Religious Freedom between Religion and Spirituality

The empirical study of religious freedom can shed new light on the relationship between religion and spirituality. Religious freedom as a condition of modern religious and political life establishes relationship between religious and secular spheres and among religious, spiritual, and nonreligious identities. We discuss the results from the recent empirical research on perceptions of religious freedom which was conducted in Northern Italy in 2018 and revealed that spirituality is an important predictor of social perceptions of religious freedom (SPRF). We first explore the nexus of spiritual and religious identities of respondents in the convenience sample (N=1,035). Then, we analyze the predictive power of two scales: 'spiritual personality' and 'religious personality', along with the other characteristics of religiosity vis-a-vis the SPRF Index. The results showed that the spiritual identity had a significant positive influence on perceptions of religious freedom in all our models while the identity of 'being religious' did not.