Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me: Why Governments Discriminate against Religious Minorities by Jonathan Fox (review)

Many have sensed what comedian Tom Lehrer sang in jest: “Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics, and the Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Hindus hate the Moslems, and everybody hates the Jews” (“National Brotherhood Week,” 1965). In Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me, Jonathan Fox digs deep into the data and provides a clear and well-written analysis to illustrate overwhelmingly that Lehrer was right, at least at the governmental level around the globe.

Fox uses the third round of the Religion and State-Minorities data set—a subset of the Religion and State data set from more 180 countries (including more than 770 religious minorities) collected between 1990 and 2014—as the foundation for his research. Relying on these data, he seeks to explain “the nature, causes, and dynamics of government-based religious discrimination” (GRD), which he defines as “restrictions placed by governments or their agents on the religious practices or institution of religious minorities that are not placed on the majority religion” (3). Of necessity, part of Fox’s analysis includes a consideration of “societal religious discrimination” (SRD), which he defines as “societal actions taken against religious minorities by members of a country’s religious majority who do not represent the government” (4). But he also explores other theories to explain levels of GRD in various national groupings, which he identifies as the Muslim world, non-Orthodox Christian-majority democracies in the West and Europe (as defined by the 2018 “Polity Project” from the Center for Systemic Peace), Orthodox Christian, Buddhist, and Communist states, the Rest 1 (the democracies not already discussed) and the Rest 2 (the non-democracies not already discussed).

Sadly, Fox finds that both GRD and SRD increased globally between 1990 and 2014, and that almost no nation was guiltless: nearly 95 percent of the nations covered engaged in GRD against at least one minority group. More profoundly, he finds that despite their self-congratulatory rhetoric, the non-Orthodox Christian-majority democracies in the West and Europe are not the best protectors of religious freedom. Rather, it is “the Rest” (both the democracies and the non-democracies)—particularly those in the Global South—that provide greater freedom to their religious minorities, likely because government-based discrimination requires the expenditure of scarce resources. Religious liberty, it seems, has less to do Western ideology than with cost-effectiveness. Among those nations that can afford to discriminate, GRD may result from security anxieties (related to religion-based terrorism), the identification of a religious tradition as “foreign” to the nation or culture, the existence of an official religion (or one favored by the government), or an anti-religion bias, as well as SRD and other factors.

It is the reading of this work—and not its content or argumentation—that may present the greatest challenge. Readers from the humanities may find the material a bit dense; those more comfortable in the field of statistics and data analysis will doubtlessly have an easier time. Others might mistake the use of “religious minorities” (in the subtitle) to mean new religious movements and the like. But Fox relies on the data to define the term simply: religious groups that are not in the majority in a given nation-state (the unit of measure in the source data), such as Christians (and others) in Muslim-majority states, Protestants and Catholics (and others) in Orthodox Christian-majority states, and Jews everywhere but Israel. Readers must examine the charts and tables— which are plentiful—to find smaller groups or finer levels of distinction. Some of the author’s rhetorical tics may be distracting, such as restating (“ .. . as I have argued”) or telegraphing (“as I will argue .. . ”) claims, or his seeming enthusiasm for acronyms. Most are the result of the author’s reasonable impulses, either to provide a strong methodological foundation early in the work, or...