Home›The Americas and the Caribbean›Modern AreaBrowse ByModern AreaThis page groups sacred regions by the present-day country or countries they actually fall inside. Wikipedia notes that the Holy Land "today ... chiefly overlaps with the combined areas of Israel and parts of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Palestine." Browsing by modern-area lets a visitor find every sacred region that falls inside the same present-day country.FactsModern AreaSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsDirectoryCategoryWell-attestedRegions 1Modern AreaFilter Results3 entriesApostasy or Blasphemy LawAllArticle 208 of Brazil's Penal Code punishes public mockery of a person because of their religious belief or clerical function, disruption of a religious ceremony, and public vilification of a religious act or object of worship, with detention of one month to one year or a fine; the penalty rises by a third when violence accompanies the offense. (1)The United States has no federal blasphemy or apostasy law and none is constitutionally possible: the First Amendment bars Congress from establishing a religion or abridging speech, and the Fourteenth Amendment extends that bar to state and local government. In Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1952) the Supreme Court struck down a New York statute banning "sacrilegious" films, holding that "it is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches or motion pictures." Several states retained blasphemy statutes on their books into the twentieth century despite that ruling; the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down its own as unconstitutional as recently as 2010. No apostasy offense has ever existed in American law. Burning a religious text, publicly mocking a faith, or declaring apostasy from any religion are all protected speech; the outer limits of that protection are set by ordinary doctrines such as incitement and true threats, not by any religion-specific carve-out. (1)Ban or Official WatchlistAllThe United States maintains no list of banned or officially watchlisted religious organizations. The First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause bars federal and state governments from prohibiting the free exercise of religion, and constitutional doctrine holds that government may not regulate religious belief itself or punish religiously motivated conduct out of disapproval of a particular religion or of religion in general. (1)CapitalAllBrasília (1)Mexico City (Ciudad de Mexico) (1)Washington, D.C. (1)Concordat BasisAllMexico holds no concordat with the Holy See. Diplomatic relations were severed for over a century, from the anticlerical rupture of the Reform War through the 1917 Constitution's restrictions on the Church's legal existence, and were restored only in September 1992 under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the same year Congress passed the Law on Religious Associations and Public Worship removing the prior constitutional restraints. The restoration is a diplomatic and domestic legal change, not a bilateral treaty, and no concordat has followed it. (1)The Holy See's own Secretariat of State lists a single agreement with Brazil, signed 23 October 1989, as the country's live instrument with the Vatican. Brazil has had no established church since its 1891 constitution separated church and state, and the 1989 agreement sits within that separation, an accord between two international juridical parties rather than a concordat naming Catholicism a state religion. (1)The United States holds no concordat with the Holy See. Full diplomatic relations were established on 10 January 1984 under President Reagan, ending a gap that had lasted since 1870, but the relationship rests on an exchanged embassy and nunciature rather than a bilateral treaty. The First Amendment's bar on an establishment of religion forecloses the kind of church-state instrument a concordat is, so the absence follows directly from the country's own constitutional structure rather than from any lack of a formal relationship. (1)Established YearAll1776 (1)1810 (1)1822 (1)Establishment StatusAllDisestablished (1)No Establishment (2)Government TypeAllconstitutional federal republic (1)federal presidential republic (2)Legal StatusAllA 1992 constitutional reform restored legal personality to churches, permitted religious education in private schools and reestablished diplomatic relations with the Holy See, ending decades of formal estrangement rooted in the 1917 constitution's anticlerical provisions; Mexico remains constitutionally secular with no official religion. (1)Church and state have been separated since the 1891 republican constitution ended the Catholic Church's colonial and imperial establishment; the current constitution guarantees religious freedom, though Afro-Brazilian religious communities report continuing incidents of vandalism and violence. (1)The First Amendment (1791) prohibits Congress from establishing a religion while guaranteeing free exercise; extensive Supreme Court litigation continues to define the boundary between permissible accommodation and prohibited establishment. (1)Registration or Recognition RegimeAllA 1992 constitutional reform restored legal personality to churches and religious associations, letting them register, hold property and operate schools under Mexican law after decades of unrecognised status under the 1917 constitution's anticlerical provisions. (1)No government registration or permission is required for a religious group to organize, meet, worship or collect funds. The First Amendment forbids a law establishing or restricting religion, and a registration requirement conditioning a group's existence on state approval would itself run against that guarantee. A congregation may still seek voluntary state nonprofit incorporation and, separately, federal tax-exempt recognition under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3); both are optional civil-law conveniences for holding property, opening accounts and issuing deductible-donation receipts, never a precondition for existing or operating as a religious body. (1)Religious groups are not required to register to establish places of worship, train clergy or proselytize. A group seeking tax-exempt status registers instead with the Department of Federal Revenue and its own municipality, a process whose specific paperwork varies by jurisdiction but generally calls for a statement of purpose, financial accounting and a fire inspection. In January 2021 the federal government separately opened a voluntary National Registry of Religious Organizations, administered through the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights, which lists religious leaders and entities eligible to partner with the ministry and receive federal funds. (1)Religious CompositionAllAbout 50% Catholic (declining from over 90% decades ago); Protestant/Pentecostal communities around 25-30%; Afro-Brazilian traditions including Candomble and Umbanda; growing religiously unaffiliated share (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)About 78-80% Catholic per recent census figures, down from over 90% decades ago; growing Protestant/Pentecostal and religiously unaffiliated populations (Mexico national census; Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)Protestant affiliation below half the population; Catholics the largest single denomination at around 20%; religiously unaffiliated around 28-30%; Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other communities each in the low single digits (Pew Research Center, Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020). (1)Sovereignty StatusAllSovereign UN member state (3)State Funding MechanismAllMexico has no state funding mechanism for religion. The constitutional reform of January 1992, which amended Articles 3, 5, 24, 27 and 130, and the Law on Religious Associations and Public Worship signed that July restored legal personality to churches and ended the ban on monastic orders after decades of anticlerical restriction, but established no funding channel alongside those grants: the state remains formally laico, and neither the Catholic hierarchy nor most other religious bodies came away satisfied that the 1992 settlement went far enough. (1)The United States has no state funding mechanism for religion at the federal level. The First Amendment's Establishment Clause, ratified 1791, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion", has been read since Everson v. Board of Education (1947) as barring direct government funding of religious institutions, though indirect and neutral mechanisms, tax exemption for religious property and organizations chief among them, remain in place nationwide. (1)BrowseCompareBrazilModern Area1 entryMexicoModern Area1 entryUnited StatesModern Area1 entrySources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category TreeComments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.