Pew: India, Egypt, Pakistan Top 2023 Religious Restrictions
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- Pew Research Center measured religious restrictions across the 25 most populous countries — home to roughly three-quarters of the global population — using a 20-indicator Government Restrictions Index (GRI) and a 13-indicator Social Hostilities Index (SHI), each scored 0 to 10.
- India, Egypt, Pakistan, Iran and Indonesia led the combined ranking for religious restrictions and hostilities in 2023, while South Africa, the United States, Japan, the Philippines and the United Kingdom posted the lowest combined levels among the 25 largest countries.
- China recorded very high government restrictions (GRI 6.6–10 range) but low social hostilities — a split that has held for five straight years since 2019, contrasting with Vietnam, which also combined high state restrictions with moderate social hostilities.
- Germany registered the largest GRI movement among the 25, rising a full point from 3.0 to 4.0 after authorities restricted Jehovah's Witnesses from using temporary display carts for religious literature in cities and airports, though the score stayed in the moderate category.
- Bangladesh moved from high to very high on the social hostilities index, with its score climbing from 6.1 to 7.8 largely due to deaths from mob violence against minority religious groups in the Muslim-majority country.
- The Democratic Republic of the Congo saw its social hostilities score rise after ISIS-DRC attacks on Christians, including a March assault on Mukondi village that killed at least 38 people, injured 17 and burned Christian homes.
- Japan crossed into the moderate social hostilities category as its score rose from 1.1 to 2.6, partly due to a reported increase in physical harassment of Jehovah's Witnesses — including a June incident in which a man kicked and injured a Jehovah's Witness in her 70s while she was preaching.
Why it matters: Across the 25 countries covering roughly three-quarters of humanity, government restrictions and private hostilities tell different stories: Egypt and Pakistan appear in the top five on both indexes, but China sits in the top five for state restrictions yet the bottom five for social hostilities, a five-year divergence that suggests state enforcement can suppress reported private religious violence. The 2023 movements — Germany's GRI up 1.0 point over Jehovah's Witnesses literature carts, Bangladesh's SHI jumping into the very high range on mob-lynching deaths — show that small-index-metric shifts can still mark category changes with real-world impact on minority communities.
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