Wednesday 15th January 2014

The Pew Research Centre released its global study showing that hostility towards religion is at a six-year high.

The study by the Pew Research Centre looks at global restrictions on religion, whether against Christians or otherwise. It is similar to the World Watch List, released last week, however, the Pew survey, measures violence using two indices, measuring the level of restriction imposed by government, and acts of hostility for religious reasons.

Coinciding with the World Watch List report, Egypt, Pakistan and Myanmar all featured heavily in terms of government restriction and acts of hostility. North Korea, which was number 1 in the World Watch List report, was not officially ranked due to limited information, but it did mention, “The primary sources used in this study indicate that North Korea’s government is among the most repressive in the world, including toward religion.”

The study found that a third of the countries included in the study had a high level of religious hostilities, up from 29 per cent in 2011, and 20 per cent in 2007. This means that more than 5.3 billion (more than three quarters of the world population) live in countries with a high to very high level of religious restriction. Compare this to the number that live in areas with low levels of restriction on religion: 4 per cent.

The percentage of countries where violence, or threat of violence, was used to enforce religious custom more than doubled since 2007, to 39% of the countries surveyed.

Reasons for the increase included the flow-on effects of the Arab Spring. Of the 20 countries measured in the Middle East-North Africa region, 15 of them had an increased level of hostilities.

If these reports of religious violence sound unsurprising, then that only serves to underline the problem itself. If we come to regard the death of someone for their religious belief as banal because “we’ve heard it before”, such a response only shows how commonplace the violence has become in our world.

Infographics courtesy of the Pew Research Centre.