— Prepared Comments for Religious Diversity & Inclusion event at Texas Instruments HQ, May 6, 2019

Many people haven’t thought much about the connection between religious freedom and business, but I’ve been thinking about it at least since 1982 when my wife and I worked in the ancient port city of Quanzhou, home to one of China’s oldest mosques built by Muslim business people who first introduced Islam to China more than a thousand years ago. In the 1980s we also worked in Xinjiang, China’s far west, where Nestorian traders first brought Christianity to China along the old Silk Road nearly 1400 years ago.

Then in 1991 working right across the border in what is now Kazakhstan, the USSR was dissolved – in my office building, incidentally – and first request of new President was for my faith-based NGO to help them turn the former Communist Party training school into the region’s first western-style business school, KIMEP. At the start of a new country, he saw the connections between faith, freedom and the economy.

More recently I completed a study on the economic impact of religion set free by the freedom found in the United States.

So you could say there’s a lot of spiritual fuel being pumped unto the economy. My current work focuses on highlighting how religious diversity & inclusion – or workplace religious freedom – is an asset to the bottom line.

This work includes the privilege of working with some top experts, like Kent Johnson, who was Senior Council here at Texas Instruments for many years, as well as the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute in Washington DC. In this task, religious literacy is important. But I’m not talking about knowledge of religious beliefs and practices. It’s knowledge about how religion impacts the workplace and the marketplace –our coworkers and partners as well as our customers and clients.

Data can help us with this. First, religion is not in decline.

When I led the international data project at the Pew Research Center from 2008-2014, we projected that our planet will have 2.3 billion more religiously affiliated people by 2050 compared with just 0.1 billion more religiously unaffiliated people.

That’s like religion “winning” 23-to-1.

This religious growth is changing the global marketplace. Today, three of the top five economies are Christian-majority. But in 40 years, only one is projected to be. The other four top economies in 2050 will include countries where Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and the unaffiliated predominate.

Research shows that this religious growth can be good for the workplace and the bottom lines of businesses – as long as restrictions on freedom of religion or belief are kept low. In such countries, innovative strength is more than twice as high as in countries where governments and societies don’t respect freedom of religion or belief. So, freedom to believe – or not believe – is good for business, as I’ll come back to in a moment.

But the data on respect for freedom of religion or belief in the U.S. and worldwide are very concerning.

Annual studies that I initiated while at the Pew Research Center find that restrictions on religion and belief are high or very high in 40% of countries. But because some of these countries (like China) are very populous, some 5.9 billion people (nearly 80% of the world’s population) live in countries with a high or very high level of restrictions on religion.

Since 2009, the number of people living in countries with high religious restrictions and hostilities has increased from 4.8 to 5.9 billion people – that’s an increase of 1.1 billion more people living in countries where freedom of religion or belief is under duress, based on studies from the Pew Research Center.

The restrictions come from two main sources: the actions and policies of governments, and the social hostilities involving religion coming from people and groups in societies. So, what are examples of social hostilities involving religion? These include attacks on places of worship, such as the recent murders in a California synagogue and last fall’s massacre in at Pittsburg synagogue.

Social hostilities involving religion include the recent Easter Sunday bombings of churches in Sri Lanka that lefty hundreds dead and as many or more injured. They also include the recent Friday prayer massacres in two New Zealand mosques. Such hostilities also include attacks motivated by religious hatred to people with no religious beliefs, such as Alexander Aan, an Indonesian who was beaten by a mop for declaring himself and Atheist, and then jailed by police for two years because in Indonesia blasphemy is a crime. This case shows the frequent close connection between religiously biased laws and social hostilities involving religion.

Now let’s turn to examples government restrictions on freedom of religion or belief. I’ll give some examples from China, because some of the same policy perspectives it has on religion are paralleled in some of its economic and security policies. China has been on a several year campaign to not only remove crosses from churches and Christians from churches, but also church buildings from existence, such as the recent demolition of a church in Wenzhou, seen in these 24-hour before-and-after photos. In China’s far west, up to one million mostly Uygur Muslims have been forced into re-education camps in the government’s attempt to stamp out the possibility of Islamic radicalization.

While China has one of the most developed programs of restricting religion and belief, it is far from alone.

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