Featured Research:
Do Religious Freedom and LGBTQ Rights Have Common Ground?
Brian Grim, Ph.D., Religious Freedom and Business Foundation President
”Religious freedom – enshrined in the US Constitution’s first amendment – is central to our national identity. It is often called our first freedom because it constitutes the first two clauses of the US Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Simple yet profound.
Given our nation’s history, including the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act that passed the Senate unanimously during a time of extreme partisanship (President Clinton’s impeachment inquiry), some may be surprised to learn that the US does not rank highly on global measures of religious freedom.
According to the latest Pew Research Center data, there are 117 countries that place fewer restrictions on religion than the US.
Among the 137 countries that have both religious freedom and LGBT data, the average level of support for LGBT rights is 38% higher in countries with higher religious freedom than in countries with low levels of religious freedom. In the third of countries scoring the highest on religious freedom, the level of support for LGBT rights was 4.1 compared with only 2.9 in the third of countries scoring at the bottom of the scale on religious freedom.
The level of support for LGBT rights is much more likely to be growing in religiously free countries than in religiously restricted countries.”