Government Regulation of Religious Minorities
[DRAFT – DO NOT QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR]
Brett S. HeindlAssistant Professor
Dept. of Political Science10 Schumacher Hall
State University of New YorkCollege at Oneonta
Oneonta, NY 13820 [email protected]
AbstractMuch has been made recently about a shift in understandings of secularism and the so-called resurgence of religion. Less attention has been paid to the shifts in public policy that attend these changes, such as recent public bans over headscarves, minaret construction, funding for religious education, and the recognition of religious holidays. For example, several Western European governments (notably France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) have moved to more sharply delineate the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable religious expression, with Muslims often bearing the brunt of these changes. Under what circumstances do governments extend or withdraw protections for religious minorities, whether indigenousor immigrant? Multivariate regression analysis demonstrates that regulations on religious minorities are influenced by official restrictions governments place on religion in general, favoritismshown toward particular religions, the role civil society leaders
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play in promoting one religion over others, mass immigration over50 years, and the level of democracy in each country. It also yields the surprising finding that states with high levels of economic development are more likely to discriminate against religious minorities, while those receiving a high volume of immigration within the last decade are less likely to discriminate.
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Introduction
Much has been made in recent years about the philosophical
and empirical failings of secularism and the universal
secularization it presumes, but this work has been primarily
theoretical. Relatively little work has gone into exploring the
ways that a renegotiated, reconceptualized secularism plays out
in public policy. Comparative politics provides a useful lens for
describing and evaluating the many forms that these rebalanced
church-state relations take. Of particular interest is the
disjuncture between the ways that governments are treat religion
in general and how they treat specific religious groups,
particularly religious minorities.
Religious restrictions of course raise serious humanitarian
and rights concerns, as well as more pragmatic challenges for
bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. However, as noted elsewhere
(Grim and Finke 2007; Grim and Finke 2011; Finke and Harris
2012), restrictions on religion can sharply intensify social
conflict and religiously motivated violence within and between
states. This is particularly true among religious minorities,
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where persecution may encourage the development of underground
movements, messianic ideologies, and transnational militancy by
co-religionists abroad (Jenkins 2004; Heindl 2013a). This creates
clear obstacles for nation-building and a sense of national
unity. While these restrictions affect believers of all religious
persuasions, they are particularly worrisome for members of
religious minorities, who by virtue of their smaller numbers, are
often subject to inegalitarian, majoritarian public policies,
popular misunderstanding, and at the extreme, social hostility
and persecution.
As Fox, James, and Li (2009:203) note, while the long-term
global trend is toward fewer new instances of religious
discrimination, there is a countervailing trend in full and
hybrid democracies toward further tightening existing
restrictions on minority religions, particularly against
immigrants and noncitizens. Under what circumstances do
governments extend or withdraw protections for religious
minorities, whether indigenous or immigrant? This paper sets out
the groundwork for exploring this question with some preliminary
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hypothesis-testing using basic quantitative tools to leverage
future qualitative work.
Regulating Religious Minorities
Recent debates in Western Europe and North America over
Muslim immigration and immigrants have drawn attention to broader
questions about how governments regulate religious expression.
Politicians as diverse as Nicolas Sarkozy, Geert Wilders, Marine
Le Pen, and the late Pim Fortuyn have called for restrictions on
Muslims’ public religious expression. They justify these
proposals as being in the interest of protecting national unity,
national sovereignty, women’s rights, the wall of separation
between church and state, and European cultural identity (Heindl
2013b). The policies they have proposed would regulate what forms
of dress women can wear in public, what kinds of buildings
religious groups may construct, what kinds of foods school
children and prisoners may eat, what kinds of religious worship
may be observed collectively, and what preachers may say in their
sermons.
These proposals to regulate Muslim immigrants’ religious
expression emerged across Western Europe. In Spring 2010, the
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lower house of Belgium’s parliament passed legislation banning
the niqab and the burqa, two forms of the veil or headscarf that
cover the face, in public places. At almost the same time, French
President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that his party supported
similar legislation. This came six years after France banned most
forms of the veil in public schools. Seven of the sixteen states
in Germany forbid public school teachers from wearing any kind of
veil. A Swiss referendum in November 2009 passed a nationwide ban
on the construction of minarets. German Chancellor Angela Merkel
declared in October 2010 that multiculturalism in Germany had
failed; UK Prime Minister David Cameron reiterated Merkel’s words
four month later and took it a step further blaming “passive
tolerance” for Muslim radicalization and terrorism (Cameron
2011).
These efforts sparked heated debate regarding the proper
balancing of church and state. Liberalism and republicanism
challenged the notion of state religions, and the French and
American revolutions made forceful assertions about the need for
a clear separation of church and state. However, they understood
the shared principle quite differently. The American
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understanding of secularism stressed the importance of protecting
religious practice from state interference, while French laïcité
emphasized the protection of the state from religious
interference (Hervieu-Leger 2007). In Europe, secularism was also
increasingly construed as freedom from religion (Casanova
2011:59-60). Casanova (ibid.) argues that Europeans to view
religion as a throwback to a premodern era. In this
understanding, to accept religious faith is therefore to ignore
or reject modernity. He attributes Europe’s long-term process of
secularization and its restrictive attitudes to minority
religions, particularly Islam, to this understanding.
Secularism therefore cannot be regarded as one singular
entity with the same values throughout the world. Rather, it
should be understood as a conglomerate of multiple unique
ideologies with differing definitions, each varying by a state’s
institutional make up and notion of national identity (Stepan
2011). Kuru (2007) argues that each state’s ideological
understanding of secularism, either as a passive or assertive
force, shapes how it regulates dominant and minority religions.
States animated by assertive secularism (e.g. France and Turkey)
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are more likely to restrict public religion expression in
general, while passive secularist states (e.g. the United States)
tend to take a laissez-faire approach to public religious
expression. Further, assertive secularism may intend to
subordinate church to state, particularly in Kemalist Turkey
(Kuru 2007; Azak 2010: 13-14). Individual church-state
configurations are therefore localized and specific to the point
where we might more accurately speak of degrees of secularism and
forms of secularism.
Echoes of these understandings often appear in the public
debate around the headscarf or hijab. President Jacques Chirac
claimed in 2003 that the hijab undermines secularism, which stands
as “one of the greatest successes of the [French] Republic …
[Secularism] is a crucial element of social peace and national
cohesion. We cannot let it weaken” (“France’s Hijab Ban” 2004).
Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn argued more broadly against
providing special accommodations toward Muslims, suggesting that
values like tolerance and open-mindedness were at stake. Others,
like former British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
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suggest that the veil, as a “marker of separation,” undermines
societal and national unity (Cowell 2006).
Without delving into effectiveness, morality, or legality of
these restrictions, the regulation of religious expression has
become a salient political issue in recent years, as some groups
strive either to reassert cultural dominance or to drive religion
out of the public sphere. Regulation of religion touches on core
aspects of public life, like the freedom of association, and
reaches into the most intimate aspects of daily life, such as
individual conscience, family law, and childrearing. Government
regulation of religion touches on questions of if and how people
may perform their religious obligations in public spaces, what
codes their houses of worship must meet, what rules govern how
religious organizations operate, the extent to which the state
may monitor groups it deems threatening, what limits are placed
on religious proselytizing and conversion, and whether members of
one religious community can be compelled to observe the religious
rituals of another community. As noted above, these regulations
are often felt most acutely by religious minorities, who may find
their otherness exacerbated by majoritarian public policies.
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Factors Influencing Government Regulation of Religious Minorities
An extensive literature exists related to church-state
relations in general and the politics of religious minorities
specifically. It offers a series of explanations for the various
configurations of church-state relations. Among them are the
historical legacies of religious conflict and accommodation;
formal establishment of or governmental favoritism toward
particular religions; the balance of power between religious and
ideological groups within governmental coalitions; the
distribution of power between different branches of government
and the ethnoreligious composition of government agencies; larger
processes of democratization or autocratization; levels of
economic development; political mobilization by religious groups
within society; demographic changes within the society due to
immigration or birthrates; and exogenous influences, either in
the form of political or diplomatic pressure or regional
“contagion” effects in neighboring states. Of these explanations,
this review will focus on the more dynamic influences, that is,
on the ones most likely to change over the course of years,
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rather than decades, as many of these possible influences are
stronger explanations for continuity than for change.
Historical legacies of religious conflict and accommodation
A wide variety of explanations of religious freedom and
church-state relations emphasize the importance of path
dependence and historical legacies of past conflict or
accommodation between religious groups. Madeley (2003) attributes
the current state of affairs in Europe to the long-term patterns
of religious observance in individual countries. Here, the key
factor is whether each country has been traditionally
monoconfessional, that is, historically dominated by Roman
Catholicism, Lutheranism, or Orthodoxy, or if it is part of
pluralistic “multiconfessional belts” that exist between
“monoconfessional blocs” of similar states. Similarly, Kuru
(2007) finds that the presence or absence of religious diversity
with the state and the existence of an ancien regime, a linkage
between the traditional elite and the dominant religion, at the
time of state-building have a marked effect in the content and
character of that state’s version of secularism.
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Formal establishment of or governmental favoritism toward
particular religions
Other authors (Madeley 2003; Bader 2003) argue that formal
establishment of religion or informal “state religious
exclusivity” (Fox, James, and Li 2009) have the effect of
squeezing out or suppressing minority religions. Fox, James, and
Li (ibid:206) note a strong correlation between state religious
exclusivity and nondemocratic political systems. Establishment or
favoritism therefore sharpens the de facto and de jure
differentiation within societies and polities between native-born
citizens, naturalized citizens, and immigrant noncitizens, and
between religious majorities and religious minorities (Morris
2003). The effects of official establishment or unofficial
favoritism may negatively affect religious minorities even when
multicultural policies attempt to proactively incorporate
minority groups (Stepan 2011; Heindl 2013b). Stepan (2011:117)
notes that all of the EU-27 provide governmental funding for
religious schools or educational programs, while 67 percent have
official governmental departments for religious affairs. While
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this arrangement seems to work fairly well for historical
religious minorities in these states, Muslim immigrants have had
a particularly difficult time tapping into existing resources,
often for simple logistical reasons (Stepan 2011:124-125).
“[M]inority religions … are more likely to find that existing
legal, political, and social structures are not designed to
accommodate their beliefs and practices… [T]he tenets of the
majority’s religion, along with impediments to minority
religions, sometimes creep into laws and government policy,”
Emerson, Mirola, and Monahan note (2011: 130). In most European
states, Christian religious groups have adapted to the
hierarchical forms governmental bureaucracies prefer for
distributing support, while Muslim groups, due to differences of
theology, jurisprudence, and ethnicity and national origin, have
instead created loose, personalistic, and largely horizontal
confederations of mosques with few widely accepted figures
empowered to act as spokespersons or figureheads. Citing the
German case, Stepan (2011: 125) observes that “from the German
state’s perspective, Muslims do not yet qualify as a public
corporation, mainly for reasons of their internal diversity,
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which makes them difficult to fit into long-standing German law.”
As Stepan summarizes, “these legal formulas acquired a certain
path-dependency … [S]uch requirements often made new non-
Christian religions non-recipients [of public funds], not as a
matter of principle but as a matter of practice” (Stepan
2011:125). The consequences, whether intended or unintended, of
the institutional arrangement of church-state relations can have
profound implications for religious minorities.
Larger processes of regime type and democratization or
autocratization
The extension or retraction of religious freedoms is often
part and parcel of larger transitions to democracy or autocracy.
Kuru (2007:591), Buckley (2011:8), and Fox, James, and Li
(2009:203) find that democratization or autocratization often
result in new rights or restrictions for religious and ethnic
minorities. Sorens (2010) supports this, finding that states that
provide access to free, frequent, and fair elections rarely
impose new restrictions on ethnic minorities. In a related vein,
Azak (2010:19) attributes increased official recognition of
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religious pluralism in Turkey to the rise of multiparty
democracy.
In transitional and hybrid democracies, the uneven
application of civil liberties creates a unique set of challenges
for religious minorities. The legal equality of individual
members of religious minority communities is jeopardized if anti-
religious laws are selectively enforced and new restrictions are
targeted at these groups. This differentiation is often amplified
in hybrid democracies, where instability and uncertainty lower
politicians’ inhibitions toward and perhaps even construct
incentives for majoritarianism or scapegoating (Sorens 2010).
The balance of power within government
Other authors attribute changes in how governments regulate
religious minorities to changes in the balance of power between
religious and ideological groups within ruling coalitions. A
related group of explanations suggests that in some cases,
certain ethnic or religious groups manage to penetrate or
“ethnicize” the governmental bureaucracy itself through
clientelism, institution capture, or other means (Sorens
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2010:538). The machinery of government could therefore be used to
the benefit of some groups or the detriment of others. Stepan
(2011) notes that significant religiopolitical changes may also
be unintended consequences of broader governmental or
bureaucratic restructuring. Ram (2009) considers the effects of
redefinitions of national identity from secular nationalism to
religiously-based nationalism. Here, crises of legitimacy in
either the sitting government or in the dominant religion may
stimulate political changes. This is particularly true if these
crises call into question the effectiveness or relevance of
existing corporatist, consociational, or religious establishment
arrangements (Buckley 2011; Casanova 2011:71). Bader (2003:61)
and Buckley (2011) attach additional significance to ideational
changes within governing coalitions, state institutions, or
religious bodies regarding state neutrality vis-à-vis religion.
Sorens (2010) emphasizes the institutional limitations on
executive branch authority, the mechanisms for selecting the
executive, and the independence of judiciaries. Still, the
strength of path dependence should not be underestimated, Kuru
(2007:585-586) warns, suggesting that these “crises” would have
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to be very serious indeed to cause significant reevaluation of
church-state relations.
Political mobilization by religious groups within society
Drawing from writings on social movements, several authors
have highlighted the importance of political mobilization for
effecting religiopolitical change. Here, groups within society
may be organizing for or against minority religions, and of
course, minority organizations are likely to play a central role
themselves. Religious movements, in response to opportunities or
threats, may organize to make demands of government, while
majoritarian, nationalist, or statist groups may countermobilize
(Brouard and Tiberj 2008). Among the factors that may influence
the success or failure of these mobilized groups are resources
like social capital and organizational capacity which allow
organizations to overcome collective action problems (Putnam and
Feldstein 2003, Beyerlein and Hipp 2005), past historical
experiences of protest or separatism (Fox, James, and Li 2009),
and how religious minority groups conceive of their relationship
with government, what Philpott (2007) calls political theology.
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Levels of economic development
A prominent strain in the literature argues that as
societies reach higher levels of economic development, there is a
concomitant process of secularization that takes place, whereby
religious express is progressively relegated to the private
sphere (Berger 1967; Norris and Inglehart 2004). However, this
perspective is increasingly being called into question by an
apparent global resurgence of religion that does not directly
correlate with levels of economic development (Berger 1999;
Casanova 1994; Thomas 2005; Fox, James, and Li 2009).
Demographic changes within the society due to immigration
Another body of literature connects changes in church-state
relations to larger sociocultural and demographic changes in
society, typically brought on by mass immigration. Here the
influx of members of religious minority groups (notably Muslims
to Western Europe) can induce serious reevaluations of
secularism, as well as wrenching debate over religious expression
in the public sphere (Heindl 2013a; Banchoff 2008; Casanova
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2007). This is particularly salient when the flow of new
religious groups becomes a larger proportion of the state’s
overall population and when these groups begin to press for
greater public voice (Fox, James, and Li 2009:203-204). The
political consequences of immigration are mediated by the
existing citizenship regime in each receiving state, most notably
whether citizenship is conferred on the basis of location (jus
soli) or parentage (jus sanguinis) (Brubaker 1992). Similarly
important are the informal barriers sometimes erected to formal
citizenship and full civic participation for noncitizens, which
can range from restricted language rights to systematic
disenfranchisement (Morris 2003). Finally, the relative political
influence of ethnoreligious minority groups may also be
influenced by their geographic distribution within their states
of residence. Minority groups may be clustered together in urban
enclaves (Portes and Rumbaut 1996) or in autonomous regions
(Sorens 2010) or conversely dispersed within the larger society
without an identifiable geographic or territorial center.
Concentration seems to encourage greater minority activism, while
dispersion creates formidable collective action problems.
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Exogenous influences
A final set of influences comes from outside of the state.
Religious politics within one country may have “contagion
effects” on religious politics in nearby countries, influencing
the form and content of religious demands and mobilization
through demonstration effects (Fox, James, and Li 2009; Fox
2000). In other instances, religious minorities may be influenced
by transnational co-religionist or co-ethnic groups (Voll 2008;
Juergensmeyer 2008; Heindl 2013a), human rights and religious
freedom activists (Shapiro 2012), or political, diplomatic,
economic, or military intervention by foreign governments
(Prodromou 2008). Recent history is rife with examples of these
exogenous influences, ranging from the strong regional influence
of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic revolution in
Iran (Voll 2008) to the Arab Spring, from the growth of
liberation theology and Pentecostalism in Latin America (Sigmund
1999) to American evangelical Christians’ support for Christian
minorities in Subsaharan Africa (Ranger 2006). These external
influences are often seen as encouraging religious claims-making,
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encouraging the growth of nascent movements, and conversely as
sometimes encouraging preemptive action on the part of the state
to forestall social disruption (Laurence 2008).
Research Design
The above literature contains a rich array of possible
explanations for why states tighten or loosen regulations on
religious minorities, but unfortunately, there is neither time
nor space to give them all full consideration here. Therefore, I
have chosen a handful of explanations for hypothesis testing.
This testing is not intended to be the final word in research on
government regulation of religious minorities. Rather, it is
intended to illuminate some possible causal relationships that
might be fruitfully explored in future research. Due to
limitations of readily available data, this paper has set aside
consideration of the possible effect of domestic political
mobilization and of exogeneous influences like foreign
intervention or transnational advocacy. The quantitative aspect
of this paper draws extensively from ready-made and widely
available datasets, which provide useful proxies for the
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influences discussed above. It uses simple statistical techniques
(i.e. OLS regression) to identify relationships between
variables.
This paper focuses on one dependent variable and several
independent variables derived from the literature review above.
The dependent variable is religious discrimination against
minority religions. The independent variables are as follows:
variations on official church-state separation: the presence of
formal establishment of religion, the degree to which the state
is willing to impose official restrictions on religion, and the
extent to which government informally favors one religion over
others; the extent of democracy within a state and transitions
along a democratic-autocratic continuum; the proportion of a
state’s population made up by immigrants and the rate at which
people are immigrating into or out of that state; and finally,
levels of wealth and economic development within each particular
country.
The dependent variable is the restrictions governments put
into place for religious practice by religious minority
communities. Efforts to describe and explain government treatment
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of religious minorities must take into consideration the myriad
direct and indirect ways that the state may assert influence over
religious groups (Bader 2003). States have at their disposal a
dizzying number of de jure and de facto tools for encouraging or
discouraging religious practice (see Bader 2003: 55-72), not
least of which are the passage of new laws, (un)evenness in
enacting and enforcing said laws, changes in taxation and
regulatory policy, and the granting of special rights and
privileges to favored groups. As discussed above restrictive
measures can limit everything from religious education,
construction of places of worship, and dress codes to observance
of religious obligations, proselytizing, forcible conversion, and
associational autonomy. The Religion and the State Round 2
dataset (RAS2) includes 30 variables that measure distinct types
of religious discrimination specifically targeted at religious
minorities. To measure restrictions on minority religions, this
paper uses a composite variable, labeled MX in the RAS2 dataset,
which aggregates these 30 variables into an overall score of 0-90
for each state, where zero indicates a complete absence of
restrictions on minority religious practice and religious
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institutions and 90 indicates the highest and broadest possible
level of restrictions on religious minorities.
I use four conceptualizations of church-state separation to
identify how particular institutionalized relationships between
religion and government affect how that state treats its
religious minorities: formal establishment of religion, official
restrictions on religion, restrictions on the majority religion,
and unofficial governmental favoritism toward one or more
dominant religions. While it is not particularly difficult to
think of examples of states with formally established religions
that are friendly to minority religions (England and Denmark come
to mind), this willingness to accommodate difference is clearly
not universal (e.g. Saudi Arabia or the Islamic Republic of
Iran). So, formal establishment of one or more religions, which
might be defined as a de jure, constitutionally-defined connection
between the state and one or more specific religious groups
either in a constitutional clause or a foundational law, could
seriously impede religious minorities’ abilities to extract
concessions from government.
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H1: Formal establishment of one or more religions will lead to more restrictive policies
toward minority religions.
Following a similar logic, the extent to which a state is
willing to restrict some or all religions using de facto means
might also be a reliable predictor of how government regulates
minority religious groups. If the government shows favoritism,
through explicit or implicit means, toward one religion to the
exclusion of others, or restrictions toward one religion that do
not apply to others, we might expect minority religions on the
whole to suffer, as the possibility of a minority religion
receiving equitable or preferential treatment seems remote. On
the other hand, however, a universally strict hand toward
religious groups could only be bad news for minority religions.
Therefore, a government that chooses not to impose restrictions
on religious groups regardless of their content or character
might be expected to issue few restrictions on minority
religions.
H2: States that have more official restrictions on religious practice in general will be
more likely to restrict minority religious participation.
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A government’s willingness to restrict religious expression
among believers of the dominant religion is a very strong
indicator of that government’s distrust for religion in general
(i.e. not just minority religions). Here, government distrust
spans everything from restrictions on religious political parties
and labor unions to publication to restrictions on religious
activities and religious education in public schools to
governmental legislation of the internal workings of religious
organizations or state ownership of religious property. One would
expect a state that puts heavy restrictions on the majority
religion to also restrict minorities religions as well.
Conversely, governments that give free reign to the majority
religion would probably also adopt a laissez-faire approach with
religious minorities. The middle ground could be considerably
more complicated.
H3: States that have more restrictions on majority religious practice will be more likely
to restrict minority religious participation.
The fourth dimension of church-state relations considered
here is de facto government favoritism toward one or more
religions. This favoritism might include granting special
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privileges to religious organizations or providing subsidies or
public funding for religious institutions, religious education,
the construction of religious buildings, religious media,
performing religious activities or missionary work, or providing
salary or benefits for members of the clergy. Here, it might be
expected that governments that show heavy favoritism toward one
religion would be inclined to restrict the activities of minority
religions.
H4: States that show strong favoritism toward a dominant religion will be more likely to
restrict minority religious participation.
To measure these variables, we must consider four measures
of church-state separation. Three of these conceptualizations of
church-state relations can be measured using the Religion and the
State Round 2 dataset. RAS2 assigns one indicator for each of the
three above-mentioned variables. Formal establishment of one or
more specific religions uses a scale of zero (no official
establishment), one (multiple officially established religions),
or two (one officially established religion). Because this is an
ordinal qualitative variable, I use a dummy variable based on
this one, where “0” indicates no official establishment and “1”
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represents establishment of one or more religions. RAS2 also
contains a variable for official restrictions, which shows the
state’s willingness to restrict religions in practice. Cases are
coded on a scale from zero to five, where zero is absence of
restrictions and five is a blanket ban on all religions. NX
measures the state’s restrictions on the majority religion. Like
MX, used to measure the dependent variable, NX is a composite
indicator that aggregates 29 separate measures of restrictions on
the majority religion’s practices. The resulting measure of
religious regulation ranges from 0 to 87, with zero being an
absence of restrictions and 87 being the highest possible form of
restrictiveness. The fourth dimension of church-state relations
considered here, de facto government favoritism toward one or
more religions, is included in the International Religious
Freedom Data Aggregate File (2003-2008), which content-analyzed
the US Department of State’s International Religious Freedom
Reports from 2003, 2005, and 2008. Several individual indicators
of government favoritism are then aggregated into a composite
variable on a 10-point scale with the three years averaged in
order to smooth over year-to-year differences in reporting. These
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indicators include public financing of construction, religious
organizations, clerical salaries, and news media. Low numbers
indicate low levels of government favoritism, while high numbers
indicate high levels.
Two other variables emphasize the possible effects of the
society of a particular country on the government’s treatment of
religious minorities. Two key considerations are majoritarianism
and the extent to which members of that society act as informal
regulators of religion by actively encouraging or discouraging
certain religious perspectives. To simplify Madeley’s (2003)
typology of religious homogeneity and heterogeneity, we would
expect that the religious groups that make up a larger percentage
of the country’s population to be more inclined toward
majoritarian policies and consequently to impose policies that
either deliberately or inadvertently discriminate against
religious minorities. This numerical dominance might also be
expected to translate into cultural and political hegemony.
H5: Countries numerically dominated by one religious community will be more inclined
to discriminate against religious minorities.
29
A society’s sociocultural leaders, who are sometimes but not
always its political elite, may also play a role in encouraging
governmental discrimination against religious minorities. Here,
members of the clerical establishment or civil society may
express intolerant attitudes toward and discriminate against
members of nontraditional faiths, attempt to “shut out” other
religions, or interfere with proselytizing by minority religious
groups. In these cases, we would expect governmental policies to
mirror the level of social regulation practiced by the dominant
group.
H6: Countries with high levels of social regulation of religion will discriminate more
strongly against minority religious groups.
To measure these variables, this paper draws from the World
Christian Database 2010 and the IRFD Aggregate File (2003-2008).
The numerical dominance of each country’s largest religious group
was derived by calculating the percentage of each country’s
population made up by members of 18 distinct religious faiths, as
estimated by the WCD. The group with the largest religion was
determined to be the plurality religion. That percentage was then
used in the regression models below. Social regulation of
30
religion is determined by the IRFD’s Modified Social Regulation
of Religion indicator, a composite variable taking into account
the relative tolerance or hostility of social attitudes toward
minority or new religions; attitudes and actions of the clerical
establishment and the citizenry toward proselytizing, public
preaching, or conversion by minority religions; and whether
established religions actively seek to shut out other religions.
Social regulation of religion is then aggregated on a 10-point
scale, where low numbers indicate low levels of social regulation
and high numbers indicate high levels.
A fourth set of independent variables considers each
government’s location on a democracy-autocracy continuum. Because
of the high value liberal democracy places on individual rights
and freedoms, we would expect more democratic countries to place
fewer restrictions on religious minorities. Conversely, more
autocratic governments might be expected to restrict minority
religions more heavily.
H7: Countries with higher levels of democracy will be less likely to restrict religious
minorities.
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This relationship between democracy/autocracy and minority
restrictions would also change as governments undergo processes
of democratization or autocratization. As noted above, Sorens
(2010) suggests that transitional governments may see strong
incentives in scapegoating religious or ethnic minorities as a
way of maintaining a broader sense of national cohesiveness. As
governments move along this continuum, we would expect them to
re-evaluate restrictions on religious minorities.
H8: States experiencing a significant transition between democracy and autocracy in
the last decade will be more likely to impose restrictions on religious minorities.
To examine the influence of these two democracy/autocracy
variables, this paper uses two indicators from the Polity IV
dataset, which examines political regime characteristics and
transitions over two hundred years. Each state’s Polity score,
ranging from -11 to 11, is based on series of determinations
about the institutional constraints on executive branch power and
how heavily regulated and competitive political competition is
within that state. Negative lower numbers indicate autocratic
regimes, while higher positive numbers indicate full-fledged
democracies. This paper used each state’s Polity score from 2008
32
as an indicator of the level of democracy or autocracy within
that state. It also uses a related Polity IV indicator that
examines the amount of time that has passed between 2008 and the
most recent significant shift on the democracy/autocracy
spectrum. This paper uses a dummy variable where “0” indicates a
stable regime, where more than 10 years have passed since the
last major transition and “1” indicates a transitional regime,
where a transition has occurred in the last decade. This serves
as a proxy for transitions to or from democracy.
The fifth set of independent variables discussed in this
paper deal with the possible social turmoil associated with
immigration and new immigrants. Here, the most important
consideration is the extent to which mass immigration may disrupt
hard-won consociational or intersectarian arrangements. We might
expect that states that have experienced a high volume of recent
immigration, relative to historic levels, would be more likely to
impose new religious restrictions or to tighten existing ones in
the name of protecting social cohesion or cultural identity. The
historical element to this can be important. The effects of this
large volume may be offset to some extent by a country’s longer
33
experience of religious pluralism and incorporating immigrants.
Pluralistic states that have more experience accommodating
religious difference and that had a longer period of time to
integrate immigrants into society might be expected to take more
hands-off approaches to religious minority practices, whereas
states with little prior experience with diversity that are
swamped by a sudden wave of immigration may respond by
restricting religious minorities.
H9: States experiencing high levels of immigration will be more likely to tighten
regulations for religious minorities.
H10: States experiencing high levels of immigration relative to historic levels will be
more likely to tighten regulations for religious minorities.
H11: States experiencing high levels of immigration within the last decade will be more
likely to tighten regulations for religious minorities.
So, two key components of immigration are the percentage of
foreign-born residents in a country and the recency of their
arrival. This paper derives immigration data from the World Bank:
the percentage of each country’s population that is foreign-born
in 2010 and a percentage change of the proportion of a country's
34
population made up by immigrants in 2010 relative to that in 1960
and 2000. This percentage is determined by subtracting the
percentage of immigrants in 1960 from the percentage in 2010,
then dividing the result by the statistic for 1960. For example,
the proportion of Belgium’s population made up by migrants in
2010 was 85.5% higher than in 1960 (8.9% vs 4.8%), but just 4.3%
higher than in 2000. Here, we might infer a significant wave of
immigration to Belgium after the 1960s that had largely ended by
2000. Israel’s foreign born percentage in 2010, not including the
occupied territories, was 31.2% lower than in 1960, but 7.5%
higher than in 2000, suggesting that the postwar wave of
immigration had faded but was being followed by a recent wave.
The indicators use data from country-year 2010 as their basis
because this is the most recent data available from the World
Bank and the closest available year to match the 2008 data used
in the Polity and RAS2 indicators in cross-sectional analysis
below.
A sixth set of variables examines the effects of economic
development on the treatment of religious minorities, drawing on
the expectations put forward by the secularization literature.
35
This body of scholarship holds that as states modernize, religion
becomes an increasingly private matter until those societies can
be described as secularized. Under these circumstances, we would
expect states with higher levels of economic development and
industrialization to provide a wider range of safety nets to
protect residents from threats to human security, one of the
driving forces for religiousity (Norris and Inglehart 2004). The
effects of this predicted secularization on religious minorities
are somewhat unclear. We would expect states where privatized
religion is the norm to be more hands off toward religious
minorities, because religion is increasingly taken off the public
agenda and because of increased privacy concerns among the
general public (Durham 2008:pg#?).
H10: States with higher levels of economic development and human security will be
more tolerant toward religious minorities.
To evaluate the influence of economic development on the
treatment of religious minorities, I use each country’s Human
Development Index score in 2010, as drawn from the United Nations
Development Program. The HDI measure is widely used in studies of
secularization (CITE). The HDI provides a broader measure of
36
human security by considering wealth, life expectancy, education,
and the broader standard of living.
Using these indicators, I performed a series of simple
cross-sectional OLS regressions to examine the influence of the
independent variables. The results are depicted in Table 1. These
indicators, particularly the four aspects of church-state
relations, risk multicollinearity, which would likely skew the
regression results. However, the regression models below used the
variance inflation factors (VIF) diagnostic to test for
multicollinearity. In each of the models below, the VIF scores
were less that 3.0. Each successive model in Table 1 removes one
variable from the previous model that proved to be statistically
insignificant. This technique is used to identify possible
relationships and interactions among the independent variables.
Also, the second set of models presented below (Table 2) group
the independent variables (governmental, social, democratic,
demographic, and economic) and test each group separately. This
is intended to identify which groups of variables seem to have
the most influence over how governments treat religious
minorities. Model 6 includes only those variables that had been
37
significant to the 0.05 level in the previous iterations. Also,
Model 7 excludes the Migration since 1960 measure, because
missing data for 27 LDCs and post-Soviet states kept then number
of possible cases to 127 in the first six models. The fact that
historically significant countries with complex ethnic and
religious dynamics like Russia, Ukraine, a unified Germany, and
the successors to the former Yugoslavia were left out threatened
to skew the results. Excluding the 1960 migration variable raises
the number of cases to 149, and the findings for the larger-n
model parallel the previous findings.
[Tables 1, 2, and 3 about here]
Results
The above findings confirm some existing ideas about
influences on how governments regulate religious minorities, but
challenge others and suggest that greater complexity exists in
this relationship that merits further exploration.
No meaningful relationship between formal establishment and
treatment of religious minorities can be identified above. The
challenge of doing so is perhaps best exemplified by the earlier
38
example of the treatment of religious minorities under UK and
Denmark compared to that of Iran. This leads us to reject the
first hypothesis that predicted that formally established
religions would lead governments to more restrictive policies
toward religious minority practice.
The second and third hypotheses, that governments that restrict
all or just the majority religion will also restrict religious
minorities, receive strong support, as is the hypothesis about de
facto governmental favoritism. The beta coefficients for both
official restrictions and regulation of the majority religion are
strong and statistically significant across all of the variations
of the model hypothesis holds up somewhat better. Simply put,
governments that intervene in majority religion are similarly
inclined to intervene in minority religions. Furthermore, the
majority religion variable consistently has the highest
coefficient value, suggesting that it is the single strongest
explanation of governmental regulation of religious minorities.
This is not surprising, as it is difficult to imagine a scenario
where a religious minority is less restricted than the majority.
Only in religious-minority-ruled states is this imaginable, and
39
instances of this can probably be counted on one hand. The beta
value for government favoritism is neither as strong nor as
consistently significant as the other two governmental variables.
Still, relationship can be teased out of these findings, as the
p-values range between 0.005 (Model 7) and 0.063 (Model 1). A
fairly clear positive relationship exists, whereby greater
favoritism shown by government toward one religious group leads
to higher restrictions on religious minorities.
The hypotheses about the social and democracy variables do
not hold up quite as well. The hypothesis about the simple
numerical dominance of one plurality religion over minority
religions finds little support with no meaningful relationship
evident. The hypothesis on the social regulation of religion does
find strong support, suggesting that where members of civil
society act to promote one religion at the expense of others,
minority religions will face more restrictions. There is an
observable relationship between the democratic or autocratic
nature of the governmental regime and the dependent variable,
where more democratic governments are less likely to discriminate
against minority religions. This relationship is statistically
40
significant in all of the regression models. There is no clear
relationship between the duration of the current governmental
regime and the dependent variable, although the coefficient is
positive in all four models where it is included, and in each
case, the p-value is between 0.205 and 0.224. While this clearly
not strong enough to suggest support for the eighth hypothesis,
it is just compelling enough to consider alternative ways of
exploring the relationship. The duration/transition variable
might be tested using different indicators suggested by the
extensive literature on transitions to democracy.
Examination of the three immigration variables yields some
surprising conclusions. The ninth hypothesis, that countries with
larger volumes of immigration would be more likely to restrict
religious minorities, is clearly rejected, as the data reveals no
apparent relationship. The two hypotheses related to the timing
of immigration generate some interesting results. Countries that
had experienced large increases in immigration since 1960 were
more likely to restrict religious minorities, confirming the
tenth hypothesis. While this relationship is not particularly
strong (coefficient values of 0.100 to 0.129 for the first six
41
models), it is statistically significant in each model. However,
those states that saw an increase in immigration since 2000 were
less likely to discriminate against religious minorities,
requiring us to reject the eleventh hypothesis. This is the
inverse of the expected relationship. Even though these results
approach statistically insignificance (p-test values of 0.056 to
0.062 in Models 1-6) and the relationships are somewhat weak, the
counterintuitive result merits further consideration. One
possible explanation could be that the political backlash against
mass immigration and its legislative response are either
cumulative or lagged by several years. The immigration variables
might require further modification. On further reflection, the
percent of immigrants indicator does not consider the origins and
more importantly the religious background of the immigrants each
state is receiving. This variable might be made more relevant to
the research design by taking national origins into account.
Finally, the hypothesis about the relationship between human
security and economic development and religious minority
restrictions is rejected because the observed relationship is the
opposite of what was predicted. Countries with higher levels of
42
human development were more, not less, likely to discriminate
against religious minorities. This flies in the face of the
secularization literature’s expectation that religion will become
increasingly privatized as levels of development and human
security rise. Governmental intervention to restrict the rights
of religious minorities clearly publicizes religion. This also
warrants further consideration in future research. This dynamic
appears to be somewhat complex, as indicated by the fluctuations
in the beta coefficients of the HDI indicator in Models 3-6
(0.163, 0.182, 0.140, and 0.113 respectively) as other variables
are removed. The jump between Models 3 and 4 occurs with the
removal of the Foreign Born Percentage indicator, while the
subsequent drop in Models 5 and 6 occurs when the Transition and
Migration Change since 2000 variables are dropped. This suggests
an interaction between the democracy and immigration variables,
which could shed light on the counterintuitive finding for HDI’s
effect on religious minorities. This possibility is bolstered by
the absence of a relationship between HDI and discrimination
against religious minorities in Model 12, which takes HDI by
itself. If mass migration occurs predominantly from countries
43
with low HDI to those with higher HDI, one would expect higher
HDI countries to be more inclined to discriminate against
religious minorities, as many of those migrants are likely to
also be religious minorities. The possible relationship with the
democracy variables is more difficult to decipher, although one
would expect a correlation between a country’s HDI and its Polity
score.
Models 8-12 group the variables to determine each group’s
relative explanatory power. Model 7’s adjusted R-squared value,
0.690, indicates that governmental variables explain the most
variation on the dependent variable. Somewhat surprising is the
fact that despite the theoretically interesting findings for the
immigration and HDI variables, their low adjusted R-squared
values in Models 11 and 12suggest that they have little
explanatory power in and of themselves. Similarly puzzling is the
combination of the high beta coefficient for Social Regulation of
Religion, the overall adjusted R-squared for the social
variables, and the statistically insignificant value for the
constant. The constant value calls into question the validity of
the Social Regulation coefficient.
44
Conclusion
This research design leaves a number of important and
interesting variables unexplored. It does not consider the
importance of exogenous factors on how governments regulate
religious minorities, factors like political pressures from
transnational religious groups (e.g. the Vatican, evangelical
Protestants, the Gülen movement, jihadist groups), human rights
groups, diasporic organizations and co-ethnics abroad, or
regional and international organizations like the UN, NATO, or
the EU. It also doesn’t consider the political mobilization of
religious minority communities themselves, the political
theologies that animate them, or the organizational capacities
and social capital that they bring to bear on political claims-
making. It also largely leaves untouched questions about the
domestic political dynamics, changing coalitions within
government and/or religiously motivated political parties, and
political contestation surrounds religious minorities. It also
does not consider the possible effects of widening economic
45
insecurity due to privatization, economic stagnation or
contraction, or, conversely, of prosperity and economic growth.
These variables may be accessible quantitatively, but
several of them are probably more appropriately measured
qualitatively. It is difficult to imagine a satisfying way to
measure, for example, the political theologies espoused by
mobilized religious minorities or these groups’ organizational
capacity. Here, quantitative data may be used to help assist in
case selection to help control for the influence of some
variables while shedding light on relationships between others.
46
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Table 1: Government Discrimination against Religious Minorities
Model 1Coefficient
Sig.
Model 2Coefficient
Sig.
Model 3Coefficient
Sig.
Model 4Coefficient
Sig.
Model 5Coefficient
Sig.
Model 6Coefficient
Sig.
Model 7Coefficient
Sig.
Formal Establishment
-0.024 0.708 -0.024 0.692 -0.029 0.609
Official Restrictions
0.226*** 0.000 0.226*** 0.000 0.229*** 0.000 0.232*** 0.000 0.236*** 0.000 0.245*** 0.000 0.238***
0.000
Regulation of Majority Religion
0.365*** 0.000 0.366*** 0.000 0.366*** 0.000 0.359*** 0.000 0.355*** 0.000 0.347*** 0.000 0.305***
0.000
Government Favoritism Index
0.129† 0.063 0.128† 0.060 0.117† 0.057 0.120* 0.050 0.130* 0.032 0.137* 0.025 0.187** 0.003
Social Regulation of Religion
0.199** 0.002 0.199** 0.002 0.198** 0.002 0.196** 0.002 0.201** 0.002 0.212*** 0.001 0.227***
0.000
Dominance of Plurality Religion
-0.002 0.972 -0.030 0.534
Polity IV -0.171* 0.011 -0.171* 0.011 -0.165* 0.012 -0.181** 0.002 -0.169** 0.004 -0.176** 0.003 -0.190**
0.005
Transition in last decade
0.072 0.207 0.072 0.205 0.068 0.223 0.067 0.224 0.060 0.245
Foreign Born percentage
0.038 0.521 0.038 0.653 0.034 0.550 0.037 0.503
Migration Changesince 1960
0.127* 0.016 0.127* 0.015 0.126* 0.015 0.129* 0.012 0.128* 0.013 0.100* 0.044
Migration Changesince 2000
-0.100† 0.062 -0.100† 0.059 -0.099† 0.062 -0.100† 0.056 -0.099† 0.060 -0.031 0.517
Human 0.168* 0.025 0.168* 0.024 0.163* 0.062 0.182** 0.007 0.140* 0.014 0.113* 0.043 0.156** 0.020
51
Development IndexConstant 0.006 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.007Number of Observations
127 127 127 127 127 127 149
Adjusted R-squared
0.729*** 0.000 0.732*** 0.000 0.734*** 0.000 0.735*** 0.000 0.734*** 0.000 0.728*** 0.000 0.712***
0.000
Note: † p<0.1; * p<0.05; ** p<0.01; *** p<0.001.
52
Table 2: Government Discrimination against Religious Minorities, by grouped variables
Model 8Coefficient
Sig.
Model 9Coefficient
Sig.
Model 10Coefficient
Sig.
Model 11Coefficient
Sig.
Model 12Coefficient
Sig.
Formal Establishment
0.031 0.532
Official Restrictions
0.359***
0.000
Regulation of Majority Religion
0.463***
0.000
Government Favoritism
0.233***
0.000
Social Regulation of Religion
0.604*** 0.000
Dominance of Plurality Religion
-0.052 0.394
Polity IV -0.530***
0.000
Transition in Last Decade
0.016 0.816
Foreign Born percentage
0.123 0.130
Migration Changesince 1960
0.208* 0.017
Migration Change -0.222** 0.010
53
since 2000Human Development Index
0.079 0.314
Constant 0.000 0.763 0.000 0.000 0.059Number of Observations
176 175 158 150 165
Adjusted R-squared
0.690***
0.000 0.354*** 0.000 0.272***
0.000 0.061** 0.007 0.000 0.314
Note: † p<0.1; * p<0.05; ** p<0.01; *** p<0.001.
54
Table 3: Hypotheses and Findings
Hypothesis Relevant Indicator(s)
Observed Relationship
H1: Formal establishment of one or more religions will lead to more restrictive policies toward minority religions.
Formal Establishment
Hypothesis rejected;no observable relationship
H2: States that have more official restrictions on religious practice in general will be morelikely to restrict minority religious participation.
Official Restrictions
Hypothesis supported
H3: States that have more restrictions on majority religious practice will be more likely to restrict minority religious participation.
Regulation of Majority Religion
Hypothesis supported
H4: States that show strong favoritism toward a dominant religion will be more likely to restrict minority religious participation.
Government Favoritism Index
Hypothesis tentatively supported
H5: Countries numerically dominated by one religious community will be more inclined to discriminate against religious minorities.
Dominance of Plurality Religion
Hypothesis rejected;no observable relationship
H6: Countries with high levels of social regulation of religion will discriminate morestrongly against minority religious groups.
Social Regulation of Religion
Hypothesis supported
H7: Countries with higher levels of democracy will be less likely to restrict religious minorities.
Polity Hypothesis supported
H8: States experiencing a significant transition Transition in Hypothesis
55
between democracy and autocracy in the last decade will be more likely to impose restrictions on religious minorities.
Last Decade tentatively supported
H9: States experiencing high levels of immigration will be more likely to tighten regulations for religious minorities.
Foreign Born Percentage
Hypothesis rejected;no observable relationship
H10: States experiencing high levels of immigration relative to historic levels will be more likely to tighten regulations for religious minorities.
Migration Change since 1960
Hypothesis supported
H11: States experiencing high levels of immigration within the last decade will be more likely to tighten regulations for religious minorities.
Migration Change since 2000
Hypothesis rejected;observed relationship is opposite of prediction
H12: States with higher levels of economic development and human security will be more tolerant toward religious minorities.
Human Development Index
Hypothesis rejected;observed relationship is opposite of prediction
56
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