An Increase in Hostility Toward Religion

A new report on hostility toward religion around the world has recently been released by the Pew Research Center.  A nice overview of the report is found here (the much longer full report is found here).  Some of the findings include:

• The share of countries with a high or very high level of social hostilities involving religion reached a six-year high in 2012.
• A third of the 198 countries/territories had high religious hostilities.
• The sharpest increase was in the Middle East and North Africa, but there were also significant increases in the Asia-Pacific region.
• The share of countries with high or very high levels of government restrictions on religion stayed about the same.
• Restrictions on religion, whether social or by government, are high or very high in 43% of countries.

In our class, we will discuss these measures of hostility toward religion and discuss how they might affect religiosity.