God and Global Order: The Power of Religion in American Foreign Policy

2. Bringing Religion into International Religious Freedom Policy

45 Thomas F. Farr Bringing Religion into International Religious Freedom Policy Chapter 2 The Duty which we owe our Creator, and the manner of our discharging 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 46 Thomas F. Farr 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 understanding 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 illprepared , 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 differentiation 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 commonly 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 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...