The lack of religious freedom can be damaging to women's rights

The argument

Religious freedom is associated with gender equality, and this position argues the association runs deep enough that the two cannot sensibly be set against one another. When religious freedom is not upheld it is the women in minority groups that suffer the most, because they are exposed twice over — as members of a persecuted community, and as women within it. For example, when ISIS kills Yazidi men and boys and forces women to convert or be sold to slavery, it promotes gender-based violence under the name of religious ideology, and the violence falls along both lines at once. The connection holds in the ordinary case as well as the atrocity. The freedom to practice religion results in more stable economies, where women's rights are upheld, and they are able to bring a voice to the table. Where a woman is not enabled to practice religion freely, she is restricted in her ability to contribute economically and politically, which can lead to governments restricting women's autonomy — so a restriction that appears to be about belief becomes a restriction on participation, and from there on standing. State enforcement of religious dress shows the same mechanism running in the other direction. For example, in Sudan, the case of Amira Osman Hamid, where Amira was charged for violating a Sudanese law on public morals, punishable by forty lashes, a fine, or both, for refusing to wear a hijab. What is punished there is not religion itself but the absence of state-mandated compliance with it, which is precisely a failure of religious freedom. Such instances of governmental restrictions on women, and religious community restrictions have been on the increase over the past decade. Because it is the loss of religious freedom that damages women's rights, religion and feminism are compatible rather than opposed.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Even if women have the liberty to choose their religion, they can still be confined to the rules within the religion, or the religious and cultural practices of that state. Simply enabling women to have the freedom to practice is insufficient. Where religions have practices that put women on an unequal platform, challenges need to be made. There are subtle and extreme forms in each mainstream religion. For example, honor killings, female genital mutilation, pro-life and the refusal to allow abortion to everyday society of gender norms of the woman being the home-maker or putting her career before her familial relationships. These norms maintained under the guise of religion need to be challenged to ensure that gender equality and freedom of religion are compatible.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The ISIS example is evidence about persecution and mass atrocity, not about the compatibility of religion and feminism. It shows what follows when one group imposes on another, which both sides of this question condemn — and the perpetrators were themselves acting in the name of a religious ideology, which is the fact the conclusion would have to accommodate. [Rejecting P2] Cross-country correlation is a weak instrument here. Religious freedom, economic development, education and legal equality move together and are jointly associated with democratic governance, so the premise cannot isolate which is doing the work. Even if it could, a claim about state policy would not establish that any particular religion's doctrine places women on an equal footing. [Rejecting P3] The Sudanese case shows a state compelling religious observance, which is an argument against coercion rather than for compatibility — and it runs in either direction, since the compulsion at issue was itself religiously grounded. The conclusion also does not follow: that denying religious freedom harms women establishes that coercion is harmful, not that the doctrines women are free to adopt treat them as equals. That is the question the counter-argument raises and the argument never reaches.