Capital Faith
Religious Freedom in the World 2007—New Survey Released by the Hudson Institute
by Joan Frawley Desmond
A “truncated view” of religious freedom ignores the essential role “spiritual capital” plays in nurturing a free society, and leads some governments to offer a false choice between economic development and religious tolerance, said Paul Marshall of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, speaking at a conference last summer announcing the initial findings of the center’s report, Religious Freedom in the World 2007, to be published next year.
The tendency of some Westerners and third-world dictators to dismiss freedom of worship as an ethnocentric “quasi-luxury” poor countries can ill afford ignores the universal appeal and crucial value of religious freedom, said Marshall, a primary author of the report, and a senior fellow at the center. “It is a moral travesty of the highest order to maintain that because people are hungry or cold it is legitimate to repress their beliefs as well.”
Designed to increase public awareness of the importance of religious freedom, to promote the linkage of Western economic investment with human rights in the developing world, and to raise the standard for Congressionally mandated reports on religious persecution around the globe, the report, completed in partnership with the Spiritual Enterprise Institute, challenges the benign view of religious persecution that leads wealthy nations, multinational corporations, and international financial institutions to invest in countries like China, where Communist party officials imprison spiritual leaders and suppress churches and sects.
At the conference, held at the Hudson Institute’s offices in Washington, D.C., Marshall was joined by Theodore Malloch, founder of the Spiritual Enterprise Institute, who explored the intimate relationship between religious virtues and free market systems, and Brian J. Grim of Pennsylvania State University, who presented his findings on the relation of religious freedom and socio-economic status.
The Center for Religious Freedom, founded by Nina Shea in 1986, moved from Freedom House to the Hudson Institute in early 2007.
A New Model
The report offers a new model of reporting on religious freedom, one that attempts to correct the lack of nuance in similar global surveys, especially the State Department’s 1999 report mandated by the US Congress. Such surveys, the authors suggest, define religious persecution so narrowly that the definition both distorts the statistics and equates well-publicized but rare problems in one country with systemic but under-reported problems in another.
In most parts of the world, for example, religious identity cannot be separated from the social-political context. When researchers ignore this, Marshall said, they tend to contrast
politics, nationalism, and ethnicity with religion, as though concrete acts, events, and movements were necessarily of only one or another category. In fact, most things human are several of these things at once. A war can be both economic and religious . . . just as a wall can be both thick and tall.
Joan Frawley Desmond is a freelance writer who lives with her husband and three children in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She is a recent graduate of the John Paul II Institute for the Study of Marriage and the Family.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
33.1—January/February 2020
on a Saint's Charism That Cures Toxic Perfectionism by Colleen Carroll Campbell
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
