New Reports on Religious Freedom and the Religious Blogosphere

Two reports of interest appeared on the Internet recently.

The first is a report from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs called "Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy." It is a bit long, so you might want to just read the executive summary at the beginning.

The second is a report called "The New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere" by the Social Science Research Council. Unfortunately, this blog did not make it into the report. What an oversight!

Many Recent Events

Too many to say too much:

• The USCIRF is accused of an anti-Muslim bias in the Washington Post.
• The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a U.S. group that seek increased separation of church and state, is lobbying the federal government to end tax breaks for ministers.
• A church that mixes Eastern Orthodoxy with Evangelical Christianity.
• Pew releases a study on the religious attitudes of the millennials.
• A group unhappy with current trends in the Lutheran Church has unveiled plans to form a rival, the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), which will promote traditional teachings.
  

A New Religion in India?

You can read about it here. Of course, not everyone is in favor of its forming.

French Parliamentary Report Recommends Burqa Ban in Public Places

Here is CNN's summary of this story.

Religious Regulation in the News

Religious regulation has been big in the news lately.

• The transcript for a discussion of the Pew Report on Global Restrictions on Religion has been posted online. The transcript is long but gives some excellent context for the report.
  
• Open Doors released its World Watch List, which ranks countries where persecution of Christians is the worst.
• The Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University released a document that explores 35 questions related to religion in politics and public life. It is titled Religious Expression in American Life: A Joint Statement of Current Law.
• The December 2009 Newsletter of the Association of American Law Schools included a 35-page bibliography of articles, books, and websites on law and religion from 2009.
  
• Following his recent predecessors, President Obama declared January 16th Religious Freedom Day.
  

Wrapping up 2009 and Looking Toward 2010

Time to wrap up the 2009 year with some big religion stories.

1. The Pew Forum released this month a big study on religious regulations around the world. Here is the executive summary. The big item was that an estimated 70% of the world's population live under high or very high religious regulations.
2. For the fifth year in a row, the United Nations passed a resolution against religious defamation, yet support for this is declining each year. The main criticism of the resolution is that it can be used to support the suppression of some minority religious groups whose members speak out against persecutions enacted by member of other religious groups.
3. These two stories are mentioned in this Economist Magazine article.
   
4. Another Pew Forum study on trends in American's religiosity. In short, there is a lot of switching and mixing. Here's a Wall Street Journal article on it.
   

Putting the year in perspective is Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, which posted online their annual roundtable on the major religion stories during the past year, and Howard Friedman of ReligionClause.blogspot.com, who gives his Top-10 Religious Liberty Developments of 2009.

Religion & Ethics Newsweekly also gives a look ahead to 2010.

End-of-quarter Thoughts on the Blog

I welcome your feedback on the value of the blog. Please take a few minutes to answer the following questions.

1. Which one or two blog posts did you like the most?
2. What did you like about the blog? What did you not like about it?
3. In what ways did the blog contribute to the class, if any?
   
4. Would you come back to visit this blog later even though you will not be a student in the class?
   

Any other comments are appreciated as well. If there is interest, I can continue to post stories even though the class has ended. I have enjoyed our interaction on the blog, and I hope it has contributed to your understanding of the economics of religion.

Sikhs and the Possibility of Religious Freedom

Sikh-Americans are small in number: there are only 211 Sikh congregations in the U.S.A. in the year 2000 according to the ARDA web site. Yet Sikhs stand out because of their many distinctive practices. The Pew Forum just published online a short but nice Q&A about the difficulties Sikh-Americans face in practicing their religion in the U.S.A. Much of this has to do with some of the particular requirements of Sikhism, e.g., men must wear head coverings, believers must carry a kirpan (a small curved sword), and more.

The Q&A examines the difficulty in balancing our ideal of religious freedom with other ideals in our society. For example: Should Sikh students be allowed to bring kirpans to school when the swords could become dangerous weapons? Should Sikhs be allowed to wear head coverings when it violates the uniform code required at a place of employment? Should imprisoned Sikhs be forced to shave their beards to comply with prison dress standards?

These questions are often resolved in the courtroom, where judges must perform a balancing act in trying to weigh a person's right to act in line with religious beliefs with another person or group's rights to set rules for behavior. In general, the courts rule in favor of the religious person unless there is a reason compelling enough to overrule that person's right to religious practice. For example, a 1984 ruling went in favor of an employer who required his Sikh employee to shave his beard because the beard hair hindered the operation of a gas mask that must be worn by employees for safety.

But we see here the difficulty in putting into practice our basic notion of religious freedom. Religious freedom often comes into conflict with other freedoms and responsibilities, and this means that religious freedom, even in the U.S.A., is not a right that trumps all other rights at all times and in all places in the eyes of the courts. This conclusion has even led at least one person to conclude that religious freedom is impossible.

It is true that religious freedom in the fullest sense of the term will never be realized because in a pluralistic society there will frequently arise conflicting claims and rights. Yet, saying that religious freedom is impossible can be misleading. Religious freedom is better thought of as existing in a matter of degrees rather than as an either-or condition. There is no doubt that people are more free to practice their religions in some countries than in others. Thus, the notion of religious freedom is still useful even if it can never be experienced in totality. Unfortunately, it also means that some people, like Sikhs in the U.S., will give up some religious practices even in relatively free religious environments.

Update: Coincidently, a Sikh man's is currently suing a transportation company claiming it did not hire him because of his beard and turban. Story here.