Religious persecution

Religious persecution is the systematic oppression of an individual or a group of individuals as a response to their religious beliefs or affiliations or their lack thereof. The tendency of societies or groups within societies to alienate or repress different subcultures is a recurrent theme in human history. Because a person's religion frequently determines his or her sense of morality, worldview, self-image, attitudes towards others, and overall personal identity to a significant extent, religious differences can be significant cultural, personal, and social factors.
Religious persecution may be triggered by religious or antireligious stances or it may be triggered by the state when it views a particular religious group as a threat to its interests or security. At a societal level, the dehumanization of a particular religious group may readily lead to acts of violence or other forms of persecution. Religious persecution may be the result of societal and/or governmental regulation. Governmental regulation refers to the laws which the government imposes in order to regulate a religion, and societal regulation is discrimination against citizens because they adhere to one or more religions. In many countries, religious persecution has resulted in so much violence that it is considered a human rights problem.

Definition

David T. Smith, in Religious Persecution and Political Order in the United States, defines religious persecution as "violence or discrimination against members of a religious minority because of their religious affiliation," referring to "actions that are intended to deprive individuals of their political rights and force minorities to assimilate, leave, or live as second-class citizens. In the aspect of a state's policy, it may be defined as violations of freedom of thought, conscience and belief which are spread in accordance with a systematic and active state policy which encourages actions such as harassment, intimidation and the imposition of punishments in order to infringe or threaten the targeted minority's right to life, integrity or liberty. The distinction between religious persecution and religious intolerance lies in the fact that in most cases, the latter is motivated by the sentiment of the population, which may be tolerated or encouraged by the state. The denial of people's civil rights on the basis of their religion is most frequently described as religious discrimination, rather than religious persecution.
Examples of persecution include the confiscation or destruction of property, incitement of hatred, arrests, imprisonment, beatings, torture, murder, and executions. Religious persecution can be considered the opposite of freedom of religion.
Bateman has differentiated different degrees of persecution. "It must be personally costly... It must be unjust and undeserved... it must be a direct result of one's faith."

Sociological view

From a sociological perspective, the identity formation of strong social groups such as those which are generated by nationalism, ethnicity, or religion, is a causal aspect of practices of persecution. says that it is these communities, which can be a majority or a minority, that generate violence. Since the development of identity involves 'what we are not' as much as 'what we are', there are grounds for the fear that tolerance of 'what we are not' can contribute to the erosion of identity. Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke say that the perception that plurality is dangerous leads to religious persecution. Both the state and any dominant religion, share the concern that to "leave religion unchecked and without adequate controls will result in the uprising of religions that are dangerous to both state and citizenry," and this concern gives both the dominant religion and the state motives for restricting religious activity. Grim and Finke say it is specifically this religious regulation that leads to religious persecution. R.I. Moore says that persecution during the Middle Ages "provides a striking illustration of the classic deviance theory, , as it was propounded by the father of sociology, Émile Durkheim". Persecution is also, often, part of a larger conflict involving emerging states as well as established states in the process of redefining their national identity.
James L.Gibson adds that the greater the attitudes of loyalty and solidarity to the group identity, and the more the benefits to belonging there are perceived to be, the more likely a social identity will become intolerant of challenges. Combining a strong social identity with the state, increases the benefits, therefore it is likely persecution from that social group will increase. Legal restriction from the state relies on social cooperation, so the state in its turn must protect the social group that supports it, increasing the likelihood of persecution from the state as well. Grim and Finke say their studies indicate that the higher the degree of religious freedom, the lower the degree of violent religious persecution. "When religious freedoms are denied through the regulation of religious profession or practice, violent religious persecution and conflict increase."
Perez Zagorin writes "According to some philosophers, tolerance is a moral virtue; if this is the case, it would follow that intolerance is a vice. But virtue and vice are qualities solely of individuals, and intolerance and persecution were social and collective phenomena sanctioned by society and hardly questioned by anyone. Religious intolerance and persecution, therefore, were not seen as vices, but as necessary and salutary for the preservation of religious truth and orthodoxy and all that was seen to depend upon them." This view of persecution is not limited to the Middle Ages. As Christian R. Raschle and Jitse H. F. Dijkstra, say: "Religious violence is a complex phenomenon that exists in all places and times."
In the ancient societies of Egypt, Greece and Rome, torture was an accepted aspect of the legal system. Gillian Clark says violence was taken for granted in the fourth century as part of both war and punishment; torture from the carnifex, the professional torturer of the Roman legal system, was an accepted part of that system. Except for a few rare exceptions, such as the Persian empire under Cyrus and Darius, Denis Lacorne says that examples of religious tolerance in ancient societies, "from ancient Greece to the Roman empire, medieval Spain to the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic", are not examples of tolerance in the modern sense of the term.
The sociological view regards religious intolerance and persecution as largely social processes that are determined more by the context within which the social community exists than anything else. When governments ensure equal freedom for all, there is less persecution.

Statistics

Statistics from Pew Research Center show that Christianity and Islam are persecuted in more countries around the world than other religions, and that Jews and Muslims are "most likely to live in countries where their groups experience harassment". As of 2018, Christians face harassment in 145 countries, Muslims face harassment in 139 countries, and Jews face harassment in 88 countries. Respectively: Christians account for 31% of the world's population, Muslims account for 24%, and Jews account for 0.2%. According to a 2019 report, government restrictions and social hostilities toward religion have risen in 187 countries.

Forms

Religious cleansing

"Religious cleansing" is sometimes used in reference to the removal of a population from a certain territory based on its religion. More recently, “religious cleansing” has been used in reference to the elimination of all religious structures or all individuals who adhere to a particular religion and live within a larger community which is composed of people who are members of the same ethnicity.
Throughout antiquity, population cleansing was largely motivated by economic and political factors, but occasionally, ethnic factors also played a role. During the Middle Ages, population cleansing took on a largely religious character. The religious motivation for population cleansing lost much of its salience early in the modern era, but until the 18th century, ethnic enmity in Europe continued to be couched in religious terms. Richard Dawkins has argued that references to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq are euphemisms for what should more accurately be called religious cleansing. According to Adrian Koopman, the widespread use of the term ethnic cleansing in such cases suggests that in many situations, there is confusion between ethnicity and religion.

Ethnicity

Other acts of violence which are not always committed against adherents of particular religions such as war, torture, and ethnic cleansing, may take on the qualities of religious persecution when one or more of the parties which are involved in them are characterized by their religious homogeneity; an example of this occurs when conflicting populations that belong to different ethnic groups also belong to different religions or denominations. The difference between religious and ethnic identity might sometimes be obscure ; nevertheless, cases of genocide in the 20th century cannot be fully-explained by the citation of religious differences. Still, cases of genocide such as the Greek genocide, the Armenian genocide, and the Assyrian genocide are sometimes seen as cases of religious persecution and as a result, the lines between ethnic violence and religious violence are sometimes blurry.
Since the Early modern period, an increasing number of religious cleansings were entwined with ethnic elements. Since religion is an important or a central marker of ethnic identity, some conflicts can best be described as "ethno-religious conflicts".
Nazi antisemitism provides another example of the contentious divide between ethnic persecution and religious persecution, because Nazi propaganda tended to construct its image of Jews by portraying them as people who were members of an inferior race, it dehumanized and demonized Jews by classifying them as a race rather than a religion. In keeping with what they were taught in Nazi propaganda, the perpetrators of the Holocaust made no distinction between secular Jews, atheistic Jews, orthodox Jews, Messianic Jews and other Jews who had converted to Christianity. At least 396,000 Christians of Jewish ancestry died in the Holocaust, though the number could be far higher.