The Doctoral Research Proposal of Cometan that introduces the Cometanic theory that religious recognition is central to freedom of religion impediments was accepted by the University of Central Lancashire's School of Humanities, Language, and Global Studies on Monday 2nd November and one week later,  on Monday 9th November, the Astronist Institution published this work of Cometan for public viewing.

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Introduction

 

In their 2020 International Religious Freedom Report, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) detailed the recognition processes for religious organisations by country. Although the dynamics of religious restriction were acknowledged, the data alone did not explicate the possible link between the abuse of recognition systems and issues such as religious freedom violations, forced migration, discrimination, and terrorism. This project is primarily concerned with how the legal apparatus of religious recognition could be abused by governments and why this may be fundamental to the conditions of religious liberty. Religious recognition denotes the mechanism for the legal registration of religious institutions in a country; government recognition normally permits institutions to conduct commercial operations and religious services legally.

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Abuse of such a system may include a deliberate bureaucracy bias against some groups to make legal registration difficult to obtain. This can entail requests for members’ personal details to store in databases for surveillance purposes, or the weaponisation of terms like cult, foreign religion, and extremism against religious groups that the state does not approve of e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia. Studies of religious restriction divide the topic into government restriction and social hostility; government restriction is the focus for this research as the potential misuse of recognition systems by governments and political parties will be explored. Secondly, this study seeks to determine whether the commercial operations of religious institutions contradict religious principles and how governments may use recognition systems to restrict religious commerce e.g. the selling of religious texts or the collection of donations. Thirdly, determining whether economic freedom is relevant to religious freedom conditions will be important to this project’s study of the intersection between business, religious recognition, and freedom of religion.