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Abstract

Spearheaded by the United States, many countries have taken an interest in incorporating international religious freedom into their foreign policies. Assessments of religious freedom conditions are well-documented, but there is no consensus on what factors explain the variation in religious freedom between the world’s countries. This project posits that a government’s relationship with its dominant religion is crucial to shaping its religious freedom conditions. Since no sources have quantified the many dimensions of a government’s relationship with its dominant religion, I construct an index to measure this relationship. Within this index, I categorize the different aspects of this relationship as (1) the dominant religion’s control of laws, (2) the presence of religious members in government, (3) the presence of pro-dominant religion legislation, (4) the government’s funding of the dominant religion, and (5) the government’s control over the dominant religion. Through regression analysis, I find a negative correlation between a government’s tie to the dominant religion and its religious freedom score. However, the strength of this correlation greatly varies between the categories of the government’s relationship with its dominant religion, with the most significant negative correlation with religious freedom being with the government’s control of the dominant religion. This study suggests that international actors interested in improving the religious freedom conditions should adopt a country-specific approach that considers the country’s government’s relationship with its dominant religion. These actors should tolerate these existing relationships and only seek to change the specific aspects detrimental to religious freedom.

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