Bringing Religion Into International Religious Freedom Policy

44 Andrew Preston Chapter 2 Bringing Religion into International Religious Freedom Policy Thomas F. Farr The Duty which we owe our Creator, and the manner of our dis- charging it, can be governed only by Reason and Conviction, not by Compulsion or Violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the Magistrate. INTRODUCTION The Strategic Salience of Religious Freedom This chapter proposes a comprehensive rethinking of U.S. policy on international religious freedom (IRF). It argues that American policymakers should, as Scott Thomas puts it, “promote religious freedom as if the truthfulness of people’s religious convictions mattered.”1 The argument proceeds from two propositions which are belatedly gaining currency among International Relations scholars and within the foreign policy community. First, for the foreseeable future religion will have a significant and increasing impact on public matters in virtually every region of the world.2 As one group of scholars has recently concluded, religion has “returned from exile.”3 The vast majority of the world’s population will 45 46 Thomas F. Farr Bringing Religion into International Religious Freedom Policy 47 not only be committed to a particular religious tradition but their beliefs will influence social norms and political behaviors, government policies, regional trends, and transnational movements. A world of public faith will continue to have serious implications for the interests of the United States abroad and the security and prosperity of the American people at home. While I cannot demonstrate this proposition here, I consider it sufficiently well established in the burgeoning literature on religion and international relations to serve as a reliable point of departure.4 For this reason, the religious teachings and actions of other peoples and other nations should be integrated into the official American under- standing of the world and our strategy for engaging it. This does not mean that diplomats must be theologians, any more than they must be lawyers, economists, or political philosophers. It means that they must rediscover the first principle of true realism, which is to understand things as they are and to call them by their right names. Diplomats must therefore attain the capacity to know and to address human behavior in all its forms, including beliefs and practices formed by an increasing global diversity of religious convictions. Second, the American foreign policy establishment is at present ill- prepared, both philosophically and bureaucratically, to address a world of public faith.5 A whole variety of principles and habits from across the ideological spectrum of American society feeds a secularist diplomatic culture. The distinction between secular and secularist is important. The United States is a secular society in that it seeks to maintain a proper dif- ferentiation between the overlapping spheres of government and religion. Vigorous debates continue about whether the balance has tipped too far in one direction or the other in domestic politics and in the influencing of American foreign policy.6 But among many of the professionals and scholars in the American foreign policy community itself, there has long been a secularist approach to religion—an official, if sometimes implicit, reticence about addressing the religious factors in other cultures and indeed in seeing culture as an expression of religion at all. The explanations are varied and cut across the red-blue, political-cultural divide in America. Our diplomatic tendencies in such matters clearly flow in some respects from what is com- monly referred to as modern liberal secularism. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd even speaks of “the political authority of secularism” in international relations.7 But such tendencies are also nourished by habits of thought, including theological habits of thought, present in the American right. More importantly, the various schools of American diplomacy struggle 46 Thomas F. Farr Bringing Religion into International Religious Freedom Policy 47 mightily either to avoid the subject of religion or to assume it away, albeit for very different reasons. The fact is that no matter which political party has been in charge, and which version of foreign affairs has been in the ascendant, American diplomacy has been largely passive and ineffective in its engagement with an international order influenced by faith. A 2007 study by the Center for Strategic and International Affairs has confirmed this problem. After surveying the treatment of religion across the spectrum of American foreign policy agencies, it found that U.S. government officials are often reluctant to address the issue of religion, whether in response to a secular U.S. legal and political tradition, in the context of America’s Judeo-Christian image overseas, or simply because religion is perceived as too complicated or sensitive. Current U.S. government frameworks for approaching religion are narrow, often approaching religions as problematic or monolithic forces, overemphasizing a terrorism-focused analysis of Islam, and sometimes marginalizing religion as a peripheral humanitarian or cultural issue. Institutional capacity to understand and approach religion is limited due to legal limitations, lack of religious expertise or training, minimal influence for religion- related initiatives, and a government primarily structured to engage with other official state actors.8 Ironically, this policy deficiency persists amid a significant increase in the number of scholarly books and articles concerning religion and foreign policy. One of the unanticipated results of 9/11 was an added momentum to something already underway—the abandonment of the so-called secularization theory, according to which religion was inevita- bly withering with the advance of modernity. A few scholars have ques- tioned the theory for decades, but its assertions were for the most part too comforting to be challenged by mere facts. The attacks of September 11 proved to be, at least for some, the fact that would not be ignored. Since 2001 we have seen a proliferation of publications and programs dealing with religion and international affairs, especially among policy- oriented think tanks such as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Rand Corporation, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (all of which existed prior to 9/11 but whose interest in religion and foreign policy has increased). And yet, as late as four years after the terrorist attacks on the American homeland, the Henry Luce Foundation found it necessary to invite selected U.S. academic institutions specializing in international affairs to apply for grants on religion and foreign policy. Its purpose was to get them to pay attention to an issue that they had largely ignored.9 While 48 Thomas F. Farr Bringing Religion into International Religious Freedom Policy 49 the relationship between religion and foreign policy is getting greater emphasis among some policy institutions, it is still struggling for attention among academic institutions who seek to educate and train our future diplomats—those who will carry out America’s engagement with the world. This chapter hopes to assist in that worthy enterprise. While correcting this deficiency will not be easy, a potentially effective and even potent vehicle is at hand. America’s existing statutory policy of promoting international religious freedom should be recalibrated, broad- ened, and integrated throughout our foreign policy apparatus to help the United States meet the challenges presented by a world of faith. Such a change will require fresh thinking about religion, about freedom, and about the relationship between the two. It will require new policy man- dates from a president, the urging of Congress, a determined secretary of state, strongly supportive political appointees at Foggy Bottom, and new training for America’s diplomats. This project will in part constitute a work of recovery. It will be worth- while for U.S. policymakers and diplomats to recall the relative success that their own country has had in balancing the competing authorities of religion and state. A case in point: on June 1, 1660, magistrates from the Massachusetts Bay Colony hanged Mary Dyer on Boston Commons for her persistence in believing and proselytizing the Quaker faith.10 In 1791 the first sixteen words of the Bill of Rights guaranteed the free exercise of religion at the national level. What had happened in the intervening 131 years was not the secularization of American society or politics, nor the triumph of Enlightenment rationalism, but the mutual development of religious doctrine and political culture. Rediscovering this American experience will be important for American diplomacy, not in order to impose the First Amendment model on others, but to overcome the crip- pling presumption that religion and freedom, or faith and reason, are irreconcilable. SOURCES OF RESISTANCE A major obstacle to this project will be the premises and habits of thought present in U.S. diplomacy’s various schools, such as realism, liberal inter- nationalism, and neoconservatism.11 These schools are repositories of what ought to be our best thinking on how America should engage the world, but until very recently they have had little to say about religion as a policy issue. In the past decade their

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