(CP) Members of non secular groups faced harassment by either governmental actors or social groups in a record number of nations and territories as a recent Pew Research Center evaluation finds acts of hostility against Christians are on the rise.
The release of Pew’s report, “Government Restrictions on Religion Stayed at Peak Levels Globally in 2022,” marks the fifteenth time it has conducted research examining government restrictions and social hostilities toward religion in 198 countries and territories.
The research revealed that in 2022, “harassment of non secular groups by governments or social actors occurred in 192 out of the world’s 198 countries and territories.” This constituted “a rise by two countries from 2021 and a recent peak level for the study.”
“Governments harassed people for his or her religious beliefs and practices in 186 countries in 2022, up from 183 in 2021,” the report states. “Social groups or private individuals harassed people as a result of their religion in 164 countries, the identical number as in 2021. Governments and/or social actors harassed religious groups in 192 countries, including 158 countries where each governments and social groups or private individuals engaged in harassment.”
As has been the case in every installment of the study, Christians experienced harassment in most countries, reaching a record high of 166 in 2022.
One example cited within the report was the arrest of a person whose son brought Bibles and other Christian literature across the border into Mauritania from Senegal.
Another example is a Syriac Catholic Church leader in Bartella, a historically Christian town in Nineva province rebuilding after the defeat of the Islamic State, who said militias “sought to ‘seize and occupy Christian properties’ in an try and drive out Christians and alter the religious composition of the town.”
The study identified property damage, assaults, detentions, displacements and killings as examples of physical harassment experienced by religious groups. It highlighted how at the least one instance of physical harassment toward a non secular group occurred in 145 of 198 countries, marking a rise from the 137 measured in 2021.
Governments used physical force against religious groups in 111 countries, while social groups or private individuals were determined to have engaged in such harassment in the identical number of nations.
The most frequent type of physical harassment directed at religious groups was property damage, occurring in 61% of nations. Detentions occurred in barely lower than half (47%) of nations, while the share of nations where physical assaults, displacements and killings occurred were measured at 45%, 26% and 25%, respectively.
According to a detailed appendix accompanying the report, the one countries where absolutely no harassment of non secular groups occurred by the hands of the federal government in 2022 were Cape Verde, Fiji, Grenada, Macao, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Portugal, San Marino, Senegal and Suriname. The United States was listed as certainly one of 110 countries where there was widespread intimidation of non secular groups “by any level of presidency.”
Religious groups within the U.S. found themselves subject to property damage and physical assaults, while no displacements, killings or detentions were recorded. Another adversarial experience faced by religious groups within the U.S. involves organized groups using “force or coercion in an try and dominate public life with their perspective on religion, including stopping some religious groups from operating within the country.”
Muslims faced some level of harassment in 148 nations in 2022, which also marked a record high since Pew began conducting this research.
After reaching a record of 94 countries in 2020, the number of nations where Jews experienced harassment dropped for the second yr in a row, coming in at 90 in 2022.
The number of nations where harassment of Hindus occurred also rose to a record high of 26 in 2022. Members of people religions experienced harassment in 49 countries, one other record high. The number of countries where harassment was directed at Buddhists dropped to 25 in 2022 after reaching a record high of 28 in 2021.
Harassment directed at members of “other religions” was measured in 68 countries in 2022, tying a previous record high set in 2019. The religiously unaffiliated were targeted in acts of harassment in 32 countries, one other record high.
