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As religious nationalism and majoritarian politics advance, the position of religious minorities has become precarious across a widening range of states, and the mechanisms of their exclusion have grown more varied and more legal. The instruments range from the symbolic to the coercive. India's Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which fast-tracked naturalization for select non-Muslim migrants, wrote religious criteria into citizenship law for the first time and provoked mass protest over what it implied for Muslim belonging; a growing thicket of state-level anti-conversion laws polices religious boundaries and criminalizes interfaith marriage. Pakistan's blasphemy laws, carrying capital sentences and frequently weaponized against Christians, Ahmadis, and Hindus, generate a climate of impunity in which accusation alone can be lethal, and the Ahmadi community is constitutionally excluded from claiming Muslim identity at all. In Myanmar, the denial of citizenship to the Rohingya laid the legal groundwork for their expulsion. What these cases share is the transformation of minorities from equal citizens into conditional or suspect ones, their belonging rendered contingent on the tolerance of a majority increasingly unwilling to extend it. The exclusion operates through law, bureaucracy, and everyday social practice as much as through open violence, which makes it both more durable and harder to contest. The analytical challenges are to understand how majoritarian states construct and legalize the second-class status of minorities, why democratic institutions so often facilitate rather than prevent this process, what strategies of resistance, accommodation, or exit minorities adopt under such pressure, and whether international norms of minority protection retain any purchase against determined majoritarian projects. The treatment of religious minorities has become a decisive measure of whether formal democracies remain committed to the equal citizenship on which their legitimacy rests.