Commissioned Book Review: Jonathan Fox, Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me: Why Governments Discriminate Against Religious Minorities
| Author | Sahar Ahmed |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920963763 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(3) NP15 –NP16
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
963763PSW0010.1177/1478929920963763Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2020
Commissioned Book Review
Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before
Me: Why Governments Discriminate
Against Religious Minorities by Jonathan Fox.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xiv,
294 pp., £75 (hardback), ISBN 9781108488914
‘Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me’
is a very unusual work in its field. Fox has
taken the rigour and analytical power of the
scientific method and applied it to the field of
religious freedom, examining all the available
data on government-based religious discrimi-
nation (GRD) available for the period 1990 to
2014. This has been carefully processed and
distilled, in a compelling intersection of quali-
tative and quantitative research, to draw some
surprising but hard-to-refute conclusions about
the nature of religious discrimination as perpe-
trated by nation-states. It has a wide reaching
appeal for practitioners of law and scholars of
religion alike, and asks important questions
about the place of political actors for those
invested in political studies.
Fox asks two important questions: what
makes a government more likely to discrimi-
nate, and why would a government single out a
particular minority for discrimination? Unlike
the usual conversations on religious freedom,
this book gives empirical research which doesn’t
exist otherwise for the study of religious free-
dom, or indeed any kind of fundamental right,
particularly from the legal perspective, to answer
these questions. This approach (more commonly
found in research on economic and social rights
for development studies) quantifies, in tangible
terms, the seemingly abstract instances of gov-
ernment-based discrimination against religious
minorities. It has thrown up some surprising
results, and breaks many assumptions about
what kinds of states are likely to discriminate
against religious minorities.
One of the great modern assumptions that
Fox tackles is that neoliberal democracies are
the most ‘free’ for religious minorities. Fox’s
research shows them, however, to be among the
worst perpetrators of GRD. In fact, other than
Canada, every country examined in this cate-
gory engages in at least some GRD, particu-
larly against Jewish people and Muslims, and
GRD has been increasing constantly in these
countries throughout the 24-year period this
study covers. This idea of who is most ‘free’ is
exacerbated by the general perception existing
in the minds of the lay person that Muslim-
majority countries are the worst offenders due
to their perceived lack of respect for human
rights. Fox’s research proves otherwise; though
these countries do discriminate, they are not the
countries most inclined to commit GRD. But
the more interesting finding, and perhaps more
shocking for those still studying religion and
religious minorities from a white, colonised
gaze, is that the very ‘liberalness’ of liberal
democracies results in higher GRD. As Fox’s
data reveal, secular states will tend to devalue
religious ideals per se, and their freedom from
discrimination is, in these circumstances, only
guaranteed insofar as the religious ideals don’t
conflict with the dominant secularist ideology.
Thus, Fox tells us:
the second commandment, ‘Thou shalt have no
other Gods before me’, or its equivalent in non-
Abrahamic religions, is still observed in practice
by many governments. To be clear, the ‘God’ that
will tolerate no competition is often a secular one
or the state itself.
‘Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods’ takes a
very narrow focus, differentiating between soci-
etal religious discrimination and GRD, and
focusing solely on the latter. This does tend to
make the research feel incomplete without the
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