Forms of Religious Discrimination, Misconduct, and Violence

Recent U.S. political and advocacy discourse, including statements by Donald Trump, has labeled violence in Nigeria a “Christian genocide.” This paper argues that the genocide frame does more than misdescribe events. It reorganizes them. Drawing on eight months of research in Southwestern Nigeria, I show how residents interpret killings and kidnappings through overlapping logics of banditry, land disputes, electoral rivalry, and state neglect rather than sectarian extermination. Violence is lived as chronic insecurity, not religious annihilation. Yet transnational advocacy networks and international media compress this complexity into a single story of persecution, hardening Christian Muslim boundaries that are often fluid in practice and redirecting moral claims and resources. The analysis combines Nigerian media analysis, discourse analysis of U.S. reports and advocacy materials, and event level conflict data from ACLED, and treats naming as a social process with measurable effects, challenging genocide narratives as analytic defaults in the sociology of religion.

In Latin America, growing religious diversity has prompted calls to reform secular governance and rethink the status of minorities. Yet narratives celebrating pluralism rarely interrogate the category of “religion” itself. In Mexico, a predominantly Catholic country, this produces a paradox: while evangelical Christians are framed as vulnerable minorities, other non-Christian groups remain invisible, especially those outside the world religions framework. This paper examines how religious discrimination as a discursive regime is operationalized in Mexico’s 2022 National Survey on Discrimination (ENADIS). Drawing on a recoding of the survey’s religious identity variable and a multidimensional measure of discrimination, we compare patterns of exclusion across religious and non-religious groups. Contrary to prevailing diagnoses, Evangelical-Protestants don’t show higher discrimination than the national average, while secular individuals and subaltern spiritualities report significantly higher levels. These findings challenge prevailing understandings of religious diversity and call for renewed scrutiny of how religion is manufactured, measured, and governed.

How do organizational actors evaluate different types of clergy misconduct? The way organizational leadership misconduct is perceived has consequences for how that misconduct will be addressed, tolerated, or in extreme cases, even perpetuated. Through a preregistered survey experiment with a nationally representative sample (n=1,124), I compare how religious and non-religious individuals evaluate different forms of clergy malfeasance. While non-religious respondents view clergy sexual misconduct as categorically more serious than clergy embezzlement, religious respondents show no significant difference in their evaluations of these violations' severity. Further, religiously active people display greater confidence in their congregation's ability to "do the right thing" following misconduct. Simultaneously, religiously active people are less likely to recommend that people cease donating to or attending the congregation even when allegations of their clergy's misconduct are confirmed. 

This project explores the question, “How do government and social restrictions on religion impact human flourishing around the globe?” We merge data from the Pew Global Restrictions on Religion dataset with the data from the recent Global Flourishing Study out of Harvard-Baylor to examine the effects of religious restriction on human flourishing; further, we are interested in exploring predictors of flourishing under different levels of religious restriction, with particular attention paid to religious and irreligious minorities in the context of religious restriction.