- What is the name of the journal article (or book) and what are its coordinates?
Miray Philips. 2025. “The Social Construction of Christian Persecution through Quantification in International Religious Freedom Advocacy.” Sociology of Religion. https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/sraf022
2. What’s the argument?
In Washington, DC, International Religious Freedom advocates mostly rely on data by the Pew Research Center on religious restrictions and Open Doors on Christian persecution. Citing this data, they draw a conclusion that Christians are the most persecuted religious group worldwide. This claim, however, is based on a wrong interpretation of data. First, Open Doors only collects data on Christians. With the absence of data on other religious groups, the data cannot be used to establish a hierarchy of persecution between different religious groups. Second, advocates conflate Pew’s concept of widespread religious restrictions with the notion of “most persecuted.” Along with falsely conflating two different concepts, the Pew Research Center explicitly states in their methodology that this is the wrong interpretation of their data. Nevertheless, advocates rely on the perceived objectivity and neutrality of data to claim that the gravity of Christian persecution globally is rooted in evidence, and not a reflection of ideological bias and Christian affinity.
3. Why should we care?
There is a growing sentiment in the conservative American political landscape that there is a global and local war against Christians. This persecution complex is not new, but has gained traction recently given the rise of the far right and Christian nationalism. Religious freedom advocacy is embroiled in American culture wars, specifically in privileging Christian freedom over the rights of religious and gender minorities. This is a reflection of how the principle has been redefined by the Trump Administration in line with Judeo-Christian values. For many reasons, the advocacy field has a soft spot for the persecution of Christians globally.
While there is a plethora of images, testimonies, books, and films about Christian persecution, numbers are particularly compelling because of their presumed objectivity. Religious freedom actors rely on this perceived neutrality to claim that Christian persecution is an objective social problem—even a priority. This obscures the field’s religious and political bias towards the suffering of Christians worldwide. It is thus important to understand the political utility of numbers in a context where religious freedom is central to culture wars.
Every religious group makes claims that their suffering is most egregious and warrants spiritual and political intervention. These political claims are not particularly unique to Christians. But they are crucially important to understand in a highly polarized American context. Claims that Christians are the most persecuted ultimately shape both domestic and foreign policy, including support for authoritarian regimes.
4. Why will we find the article (or book) persuasive?
Qualitative fieldwork provides insight into the life of numbers and their political utility. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork of the international religious freedom field in Washington, DC between 2019 and 2020. This coincided with the first Trump presidency whose administration prioritized international religious freedom as a policy priority. It was a prime time to understand the politics of quantification and claims about Christian persecution. I was able to observe how advocates justified their focus on Christian persecution, and specifically how they leveraged numbers, in public and private events on Christian persecution and religious freedom. I also conducted 30 interviews with international religious freedom advocates, including those involved in the quantification process. I also analyzed over 2000 documents, including congressional hearings, bills, and policies, where religious freedom rankings and numbers were used to justify policy priorities.
Qualitative analysis is able to illuminate and parse through the discourse and paranoia around Christian persecution. It is able to illustrate how, along stories and images, advocates rely on the perceived objectivity of numbers to claim ideological neutrality. How they intertwine global Christian persecution to also claim that Christians are suffering in the United States.
5. Why did you decide to write it in the first place?
During one of the first events I attended in Washington, DC, the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Samuel Brownback, so assuredly stated that Christians are the most persecuted religious group worldwide. I was really perplexed by that “fact”. I quickly realized that it was a common belief throughout the international religious freedom advocacy space and one that was consistently iterated. While the field is complex politically, ideologically, and religiously—with some organizations even rejecting a Christian-only approach to religious freedom—advocacy around religious freedom is highly polarized and overwhelming perceived as a smokescreen for conservative values. One of the first fieldwork memos I wrote tried to piece together where that statement came from and, in the process, I realized that it is based on a wrong interpretation of the data that they cite. From there, I developed the memo into a journal article that talks about the politics of quantifying Christian persecution.
6. What would you most like to change about the piece, and why?
In the article, I dispute the particular interpretation of data from the Pew Research Center and Open Doors by international religious freedom actors. I wish I could have dedicated more time to discussing what is a better way to interpret this data, as well as explore the alternative datasets available that explore religion-based violations. Some of these datasets even tell a different and more complex story about Christian persecution that challenge the hegemonic belief in a global war on Christians. But I am in good company, and various scholars including Jason Klocek and Dennis Petri have published extensively on the challenges of quantification in religious freedom advocacy and policy.
7. How much difficulty did you have getting the piece accepted?
The piece was initially rejected from a major sociology journal after one round of reviews for lack of fit. It then went through two rounds of reviews before being published in the Sociology of Religion journal. The process was not exceptionally challenging and all the reviews I received were insightful and helped me craft a sharper argument.
What has been more challenging is placing an op-ed based on this article’s argument. Several issues came up. First, some editors hesitated to publish an op-ed that challenges claims about the gravity of Christian persecution. One editor astutely asked me to consider how my argument would land had I been questioning similar claims about antisemitism or Islamophobia. I am, of course, not interested in discounting the reality of discrimination and violence against Christians, which is largely my research focus anyway. Rather, I am arguing that international religious freedom advocates are misinterpreting this particular data and subsequently make claims that are incorrect. I am interested in highlighting the politicization of numbers by actors for political gain, and specifically by conservative religious freedom actors who are anxious about the declining hegemony of Christianity. In a sense, this highlights how there are politics to writing about the politics of persecution and its numbers.
Second, that advocates and politicians, even presidents and their VPs, make grande claims about Christian persecution based on the wrong interpretation of data was a pretty astounding discovery to me. The stakes were clear, to me at least: policy priorities, advocacy initiatives, and funding are all based on a wrong understanding of the scope of global religious freedom. This, I thought, would be something that major news outlets would be interested in. Given the negligence of international religious freedom compared to national security and human rights concerns in the field of foreign policy, however, this appeared as a small problem in light of bigger crises of misinformation, false news, and right-wing conspiracies.
Third, it was difficult to bring these numbers to life and highlight the stakes of data interpretation to a general audience. I had a difficult time striking a balance between doing a deep dive into the data, which would require a level of data literacy from the reader and a long attention span, or highlight the stakes of the political uses of numbers, which would require the reader to trust my analysis of the data in the first place. In the end, I placed the op-ed in Canopy Forum, the digital publication from the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.
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