Imagine a social force that propels democracy, thriving economics, women’s empowerment, uplift for the poor, and peace.

Remarkably, global research links religious freedom to all these outcomes. Not by itself, of course. But cogent evidence points to religious freedom as pivotal to the kind of world we want to inhabit: an X Factor for flourishing societies.

How do we know this? Because we can measure it. For centuries great thinkers have declared that coercion in religion is wrong, that it produces strife and hypocrisy. Thanks to breakthrough techniques that measure global religious conditions, scholars now can confirm such timeless ideas.

For the past 15 years the Pew Research Center has employed a rigorous method to document, code, and sum up actual religious conditions for each nation on earth. Its annual global restrictions report presents national indexes on two dimensions: government restrictions and social hostilities.

For two decades the Religion and State Project (RAS) has documented and coded every constitutional provision, statute, or decree on religion for all but the tiniest nations. It produces annual measures of government restrictions on religion, government discrimination against minorities, and, recently, social discrimination.

Both institutions also contain items that gauge the degree of state favoritism toward the dominant religion. This is crucial, because as I will show, state privilege emboldens favored religions to become more militant, autocratic, and violent.

The availability of these complementary measures has launched a vast global research enterprise, because social scientists also measure just about everything else imaginable, enabling empirical breakthroughs. Scholars can statistically test measures of religious repression (by Pew, RAS, or both) against different political systems, freedom indexes, terrorism databases, gender equality rankings, economic data, or changing religious demographics, controlling for a host of other variables.

The enormous diversity of societies on earth and changes over time provide a unique laboratory for researchers, who can subject their theories to rigorous tests and replications, across time and around the globe.

This quantitative research has also inspired creative qualitative investigations, which corroborate the findings of statistical tests, explain paradoxical results, and provide convergent validity. Historical accounts, ethnographies, and natural experiments, along with statistical findings, all converge on the same lesson: religious freedom matters.

Why is religious freedom such a potent human right? Why does it have such a huge impact on so many arenas of human life? Religious freedom is exceedingly precious to people, I argue, because it goes to the heart of human experience and aspiration: the right to be who we are, to act on our ultimate commitments, and to be treated with equal worth and dignity.

In my new book, Why Religious Freedom Matters: Human Rights and Human Flourishing, I synthesize research on the links between religious freedom and four dimensions of human flourishing: enduring democracy, thriving economics, empowerment of vulnerable people, and peace.

What emerges is a portrait of reinforcing dynamics. By limiting the reach of government and ensuring equality, religious freedom underpins democracy. Indeed, research shows that the status of religious liberty predicts the trajectory of a nation, whether the democratization of an autocratic regime or backsliding of a democratic one.

Economic prosperity is one of the strongest predictors of democratization. Historical accounts and econometric studies show that protecting religious liberty supports sustainable economic growth, reinforcing democracy. Over the past decade, countries with the greatest religious liberty enjoyed twice the GDP growth than those with the highest restrictions. Because religious persecution is bad for business, it also represents a measurable risk factor for global investment.

Religious freedom also serves democracy by enabling all members of society to participate. Research shows that poor women in developing societies are more likely to break free from socio-economic straitjackets when they exercise religious agency. Those who change their religion, for example, are more likely to succeed in micro enterprises and invest in their children’s education. In turn, the healthy competition of a religiously free society produces measurable uplift for the poor, as religious leaders respond to each other’s initiatives in education or health care.

Finally, religiously free societies are far more peaceful, which helps sustain democratic governance. The opposite is also the case. Repressive conditions not only undermine democracy but export violence. Analyzing 3,500 terrorist incidents over the past two decades, Nilay Saiya found that highly repressive states incubated over 90% of the attacks.

One might think that terrorism springs mostly from religious minorities lashing out against their persecution. But that’s not the case. Using measures of religious privilege and covering a two-decade period from 1998-2018, Saiya found that 90% of terrorist violence came from religious majorities emboldened by the privileges they enjoy from government.

A vivid case involves Buddhism; a religion distinctly associated with non-violence. But where Buddhism is declared the official state religion and tied to national identity, as in Burma, Buddhist monks participate in violence against non-Buddhists.

Saiya calls this the paradox of privilege. Like a law of physics, the fusion of religion with nation, regime, or party is bad for both governance and religion. For governance, this fusion leads to autocracy. For religion, it warps religious tenets and saps vitality. A better term is the curse of privilege, one of the most important findings to emerge from global research.

Across the world we see movements by religious nationalists to link the dominant faith with national identity. Often claiming to fight for their religious rights, their aim instead is state privilege. This plays into the hands of would-be autocrats, who cunningly co-opt majority faith leaders with promises of special access or power.

Vladimer Putin provides a telling example. By privileging Russian Orthodoxy and clamping down on competitors, he created an implicit bargain. When he launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he knew he could count on supine Orthodox patriarchs to back the war and parrot his justification for it, which they did. No “speaking truth to power” by leaders co-opted by the state.

This is why religious nationalism represents a unique threat to democracy and religious integrity. Even constitutional protections are no sure barrier, because religious nationalism gives aspiring autocrats a supposedly divine mandate to overturn democratic guardrails, spread lies, and enrich themselves. By tying religion to repression, corruption, and mendacity, nationalism undermines the broader appeal of the faith.

This brings us to an issue closer to home for Christians, the rise of Christian nationalism. Our guide again is Nilay Saiya, author of the landmark book, The Global Politics of Jesus: A Christian Case for Church-State Separation. As a political scientist, Saiya is unusual in anchoring his statistical work in a Christian theological framework. Distinct among religious traditions, he argues, Christian doctrine sharply distinguishes the Kingdom of God from the Kingdom of the World.

The Kingdom of world is predominantly tribal, exclusivist, coercive, and violent. The Kingdom of the God as proclaimed by Jesus entails uncompromising love, universal dignity, forgiveness, and peace. Employing state power to enforce the faith inevitably contradicts these teachings.

Testing measures of state privilege against church growth or decline over time, Saiya finds that as state privilege goes up, the Christian percentage of the national population declines. Remarkably, he finds that state favoritism represents the greatest threat to the growth of Christianity in the world today. In other words, political patronage undermines evangelization, the Great Commission of spreading the gospel, making disciples. That’s a curse!

Because Christian nationalism rejects pluralism, inclusion, and equality, it threatens American democracy. Indeed, scholars find that those Americans who rank high on Christian nationalist measures are more likely to support strongmen over constitutional checks, endorse violence, back cruelty toward refugees, and even criticize the Christian virtue of empathy.

This threat manifested on January 6, 2021, with the violent siege of the Capitol aimed at keeping President Trump in power despite election loss. Viewing extensive footage of the flags, prayers, and rituals of the rally, Saiya concluded that it was largely a Christian insurrection. Today Christian nationalists provide the strongest backing for the MAGA push for unchecked executive power. Not a winsome portrait of the Christian message.

What should be our response? First, on the eve of this great anniversary of our nation we must reaffirm the pluralist foundations of democracy, that our constitutional heritage does not privilege any faith, but welcomes all.

Second, in order to promote international religious freedom abroad we must live up to it at home.

Third, American Christians must resist the seductive promises from political elites of special privilege.

Finally, the urgent task of all American religious leaders and communities is to forge a culture of covenantal pluralism as the best antidote to weaponized faith and a bulwark of our democratic experiment.

Covenantal pluralism represents a vision for how diverse religious people can accept the reality of pluralism without giving up their religious truths. It entails a commitment to defending each other’s liberty of conscience. It requires hard work of forging real relationships across our religious differences. It cultivates capacity for deep listening, one of the hardest things for us humans to do. And it rejects relativism by promoting character virtues, such as humility, empathy, patience, and courage, that make us better people.

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Note: This essay is derived from Dr. Hertzke’s June 12, 2026 plenary address at “American Independence and Identity at 250: Examining Democracy in the United States and Globally,” a conference hosted by Gordon College and co-sponsored by the Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities, Christians in Political Science, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, the Center for Faith & Inquiry, and the Center for Public Justice. Videos of all plenary addresses are available here.