Patterns and Contexts of Religious Freedom and Persecution
Paul Marshall Wednesday, 1 December 2004
At the end of 1997, the former executive editor of the New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal, confessed, "Early this year I realized that in decades of reporting, writing, or assigning stories on human rights, I rarely touched on one of the most important. Political human rights, legal, civil and press rights, emphatically often; but the right to worship where and how God or conscience leads, almost never." While Rosenthal changed dramatically on this score, the pattern he describes is still widespread.
By religious persecution we should not mean human rights violations against "religious" persons. Since most people in the world have some religious identity, most human rights violations of any kind are against religious believers. Rather, we should focus on situations where a person's faith, or lack of it, is a component of the persecution or discrimination they suffer. Of course, there are few cases where religion is the only factor: religion is usually intertwined with ethnic, political, territorial, and economic concerns. Religious persecution occurs when some or all of the oppression that people suffer would not occur if they or their oppressors were of a different religion.
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