Who Persecutes Religion the Most?
By Mark D. Tooley
FrontPageMagazine.com
July 13, 2007

The greatest persecutors of religion are Islamist and communist regimes, according to a just released report from the Hudson Institute's Center on Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C. Regimes that respect religious freedom also have more civil liberties, more prosperity, better health for their people, and less militarized societies.

Hudson is publishing "Religious Freedom in the World 2007 later this year but released preliminary results at a conference early this week.

All of the most religiously free countries are democracies, almost all of them culturally Christian in background. The non Christian exceptions are Shintoist Japan, Buddhist Thailand and Mongolia, Jewish Israel, and Islamic Mali and Senegal.

The most religiously repressive include communist regimes such as Cuba, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Islamist regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and former Soviet republic such as Belarus, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the later two of which are predominantly Islamic. the rest