Religious Freedom Up Close
Subnational Religious Freedom as an Emerging Line of Research
Most of what we know about religious freedom comes from national scores. Country X ranks low on government restrictions. Country Y scores well on social hostilities. These numbers travel easily in policy circles, get cited in reports, and show up in congressional testimony. They are useful. They are also, in many cases, profoundly misleading.
The problem is not that the data are wrong. It is that national averages tell you about the middle of the distribution. They say nothing about the tails. And in religious freedom, the tails are where people actually suffer.
A Lesson from Democratization Studies
Political scientists have increasingly recognized this problem. Stein Rokkan warned against what he called the “whole-nation bias” in comparative research: the tendency to treat countries as uniform units when the real action is happening inside them. Guillermo O’Donnell, studying Latin America, coined the concept of “brown areas” to describe regions where the state formally exists but effectively does not, where constitutional guarantees are intact on paper and suspended in practice. Later scholars developed the concept of “subnational authoritarianism”: enclaves where democratic erosion happens quietly, below the radar of any national index. Economic development research is increasingly moving in the same direction, recognizing that national averages can obscure dramatic within-country inequality in outcomes.
Religious freedom research has been slow to apply the same logic. It is time to catch up.
The View from Inside Countries
Latin America registers as one of the more religiously free regions in the world on every major global index. The Religion and State Project, currently being updated for the 1990-2023 period in partnership with the International Institute for Religious Freedom, offers the most granular taxonomy of religion-state relations available globally, and it tells the same story. None of these tools, however, are designed to look inside countries. That is where the picture changes.
In Mexico, drug cartels operating in areas where they exercise effective territorial control actively regulate religious life, extorting congregations and threatening pastors who refuse to cooperate with illegal economies. In Colombia, national scores reflect a broadly pluralist legal framework, and that description is accurate for the country as a whole. Apply the same measurement framework specifically to the indigenous reserves, however, and religious regulation levels jumps dramatically. The resguardos indígenas operate under their own jurisdictional systems, and within them, conversion can trigger aggression, religious services can be disrupted, and faith-based education restricted. In Cuba, the surveillance apparatus is measurably more intense in the eastern half of the island than in Havana, a geographic gradient invisible to any country-level measure.
These patterns are not anomalies. They are structural features of how rights work in practice, hidden by the averaging logic of national indices.
A Growing but Scattered Research Base
Some of this work has been done, though it is not always labeled as religious freedom research. Scholars comparing Switzerland’s 26 cantons on religion-state indicators found variation comparable in scale to the differences between entire European nations, roughly the gap between France and Germany. Research on Indonesia has mapped how sharia regulation varies dramatically between provinces. Studies of China and Russia have documented how local authorities negotiate, co-opt, and coerce religious communities in ways that diverge significantly from national policy.
Subnational religious freedom has been one of my core research lines for several years. Together with Jason Klocek, I published an exploratory study in 2023 documenting subnational patterns across Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Colombia, and Venezuela that global datasets consistently miss, and formulating a set of hypotheses about when and where subnational divergence is most likely to occur. A follow-up study published this year with John Bainbridge put those hypotheses to a statistical test, comparing incident-level data from the Violent Incidents Database against national indices across Latin America from 2017 to 2024.
The divergence was substantial: in Nicaragua, incident counts for state-perpetrated religious repression surged dramatically while national scores registered only modest change. In Mexico, a single state, Chiapas, accounts for 81 documented incidents over eight years. Across the five largest Latin American countries, just 24 subnational units account for 78 percent of all recorded incidents. The national score, smooth and stable, reflects none of this concentration. The second study also found that in Mexico, states with weaker democratic performance tend to be precisely the states with more concentrated religious violence, suggesting that subnational FoRB violations are not random but track broader patterns of democratic deficit.
The Tool Problem
Part of the challenge is that the tools for subnational religious freedom analysis barely exist. This is not because the major indices ignore local realities entirely. The Pew indices aggregate observations that include local and regional government behavior. The Religion and State Project codes local dynamics wherever they are documented and offers the most granular taxonomy of religion-state relations available globally. But in both cases, local observations feed upward into a single national score. The subnational signal is absorbed by the aggregate. These tools were designed to enable cross-country comparison, and they do that well. They were not designed to reveal what is happening inside countries, and they cannot.
Among global religious freedom datasets, the Violent Incidents Database is currently the only one with genuine subnational capacity, because every incident is geocoded to the most precise administrative level available. The Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa produces data that extends to the state level in Nigeria and sometimes to the Local Government Area level, revealing, for instance, that Christians in Nigeria’s North West region are roughly 6.5 times more likely to be killed than Muslims, a finding invisible in any national score.
Where This Matters Most
The structural conditions that generate subnational divergence are predictable. Federal systems with significant devolution of regulatory powers create the conditions for provincial variation in how religious freedom is enforced, visible in Switzerland, Indonesia, Nigeria, and India. Indigenous autonomy zones, where customary law systems have jurisdiction over community members, can effectively suspend national constitutional guarantees in practice, as documented in Colombia and Mexico. Large lawless territories controlled by criminal organizations or armed groups create a third type, one of the most undertheorized in the field and one that is almost certainly present well beyond Latin America.
Latin America is actually a conservative test case. If subnational divergence is this significant in a region that scores favorably on every global index, it almost certainly matters more in regions that do not. Federal states with weak institutional reach, countries with significant indigenous autonomy arrangements, and areas where criminal or armed actors exercise effective territorial control exist on every continent. The research has simply not caught up yet.
An Emerging Research Agenda
Subnational religious freedom is a young research line, and the honest answer is that we are still mapping the terrain. The conceptual tools are being borrowed from democratization studies and development research. The empirical tools are limited. The geographic coverage is uneven. Many of the hardest cases are precisely the ones where data collection is most dangerous or most difficult.
None of this is an argument for abandoning national indices. Cross-national comparison requires comparable units, and these tools have done something genuinely valuable: establishing religious freedom as a social fact and creating the evidentiary basis for policy engagement. The argument is narrower. National scores should not be treated as sufficient. Programs designed to promote religious freedom that rely exclusively on national rankings will systematically miss the communities most in need of attention. Subnational data does not replace the national score. It tells you where to look within it.
Democratization studies absorbed Rokkan’s warning and started to build a research program around subnational variation. Economic development researchers are on the same track. Religious freedom research is only beginning to do the same. The map, for now, is not the territory.