Dan Gilmore – 5 minutes
Recent reports show that religious restrictions and persecution are at an all-time high around the world.
The U.S. State Department released its 2024 International Religious Freedom Report, which evaluates the state of religious freedom around the globe. The findings are alarming, showing many examples of people in other countries being persecuted for their religious beliefs. According to the data, there are “threats to religious freedom in almost 200 countries.”
Pew Research Center also reported that government restrictions on religion have reached the highest global level since it began tracking in 2007. Pew notes that “religious groups faced harassment by governments in 183 countries in 2021, the largest number since the study began.”
Aid to the Church in Need—an international religious freedom watchdog—noted in its most recent Religious Freedom Report that more than 4 billion people live in a country where they’re persecuted for their religious beliefs. That’s more than 50% of the world’s population.
Governments are doing everything from enacting laws that prohibit religious freedom, to shutting down places of worship, to interfering with unapproved religions. Because Pew most recently tracked data from 2021, it found that governments cracked down especially on religious leaders who didn’t comply with COVID-19 restrictions. Antisemitism and Islamophobia increased significantly across the globe after the terrorist group, Hamas, attacked Israel on October 7th, the deadliest day in the Jewish state’s history.
According to Secretary of State Antony Blinken,
“Today governments around the world continue to target individuals, shutter places of worship, forcibly displace communities, and imprison people because of their religious beliefs. Some countries place restrictions on wearing certain types of religious dress; others enforce it. In some instances, governments are reaching beyond their own borders to target individuals because of their faith and their advocacy for religious freedom. In every region, people continue to face religious-based violence, religious-based discrimination, both from governments and their fellow citizens. They may be shut out of schools, denied jobs, harassed, beaten, or worse.”
This isn’t just something we are seeing in nations far away. We’re feeling the effects of religious oppression within America’s borders. The State Department made clear that “here in the United States, reports of hate crimes and other incidents targeting both Muslims and Jews have gone up dramatically.”
That’s why all of this matters to us as Americans.
Despite religious persecution being on the rise at home and abroad, not all is gloom and doom. In fact, when we step back and look at the last few years, we can clearly see great momentum for religious freedom here in America.
First Liberty has secured multiple precedent-setting victories at the Supreme Court that have been the most consequential rulings favoring religious liberty of our generation. Those include our wins for Coach Kennedy, the Bladensburg Peace Cross, our “Faithful Carrier” Gerald Groff and families in Maine, all of which were monumental wins and created a seismic change in the law.
On top of our successes, many of our friends and allies have also fought in court to secure many important Supreme Court wins that are also contributing to the fight for religious freedom.
Combined, all these victories have opened floodgates, so that millions of Americans can freely live out their faith and enjoy more religious liberty than they’ve had in more than 50 years!
America is built on a promise that people of all faiths can live according to their beliefs. The United States is the land of the free, and we are known around the globe as the safe haven for religious freedom. Religious freedom is in our DNA. It’s our identity as a nation.
This was the most sacred freedom that our Founders fought for, and it’s written into our Bill of Rights as the First Freedom for a reason. Without the freedom of religion, no other freedoms are possible. It’s the wellspring from which all other rights and freedoms flow.
There is tremendous hope for our nation. There’s evidence all around us that when we stand up for religious freedom and our God-given rights, we CAN win. Let’s continue fighting for what matters most.
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