Freedom of Religion a Top Priority in Sub-Saharan Africa, Global Study Shows

In South Africa, 80 percent take freedom of religion as the most important democratic right, while 75 percent of sampled Kenyans said they consider it vitally important to live in a country that fosters religious freedom.

Other countries with comparatively high rates of religious freedom as an essential democratic right considered other rights most important. For instance, while 83 percent of respondents in Greece said they consider freedom of religion important, their most vital democratic right is fair judiciary, rated at 95 percent, followed by free media with 89 percent of respondents supporting its importance.

Similarly, 82 percent of respondents in both Brazil and Lebanon said they considered freedom of religion important but had other democratic rights as most important, with Brazilians choosing gender equality as most vital and the Lebanese taking fair judiciary as a top priority. The United Kingdom has the same rate of 75 percent as Kenya but consider fair judiciary and gender equality most vital rights, both rated at 92 percent.

However, besides the sub-Saharan African nations polled in this study, three other countries surveyed had freedom of religion as the most important democratic right – Turkey rated at 82 percent, Indonesia with 79 percent, and India with 78 percent.

Considered a fundamental human right enshrined in the constitutions of most nations, freedom of religion is a democratic principle supporting the liberty of individuals and communities to manifest their religious beliefs through teaching and practice privately and publicly.

That freedom of religion is considered a top priority in all the Sub-Saharan countries in the study seems consistent with previous studies that have illustrated Kenyan-born John Mbiti’s assertion that “Africans are notoriously religious. Whenever the African is, there is religion.”

In Africa, Christianity has become one of the most widely practiced religions along Islam, but the largest in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to Wikipedia.

The continent has produced models of holiness that have influenced people of God across the globe, including three doctors of the Church, all from North Africa – St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, and Cyril of Alexandria. From Sub-Saharan Africa, Sudan’s St. Josephine Bakhita commemorated on February 8 and the martyrs of Uganda celebrated June 3 stand out.

The findings of the 34-nation study seem also consistent with recent statistics that portray Africa as the axis of global Catholicism.

Statistics released by the Vatican in recent times have continued to demonstrate that Africa is gradually becoming an essential hinge of the Catholic Church across the globe, “with the number of baptized Catholics on the continent growing at a significantly faster rate than anywhere else in the world,” according to a 2017 report.

Compiled by Vatican’s Central Office for Church Statistics and published in Annuario Pontificio 2017, the Vatican’s yearbook, the data showed that the Catholic population remained stable or declined in other parts of the world, the African Catholic population had expanded by 19.4 percent.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, the Vatican data showed, is the top country in Africa with the most baptized Catholics, at 43.2 million.

Among the sampled countries, Nigeria’s estimated 204 million population seems equally divided between Christianity and Islam, with Christians at 48.8 percent and Muslims at 49.35 percent of the population.

In Kenya, 83 percent of the population is Catholic. The Muslims are estimated to be 11.2 percent of the population.

Meanwhile, Christianity is the dominant religion in South Africa, with the Catholic churches, Protestant churches, Pentecostal churches, and African initiated Christian churches having significant numbers of followers.

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Other democratic rights examined in the 34-nation Pew Research Center study include regular elections, free speech, free media, free internet, free civil society, and free opposition parties.

The survey was conducted between May13 and October 2, 2019.

Whereas “support for freedom on the internet, freedom of the press, free speech and gender equality has risen in many countries” since Pew Research Center asked these questions in 2015, gender equality, the second-highest rated democratic right in the nations polled in the 2019 research, was the lowest priority in Nigeria.

“The largest shares of the public describing all nine rights and institutions tested as very important are in the U.S. and Hungary; still, only a third in these countries (33%) consider all nine very important,” the study has demonstrated and that “in eight nations, the share of the public expressing this view is in the single digits.”