Assessing the Impact of Religious Registration

Abstract

Religious groups often rely on a registration process to receive the legal status needed to operate openly. Yet, the registration process has become a recent source of controversy. This research uses case studies, trend data from three global collections, and fixed effects models using 19 waves of data to test for the consequences of introducing registration requirements within a nation. The case studies help us to understand the controversies and to identify how registration requirements have been used to increase restrictions on religions in the past, while the trend data document the increasing use of these requirements for discriminating against religions. Finally, the fixed effects models find that introducing registration requirements within a nation was followed by increased religious restrictions, especially for minority religions.

Countries Mimicking Neighbors: The Spatial Diffusion of Governmental Restrictions on Religion

“…The RAS2 was collected retrospectively for 177 countries from 1990 to 2008. The number of restrictions corresponds with the "Indicators of 228 JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION Restrictions on Minority Religions Index," which was modified corresponding to a prior research designed to test the presence of governmental restrictions on religion (Finke and Martin 2014;Finke, Mataic, and Fox 2018). The removal of some items from the full index also corresponds with measures that are conceptually similar to predictive measures.…”

“…While promises of religious freedoms in a country's constitution are common, restrictions are prevalent and frequent (Fox ; Grim and Finke ; Finke and Martin ; Finke, Mataic, and Fox ). Identified as a human rights concern (Office of International Religious Freedom ), scholars have recognized the importance in understanding the determinants of restrictions on religion, particularly considering the associations between restrictions and increased levels of religious persecution and violence (see Akbaba and Fox ; Finke and Harris ; Finke and Martin ; Grim and Finke , ).…”

“…Governmental policies on religion are often implemented as seemingly benign policies, but inevitably are used to restrict religious freedom. For example, many countries require religious organizations to register with the national government to legally operate, but restrict religions through certain registration requirements (Finke, Mataic, and Fox ). Other restrictions are more direct, such as explicit policies preventing clergy from holding political office.…”

“…I excluded this measure because the IRF data do not include measurement for the United States and would therefore exclude an important country within the “Western Democracies” region from the analysis. Despite this, the modified RAS2 and the IRF favoritism indexes measure similar concepts, such as the balance of government funding between religious organizations such as hospitals and schools, and have been used in recent tests of restrictions on religion (Finke, Mataic, and Fox ). Similarly, social restrictions of religion, which demonstrate competition between nonstate actors, are excluded from the analysis despite their relation to state restrictions on religion (Finke and Martin ; Grim and Finke , ).…”

Human Rights and Religion: A Sociological Perspective

“…Recent research on religious registration requirements (Finke, Mataic, and Fox ) depicts why and how the research of legal mechanism of registration used by the states to limit religious freedom goes beyond the legal perspective and addresses this question to social scientists. In order to understand “how the registration process can contribute to the denial of freedom for some or all religions” (Finke, Mataic, and Fox ) we need to examine political regimes, types of political secularisms, nationalism, and types of religious competition within the country or regionally. The international human rights regime in its turn affects that process with the standard of religious freedom and with the measurement of International Religion Indexes: Governmental Regulation, Government Favouritism, and Social Regulation of Religion (Grim and Finke ).…”