of," was guaranteed by the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1791, but its details are still being worked out by the courts. At the international level, there have been sporadic references to religious freedom since the 1500's in various international documents. At the 1945 San Francisco Conference, during which the U.N. Charter was drafted, representatives of a number of small countries-Chile, Cuba, New Zealand, Norway, and Panamaargued strenuously for the inclusion in the Charter of precise and detailed provisions relating to the freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Their efforts were unavailing. The U.N. Charter merely refers in a general way in article 1, paragraph 3, and in article 55, to the promotion "of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion." The only slightly less general language in article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and now the much more detailed provisions of the declaration, can best be seen as efforts to give concrete detail to the very general norms in the U.N. Charter. Finally, Mr. Chairman, there is the subject of current examples of religious persecution. In preparing for this testimony, I thought that I might be able to lay my hands on a comprehensive study of contemporary examples or religious persecution. To my surprise, none of the scholars of nongovernmental organizations like Dr. Gordon's working in this area appears to have produced such a study. I did come across a survey of religious freedom by the United Presbyterians, which I will give to the staff, listing the 10 most suppressive and the 10 most free nations. I must confess that I have always been somewhat skeptical about lists of the 10 most something or other. And certainly this list contains some surprising inclusions and omissions. But it is interesting nonetheless. [The information follows:] F In Many Places It's Still Dangerous to Believe A.D. survey of religious freedom lists most oppressive and most free nations or the past eight months A.D.'s editors have been accumulating data on the state of religious freedom around the world. Sources have included personnel and publications of human-rights monitoring agencies like Amnesty International, the United Nations, citizens of more than 50 nations, newspapers, magazines and press services, refugees, and official representatives of many countries. A.D.'s conclusions: The free exercise of religion is limited, to at least a degree, almost everywhere. Faithfulness to a religion can upon occasion carry heavy price tags of discrimination, pain, imprisonment and death. • Matters of religious freedom, seen in the long view, are looking up, not down. Early in the A.D. investigation it became clear that evaluation of the degree of religious freedom enjoyed in a given country requires much more than the asking of the first question: Are believers free to meet for worship? In theory if not always in practice, people everywhere are free to engage in worship, the fundamental practice of faitheven in communist states-except in Albania and North Korea and, for some sects and religions, in such hard-line Muslim nations as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. To determine actual degrees of religious freedom we found ourselves forced to ask further questions: May a religious group hold title to property? Is proselytizing permissible? Must a sect obtain a licence or registration certificate? Can a religious group publish freely? Operate schools? Are its leaders able to travel freely in pursuit of the business of their religion? Are the children of believers given equal opportunity to education and jobs? (See graph on page 28). A second set of questions was devised to test the degree of religious freedom possessed by individuals. Among the questions: May a person freely change his or her religion? (No, in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and elsewhere). Is the practice of religion a negative factor in gaining admission to university training or securing a good job? (Yes, in most communist states). And so on. Yet, even where all such questions have been answered, another question is necessary: How violent has been the state's response to challenges posed by a religion to law or custom? The answer to that question, for example, catapults Argentina-by no means particularly repressive in legislation or enforcement against the ordinary exercises of religion-into first rank as a repressive regime because of state-sponsored murder and kidnapping of members of the social-activist wing of the Christian churches that have occurred in recent years. Finally, and even more subjectively, shifts and changes in the restrictive practices of some nations signal movement toward religious freedom; other shifts signal steps away from the same. Two examples make the point clear. A traditional tax levied in Muslim states upon non-Muslims, the jizya, was originally an ordinance by which early Muslim rulers extended the right of residence in their dominions to Jews and Christians, an unheard-of liberality for the era. Today, the necessity to pay any tax for the support of activities of a religion that is not one's own is normally viewed as oppression. To institute the exaction of the jizya in Pakistan, as is now under discussion in that country, would clearly be a step away from religious freedom. To waive payment of the jizya in a nation like Saudi Arabia, where it historically has been collected, is a move in the opposite direction. Similarly, in a country like the Soviet Union, where it has been impossible for more than 50 years for a church to remit money to persons outside the country, a new privilege to remit modest sums overseas, albeit under intense governmental scrutiny, may be a step toward freedom; the recent imposition by the United States government of procedures for scrutinizing remittances of large sums by churches (and all others), heretofore unknown in this country, could become a step backward. Repression in many nations comes down, in the end, to a quarrel betv een state and religion over what constitutes faith and its proper exercise. In Uruguay, for example, the state and its secret police have determined clearly that no religionist may question the basic economic structures of society. In South Korea, the never-to-be-asked religious questions concern the morality or immorality of the socalled Yushin constitution. Similarly, in communist states, religionists are never to question the moral basis upon which communist parties exert a dictatorship of the proletariat. None of these divergences of understanding about what constitutes an act of faith have been allowed for in this study. Our definition of the practice of religion, applied to all countries, is as follows: Religion is that which one believes and acts upon in obedience to understandings or impulses presumed by a community to be transcendant in origin. The definition makes room for Bahais, Jews and Muslims in their varieties of sects, the thousand “denominations” and religious societies of Christendom, animists of Africa, Indonesia and hill-country India, Buddhists, Shintoists, Hindus, and even-to the extent that history can be viewed as transcendant-those old foes of religion, the Marxists. In this connection, though the Marxists come through on A.D.'s chart as great oppressors of religion everywhere but in Cuba and Nicaragua, A.D. found itself asking what its chart might have looked like if we had treated communism as a reli government-bodes well for the future of religion in that country if too much strain is not put upon church-state relationships by foreign Christians or newly exuberant Chinese believers. The Soviet Union, mistreatment of Jews and Baptist Pentecostals notwithstanding, has in the opinion of experts been slowly mitigating its philosophically based campaign against religion in a process that stretches back to World War II when Stalin, beset by the Nazis, realized he needed the support of the Russian Orthodox Church. Examination of the violence of a state's response to religiously based challenges to law or custom provides a "list" that is quite different in compostion from the 10 rated "most oppressive." The list of the "most violent" looks like this: Argentina's place near the top of the list would doubtless have been shared a few years ago by Chile and Uruguay; their names are not present now because they have slain or otherwise neutralized religious opposition. Ethiopia, building a most radical socialist republic, has been violent, indeed lethal, in its handling of Ethiopian Coptic Church prelates but has been more reasonable in dealings with evangelical churches. Israel finds itself on the "most violent" list not for her super-violent raids against Palestinian activists in Lebanon but because of the intermittently violent treatment police and troops have accorded demonstrating Arab students within Israeli borders. The Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia are rated "violent" because of their penchant for forcing psychiatric treatment upon notable religious dissidents, for the frequency with which police goons, particularly in the provinces, beat up obscure young believers, and for the two nations' psychologically violent practice of tearing the children of evangelicals away from their parents. North Korea is not present on the "most violent" list only because, much earlier, it cowed its religious population in a murderous campaign; South Korea is present because of its current repression of Christian leaders and students seeking a return to democracy. Taiwan, dominated by Chinese of mainland origin, makes the list because it has dealt severely with religious protagonists of the Taiwanese indigenous population; South Africa is ranked because of its violent repression of Christian antiapartheid leaders. There is no escaping the fact that religion itself is often a factor in the repression of religion. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan all make clear that they are nations of Muslims, and that all other inhabitants are guests. Israel sees itself as a Jewish homeland, and reserves the right of election to top offices to Jews, India, more pluralistic, permits Hindu individuals to change their religion, but has moved in recent years to bar certain castes and tribes from moving as groups into Christianity. Indonesia provides freedom of religion, but since 1965 has looked askance at, and actively discriminated against, those who deny the claims of any religion. In general, the worst persecution seems to fall upon religious groups that are schismatic from or adaptations of the religion of the majority community. Yet, if not the most violent, the most pervasive churchstate tensions arise when religionists turn from worship to discussion and action on issues of justice, equity and freedom. It is almost as if states, including so-called "free world" states, would prefer that believing citizens fasten upon the object rather than the content of religion. Such states frequently view the ecumenical relationships of churches as fostering dissent, and therefore take steps, as in South Africa and South Korea, to weaken ecumenical ties through denial of passports and visas. The ten "most free" areas of the world from the standpoint of the exercise of religion are: 1. Scandinavian countries 2. Switzerland 3. United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland) 4. The United States and Canada 5. France and the Benelux nations 6. Federal Republic of Germany 7. Japan 8. Austria 9. Italy 10. Mexico Too much should not be made, perhaps, of a country's presence on the "most free" list. Religious freedoms, as noted, have a way of getting clipped when religious people address earthly and societal problems. For the most part however, nations on this list no longer view the protection of religion as a necessary preoccupation of the state. All nations on the list except the Scandinavian countries, Japan, Austria and Italy have polyglot populations-pluralism for them is a fact that must be dealt with and accepted. All nations on the "most free" list have come through major historical confrontations with the forces of religion, and have worked out accommodations that leave room for most varieties of minority religions. Spain's name does not appear on the list, by the way, because her accommodation to minority religious rights is so recent as to be untested. And politicians in all nations on the "most free" list give evidence of consciousness that modern statecraft involves continuing dialogue with religion in courts and legislatures, in the press and literature, and that such dialogue can be creative. Religion is lightly restricted in all countries on the "most free" list. Such restrictions are financial and tax-related for the most part, the so called "14 points" of religious definition used by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, for example, and the requirement in Western Europe that a legal entity be created for the holding of property. Yet religious views sometimes have social impact in most such countries and not always in the direction of freedom. Restrictions on abortion, birth control and divorce in Italy, Ireland, and some American states come to mind as examples. Religion in all of the "most free" states receives some governmental support in spite of popular belief in the mythical "separation of church and state" (a separation that does not exist in many countries on the list that remain formally wedded to state churches). "Most free" countries provide tax support for churches, as in Germany, or tax |