11 Most Religiously Tolerant Countries in the World

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Our list of 11 most religiously tolerant countries in the world might be very helpful for people who are living as a minority in their respective countries, and they are being bothered in one way or another. Unfortunately, the world that we live in doesn’t present a pretty picture when it comes to being tolerant towards the minorities. Minorities include people belonging to different culture, race, religion, etc. Despite all our advancement in technology and science, there are some aspects of our civilization that can still be compared with those of Stone Age. The world has seen many massacres purely based on religious conflicts – Things have changed now, but religious intolerance still haunts our society in many ways.

casejustin/Shutterstock.com

casejustin/Shutterstock.com

Countries included in this list are based on facts and figures. What we have done is that we have selected 3 criteria that point towards the countries’ tolerance of different religions. These criteria are “restriction imposed by the government towards religious freedom” “Social hostility” and last but not the least “Ethnic fractionalization”.

Most countries in the world impose some type of restriction when it comes to religious freedom, especially for the people living as a minority but then there are countries that provide complete freedom. We have used the stats and data from Pew Research Center (which can be found here) for the countries that impose the least restriction on religious freedom.

Then we have gathered the list of countries with the very low level of social hostilities that include religion. Our source for this is again, Pew Research Center’s report on “Countries with the most extensive religious hostilities”.

Our third category is Ethnic Fractionalization, which is actually a list of countries that are most ethnically diverse. The ethnic fractionalization index is a probability of two randomly picked individuals of a country that don’t belong to the same ethnic group.

To create our unique ranking of 11 most religiously tolerant countries in the world, we have averaged out the ranking of countries in each category and have come up with our unique list. You may want to compare it with our another list of Most tolerant countries in the world, to see if being religiously tolerant is the same as being tolerant in general. Check out if some country on this list, could be found there.

Now, before any further ado, let’s quickly find out about the country at number 11.

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