For immediate release: February 27, 2006
A study of religious freedom presents newly developed indexes that will allow researchers to examine the impact of regulating religion throughout the world. The new study, “International Religion Indexes: Government Regulation, Government Favoritism, and Social Regulation of Religion,“ by Brian Grim and Roger Finke of the Association of Religion Data Archives, develops measurement models and indexes that allows for cross-national comparisons of government regulation, government favoritism and social regulation of religion.
The study, published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion (http://www.religjournal.com), introduces and tests the reliability of the new indexes on religion for 196 countries and territories. The indexes are especially groundbreaking in that they include material not accessible to Western researchers, as well as use measures for social regulation of religion. While there have been attempts to measure government regulation and favoritism (usually in the form of state subsidies and privileges for selected religions), unofficial social actions that may also restrict religion have been largely ignored.
Religious regulation has increasingly been shown to have powerful effects on the practice of religion itself. The lifting of religious regulations has been shown to sharply increase the supply and activity of religion in Latin America, Asia, the United States, Europe, and in Muslim countries. Apart from state influence, social regulation and restrictions can be “placed on the practice, profession, or selection of religion by other religious groups, associations, or the culture at large,” write Grimm and Finke.
The indexes already offer several unexpected findings for researchers. For instance, China is shown to score a high 9.2 (on a scale between 0 and 10) on the government regulation index, but falls to 4.8 on the social regulation index. Vietnam falls even farther, going from 7.8 to 3.0. Other countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, remain high on both indexes. The ARDA indexes will prove useful for public policy and education, but their greatest promise is for stimulating research on such questions as the relationship between religion and social conflict and how religious regulation may be related to violence and armed conflict.
Grimm and Finke found that the annual International Religion Report, issued by the U.S. State Department, offers comprehensive and largely non-biased information on religious restrictions and abuses of freedom unavailable to Western researchers. Since such material is mostly qualitative, Grimm and Finke converted its findings into statistical codes, using a 243-item coding instrument, essentially a survey questionnaire.
The researchers found that the measurement models for each of the indexes had a high level of internal reliability and the models had an excellent fit with the data. The current indexes represent only the ARDA’s first installment in cross-national data on religion. Additional years of the International Religious Freedom Report are currently being coded and will be publicly available at www.TheARDA.com.
