Why Governments Discriminate against Religious Minorities | Feb. 17, 2022 

Jonathan Fox, "Why Governments Discriminate against Religious Minorities"
Live streamed from West Hall on February 17, 2022
Why do governments discriminate against religious minorities? According to Jonathan Fox, author of the book, “Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me: Why Governments Discriminate against Religious Minorities”, this is actually two questions:
Why do some governments discriminate more than others?
Why are some minorities singled out for more discrimination than others?
In this talk, Fox will reflect on data from a study of 771 religious minorities in 183 countries to answer these questions. The causes are complex and often cross-cutting and include secular ideologies, religious monopolies, anti-cult policies, levels of societal discrimination, and security concerns, among others. Western democracies tend to discriminate more than Christian-majority countries in the developing world, whether they are democratic or not. While the causes of religious discrimination by governments are ubiquitous, they play out in vastly different ways across world regions and religious traditions.