On March 5, 2024, the Pew Research Center released its fourteenth annual survey on the status of religious freedom worldwide. Due to the amount of work involved in collecting the data and creating the report–which covers 198 countries and territories– the period it covers is the world in 2021. The survey finds that overall religious freedom in the world has continued to decline, paralleling the global deterioration of democracy and human rights in general.
Pew seeks to measure both government restrictions on religion (the GRI Index) and social hostilities based on religion (the SHI Index)–summarizing what government does to people and what people do to each other. Its general finding is that government restrictions have continued to climb, reaching a new peak in 2021, whereas social hostilities show a slight decline.
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