Dr. Robert Martin, professor of sociology and criminal justice, has been focusing on government interference
with citizens’ right to worship. The Lion’s Roar / Emily Stephan

Though the modern world offers many freedoms, religious freedom and religious-based violence remain two of the biggest problems in the world today.

In this day and age, it is shocking for many to learn that large nations such as the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Brazil do not honor their promise to grant citizens religious freedom. 

Dr. Robert Martin, professor of sociology and criminal justice, recently conducted a study on religious freedom with Dr. Roger Finke, a professor from Penn State University. The two have been working together since Martin’s days in graduate school.

“I’ve worked with Dr. Finke a few times before on issues regarding religious freedom and conflict,” said Martin. “He was also my mentor in graduate school and we started working together when I was a research associate at the Association of Religion Data Archives at www.theARDA.com, where he serves as director.”

Their aim was to examine government interference in the right to worship as one pleases, especially when the government promises citizens freedom of religion.

“My research with Dr. Finke tries to understand why countries’ governments place limits on people’s religious freedoms, like interfering with their right to worship,” said Martin. “The vast majority of countries guarantee religious freedom in their constitutions, but they often don’t live up to those guarantees, or else they find ways to chip away at them.  These types of limits are more common when there are more societal restrictions against religions, like when some religious groups try to shut out others or where there are hostile social attitudes toward certain religions.”

Martin listed common examples of government-inflicted religious discrimination.

“You also see more restrictions against some religions when governments give benefits and favors to other religions, like money or recognition as the official religion of the government, and where a country’s courts aren’t independent of other parts of government,” said Martin. “Another one of our big findings is that when you take other factors into account, government restrictions on religion are not more common in heavily Muslim countries than in countries with proportionally smaller Muslim populations.”

According to Martin, the United States government does well in enforcing religious freedom. Most of the religious-based friction comes from a societal level, due to negative depictions of non-Christians in the media. This has provoked hate crimes against non-Christian groups in the United States, the highest amount of them aimed at the country’s Jewish population, according to Martin. The reasoning behind such animosity mainly stems from an unfamiliarity with different religious perspectives and cultures on the part of the aggressors.

“Compared to other larger countries, the United States does a good job of ensuring religious freedom,” said Martin. “It’s important to make a distinction between limits on religious freedom imposed on people by the government and limits imposed by people in society, such as discriminating against people on a religious basis.  I think a lot of the societal discrimination against non-Christians in America is due to many people not being familiar with members of non-Christian faiths on a personal basis.  Like with any group, it’s more likely that people are going to have negative attitudes about members of minority religions if they don’t know anyone who belongs to that religion, or if they only hear negative messages about that religion in the media they consume.”

The two professors propose that these governments obviously need a separate body to keep them in check on this matter. In their published study by the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Martin and Finke claim that “without an independent judiciary, the legislative will of the majority and the actions of rulers can routinely ignore or simply overrule constitutional promises.”

For more information, contact Dr. Martin at [email protected].