religious freedoms, go on to restrict these. Fully 86 percent of the 130 countries promising religious freedoms have at least one law on the books restricting these and 38 percent have four or more restrictions. The irony is that some countries which limit religious freedoms do so in the name of maintaining order and protecting citizens—when their policies have the opposite effect. For other countries, religious restrictions by states arise from efforts to favor what they see as the “one true faith,” to strengthen a dominant group’s control over the state, or to limit the appeal and influence of sects that are seen as “brainwashing” their followers.
The findings of the book are based on a multi-method study consisting of (1) quantitative analysis of the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) and (2) detailed case studies of six countries. The ARDA data are based on country reports prepared by the U.S. State Department and include data on nearly 200 countries; Grim and Finke analyze the 143 countries with populations of two million or more. To prevent yearly spikes in the data from overly influencing their findings, the authors average their variables across 2001, 2003, and 2005. The data unfortunately do not include the United States, but the authors discuss in some detail the history of religious freedom and persecution in the United States, showing that the pattern fits well with their analyses of other countries.
Grim and Finke rely primarily on bivariate tables relating governmental and social restrictions on religion to levels of violent religious persecution and find strong and consistent relationships confirming their hypotheses. For more technically sophisticated readers, the authors offer an appendix showing structural equation models in which alternative predictors of religious persecution (the position of women, the existence of a civilizational divide, the presence of religious law, the percent Muslim, the percent Christian, the existence of armed conflict, economic strength, etcetera) are controlled. The authors show very convincingly that none of the alternative predictors has as strong and consistent an effect as government restrictions on religion. These models also allow the authors to demonstrate that there is a cycle of religious persecution: social restrictions lead to higher levels of government restrictions, which lead to higher levels of religious persecution, which in turn increase social restrictions.
Plotting government restriction of religion against social restriction, the authors identify six clusters, choosing one country from each for intensive, case study analysis: Japan (embracing religious freedoms), Brazil (religious freedom with some tensions), Nigeria (power partition between different regions), China (religion seen as a threat to the state), India (monopolistic social pressures from the dominant Hindu population), and Iran (sociopolitical monopoly). The case studies nicely complement the quantitative analyses, allowing the authors to bring historical depth to the cross-sectional comparative analyses. The cases illustrate the pernicious effects of introducing restrictions on religious freedoms and the beneficial effects of allowing religious pluralism to flourish. The book is a model of how to integrate quantitative and qualitative methods in studying a critically important social problem.
One finding in the case studies that I found especially compelling was the very different responses of the governments of China and Japan to a religious sect that could have been seen as threatening the state. While China reacted severely to the silent protest of Falun Gong members outside a government building by banning the movement, imprisoning some of its adherents and sending others to labor camps, Japan had a much milder reaction to the far more dangerous sarin gas attack launched by adherents of the Aum movement, prosecuting only the criminal acts and not banning the movement itself.
Because Grim and Finke find that governments and social structures of Muslim-majority countries are more likely than those of Christian-majority and other-majority countries to restrict religious freedoms and consequently that religious persecution is more prevalent and more severe in such countries, they devote a chapter to exploring in detail why Muslim-majority countries are exceptional. Comparing a 1945 global study with their ARDA data for the early 2000s, the authors find that Muslim countries had higher levels of government restrictions than Christian or other countries in 1945 and that restrictions had risen over the last 60 years in Muslim-majority and other-majority countries, but had declined in Christian-majority countries. Grim and Finke argue that in predominantly Christian societies there may have been a postwar determination not to allow horrors like the Holocaust to occur again, while in Muslim countries, most of which were still colonized, independence movements saw a stronger Islam as a battering ram against colonialism. Later, as Islamist movements in the latter countries pushed for stricter implementation by government of Shari’a (Islamic law) and for stronger governmental and clerical punishments for apostasy and heresy, religious persecution increased. Thus, contrary to the “clash of civilizations” thesis, the authors find that religious persecution today is the result, not of a clash between Islam and the West, but of a struggle within Islam between Muslims with a more modernist interpretation of Islam and Islamists who seek a stronger role of Islam in government and a stricter interpretation of Shari’a.
The Price of Freedom Denied, with its important message that many governments abandon the promise of religious freedom out of a misguided attempt to maintain order, should be required reading for public officials, human rights activists, and those involved in conflict resolution. Scholars working in the broad areas of religion, politics, and social movements will find much to reflect upon in this valuable study. The writing is accessible to a broad audience and it should spark engaging discussions in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on a wide range of topics.