Government Religion Policy and Religious Freedom in Latin America and the Caribbean between 1990 and 2023

The study of religion and politics in Latin America has traditionally emphasized the historical dominance of the Catholic Church and the region’s reputation as one heavily shaped by religion, while popular and casual observers continue to assume that Western liberal democracies set the benchmark for religious tolerance. The cross-national literature on government religion policy in the region, however, remains fragmented, heavily case-based, and lacking systematic quantitative comparison. Using the Religion and State round 4 (RAS4) dataset, this study provides a longitudinal cross-national analysis of religion-state meta-policy, government religious support (GRS), government religious discrimination (GRD), government religious regulation (GRR), and societal religious discrimination (SRD) in Latin America and the Caribbean between 1990 and 2023. We find that GRS, GRD, and SRD are generally lower than in the RAS4 Western democracies comparison set analyzed in Fox and Zellman (2025), while GRR is considerably higher. These findings invite a reassessment of common assumptions about the Catholic Church’s contemporary institutional grip on the state and suggest that leveling the religious playing field in a region with a historically fused Catholic-state inheritance has required more assertive state regulation of the majority religion than in Western contexts with greater institutional religious diversity.