Princeton Professor Talks about the Threats to Religious Freedom
Freedom House was fond of saying the 20th century was the century of freedom. If you look at the number of people living in freedom in the year 1900 versus the year 1990, many more millions of people ended the century living in freedom. Has that trend continued since then? Not on the religious freedom front, no. Remember, freedom is a variegated thing. There’s economic freedom, there’s political freedom, there’s freedom of speech. There are lots of different freedoms. They’re all important. On the religious freedom front, the news is simply not good. … The Pew Foundation’s data show that something very close to three-quarters of the world’s population … is living under regimes that … systematically and frequently violate the religious freedom of some substantial percentage of their people. It may be the majority of people, it may be a particular minority. Or, [the regimes] stand by as private...
