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This is the catered daily podcast for Thursday December 24th 2020. I'm Caleb Brown as we approach the Christmas holiday, what's the state of

religious toleration around the globe? Cato Senior Fellow Doug Bandau takes stock of some of the

worst regimes when it comes to religious toleration.

With the exception of this year, what had been the trend, if any, in religious persecution

around the globe? Our religious persecution has been on the rise.

I mean, it came down a few years ago, but it's been fairly steady coming up in recent years.

And unfortunately, that has not been broken broken according to the latest report from

Pew Research Center. So what does that mean? What does religious persecution look

like generally in recent years? Well what you find is that you know 150 200 countries it varies a bit by the

religion but persecution is very widely practiced you find in a majority of countries there's at least some.

There are different sorts of persecution.

One form is direct government pressure, government arrests, imprisonment, and the other is social hostility, which they can work

...