Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Religion and International Diplomacy: A Ten-Year Progress Report
Ten years ago, the U.S. Congress launched a debate on U.S. international religious freedom policy that ultimately resulted in the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. Foreign policy actors continue to debate how religious freedom – and religion itself – should be factored into U.S. foreign policy. Has the State Department interpreted the international religious freedom policy too narrowly over the past decade by focusing on individual cases of religious persecution? Does a robust international religious freedom policy truly advance U.S. national interests? The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life invited three distinguished speakers to address these and other fundamental questions. The session was held May 8.
Speakers:
John V. Hanford III, Ambassador-at-Large, Office of International Religious Freedom, Department of State
John Shattuck, CEO, John F. Kennedy Library Foundation
Thomas F. Farr, Former Director, Office of International Religious Freedom, Department of State
Moderator: Luis Lugo, Director, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
This transcript has been edited for clarity, spelling and grammar. In the following excerpt, ellipses have been eliminated to improve readability.
AMBASSADOR JOHN V. HANFORD III: When called upon to speak, it's always good to make a presentation filled with suspense, saturated with controversy, and maybe having a romantic element on the side. However, when it comes to today's topic and my presentation, I'm afraid there's not much suspense surrounding my position.
My position is that, in 1998, Congress in its great wisdom passed a very well-conceived piece of legislation and that, secondly, the Office of International Religious Freedom at the State Department has done a faithful and, dare I say, commendable job of carrying out this mandate.
However, there is still plenty of room for controversy, and I have the sneaking suspicion we may have a bit of that today. I'm reminded of the adage some of you may have been taught by your parents, as was I, that whenever you find yourself in polite company, or on a first date, you should avoid three topics: sex, religion and politics. In our brief time, I'm not going to be able to talk about the first of those three. But I don't think we'll be lacking when we have religion and politics mixed.
In 1997, the feeling on Capitol Hill was this issue had been neglected. First, a real champion on the issue of international religious freedom, Frank Wolf, came forward with a piece of legislation for the Wolf-Specter bill. This had not been written in his office, but it paved the way for consideration of legislation and was successful in the House. He said, "John, if you can write a better bill, then I'd encourage you to do that."
So I pulled together two other people to work with me on this. One was a particularly impressive brunette, and don't let anyone tell you that legislating can't be romantic, because Laura [Bryant Hanford] is now my wife. That's the element of romance I was talking about earlier. There was also an impressive balding redhead, Will Inboden. He's now the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council.
The three of us spent months sitting around a conference table poring over the question, how do we devise the best possible law and policy for the U.S. government to focus on this issue? We carefully studied other human rights laws, sanctions regimes, trade law. We consulted experts, and we spent months brainstorming.
Our goal wasn't just to punish, but to promote the advance of religious freedom, all within the context of responsible U.S. foreign policy. We were honored to have Sen. [Don] Nickles be our chief sponsor. Then Sen. [Joe] Lieberman became our chief Democratic sponsor. I was pleased the Clinton administration came out in favor of the act – one day before its passage, but better late than never. The bill passed 98-to-0 in the Senate, and then by voice vote in the House of Representatives.
The legislation sets up a position for an ambassador-at-large, a high-level diplomat to work these issues face-to-face with foreign officials, and a permanent office at the State Department. Bob Seiple was the first ambassador-at-large, and he did a fabulous job laying the groundwork. I was honored to be chosen by President Bush, but now I have to implement what I worked to create, and it's a lot of work. [The act also] sets up a commission, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, with nine commissioners who are chosen in a bi-partisan way. We do an annual report covering 198 countries.
We also have an annual process to identify the worst violators, and these are called CPCs, countries of particular concern. The countries on this list now are North Korea, China, Burma, Sudan and Iran. Two years ago we added Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Eritrea, and several months ago we removed Vietnam and added Uzbekistan.
Action is required under the act against countries that violate religious freedom, even against countries that violate it in a fairly mild way. There are a number of optional actions that can be taken, and these are calibrated from mild to severe. In the case of CPC countries, there's a narrower list, with more severe options, and these can include sanctions, or a more flexible approach like signing an agreement that gives a country a way out if it's willing to fulfill the agreement.
When this legislation was passed, I didn't expect 10 years later we would have the successes we can point to today. We still have to fight bureaucratic battles within the State Department, but increasingly the department has seen the value our office brings to the table and the changes we've been able to make.
We now have a 20-person office, and I like to say we can out-think, out-sue and out-pray any other office at the State Department. But we're still a tiny office taking on the whole world's religious freedom problems.
In terms of laws changed, people released from prison, and even tolerance increased, we've had about as strong an impact around the world as any office at the State Department on a per capita basis. The IRF report has become the gold standard of religious freedom reporting. It's an enormous encouragement to people around the world who find [the report] posted in their countries, in their language, on the U.S. Embassy websites. I have foreign ministers and others tell me how they read it and learn a lot about religion in their own country as a result. It's impossible to estimate the impact of this.
The CPC process has also been quite successful. Far from being a knee-jerk list of the countries we love to hate, it's a carefully considered [list] made each year by the secretary of state. We've tried to be as creative and productive as we can in implementing the requirements of action. For example, in the case of Vietnam, as many of you know, we negotiated an agreement under which Vietnam could come off [the list.] The change has been dramatic. When I began working with Vietnam, about 1,200 churches and places of worship had been recently shut down. They had arrested dozens of religious leaders. They had a horrible practice of forced renunciations of faith, which they were carrying out all over the country. There were people being beaten to death and others being physically abused.
As of November, 2006, we've seen legislation pass [in Vietnam] banning forced renunciations of faith. We've seen all the prisoners on our list released. We've seen virtually all of the closed churches reopened. And we've seen the government going a step further and recognizing whole new groups of religions. Underground groups of various denominations and religions are now being registered and made legal; people are no longer having to meet in the same fear.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, we went after the issue of extremist hate literature, in which the government had been responsible for the propagation around the world of textbooks and other materials that called Jews pigs and Christian dogs and were filled with other hateful references. The Saudi government has now committed to us that they will cease, and have ceased, sending these materials anywhere in the world, and that they're going to revise these materials and textbooks, [starting] from about a year from now. We're following up with them on that. They've also curbed the religious police, who were responsible for raiding private places of worship. I would say probably a million people of minority faiths are able to meet without harassment in a given week [in Saudi Arabia.] And we've negotiated a number of other things with them as well.
Too much, too little, or just right? I believe we've come close in the IRF Act to getting things just right.
JOHN SHATTUCK: What do we mean by religious freedom?
In the beginning, quite literally, as the Bible says, there was God and religion. But by definition, there was not religious freedom, because having religious freedom, at least in our perspective today, means, perhaps, to have more than one god, or more than one religion, or maybe even no god or no religion at all. Freedom and religion are [in] a complicated juxtaposition. As we look back through history, we find when a religion came into contact with another religion, it almost invariably led to conflict and war. If you take just Europe in the last millennium, you come up with the Crusades, the Islamic conquest, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years' War and the Holocaust.
Out of the terrible horrors of the Second World War came a rather remarkable idea. The idea is freedom of religion is tolerance of religious difference. It recognizes there is more than one religion in the world, and it's important to figure out ways, internationally and domestically, of promoting tolerance of those.
There's a basic strategic reason for this, which all of us can recognize, that tolerance is essential to protect one's own religion and one's own deeply held religious beliefs from external manipulation or efforts to overcome them, perhaps from other religions that are pushing in the opposite direction.
Second question: why is this concept of religious freedom so important to our national security today? We live in a time of unprecedented religious pluralism in the world, and in our own country many, many different religions co-exist. We're also in a time of unprecedented contact among religions as a result of the communications revolution and all the ways in which the world is shrinking.
At the same time, and I recognize this in my own life, there is a greater interest in religious belief and the rise in religious belief.
Religion is increasingly a motivating factor in political, economic, and cultural affairs and in the ways in which countries relate to each other. It's profoundly in our national interest, and our security interest, to come to grips with religion as a motivational force in international relations and to promote religious tolerance as a way of deterring conflict and protecting our own freedom from external and internal threats.
The United States has a good record of religious freedom protection, in terms of the tolerance we teach in our schools, and in our anti-discrimination laws, which protect religious exercise. But until recently, we haven't done this internationally.
How does the International Religious Freedom Act protect our national security by promoting religious tolerance as I've described it? The short answer is, frankly, not very well. This is partly because it is misunderstood in many places abroad, and partly because as it has been implemented, despite the very good efforts John and his office have made, it is not yet in the mainstream of American foreign policy.
There are four ways in which it's misunderstood abroad. They're wrong, and they're rebuttable, but they're there. We need to recognize them. First is the perception that this legislation predominantly represents the interests of missionary religions, interested in proselytizing and changing people's religious views in other countries. It's not technically or literally true, but it is true certain evangelical groups lobbied heavily for the International Religious Freedom Act and that record, unfortunately, has carried into the way it's perceived abroad.
The second perception is the U.S. cares more about religious freedom as we define it than about other international human rights, and that that the U.S. is projecting its interest in its own concept of freedom of religion to other countries, trying to export a uniquely American brand of religion. Here again, there's nothing in the legislation that would suggest that, but there is a fairly widely held perception that that's the case.
The third perception is -- and it's completely rebuttable because I worked on this aspect of the law -- that the International Religious Freedom Act is based on a punitive model, in which mandatory sanctions are imposed on countries seen by the U.S. to be persecuting or denying religious freedom.
Finally, there's the perception the act is another example of U.S. unilateralism at a time when there are altogether too many examples of that. Since we have yet to ratify a number of international human rights treaties, and in some respects are seen to be at odds with or even in violation of some international treaties that we have ratified, this perception is hard to dispel.
The fourth and final point -- and here's where the good news comes. The question is what we should do to promote religious freedom in our foreign policy going forward, which I agree is in our national security interest and an important element of the State Department's activity today.
In many ways we are engaged primarily in what I call "naming and shaming" – taking individual cases of persecution and focusing on how people can be released from prison and how countries violating religious freedom in terms of imprisoning individuals can be put in the spotlight. This is fine, but it's not enough [and] it's somewhat diversionary from the much larger effort to connect religious freedom with the mainstream of our foreign policy.
We need to develop our understanding and expertise in religion as part of our foreign policy. We have experts on economic or military or other issues in the mainstream of foreign policy, but we don't have experts on the broad religious elements motivating so much of international behavior.
We also need to use our foreign assistance much more effectively in promoting institutions that can protect against discrimination toward religious minorities, or that can otherwise build institutional structures similar to what we do in promoting democracy more broadly.
I would favor mandating that all functional and geographic bureaus be charged with responsibility for developing religious freedom expertise, particularly on the religions in the areas they are engaged with, and promoting religious freedom as religious tolerance and developing the institutions that I'm talking about. Only that way are we going to find this issue put into the mainstream of American foreign policy, where I think it belongs.
TOM FARR: You can count me among the people who are enthusiastic supporters of the policy begun in 1998 with the International Religious Freedom Act, but also among those who believe there is an untapped potential – I would argue a vast untapped potential – in the law. That is what I would like to talk about today.
With the exception of some of the initiatives Ambassador Hanford has taken in recent years, our policy for the last nine years has not been one of promoting religious freedom at all; it's been one of opposing religious persecution. The two things overlap but they are not the same thing overall
It's time for us to think – and I'm going to agree more with Ambassador Shattuck than I expected I would – more normatively about religion in order to begin to promote regimes of religious freedom as part of our foreign policy.
If we do this, we can address a number of international issues important to our national security and our fundamental interests, including doing a better job of reducing religious persecution around the world and addressing what many scholars and policymakers are beginning to acknowledge as our tone deafness about religion in American diplomacy -- our incapacity to deal with a world of religion, as Philip Jenkins put it, a world in the 21st century in which religion is replacing ideology as the prime motivating factor in human behavior.
I would also add, given some of the misperceptions John Shattuck pointed out, that a more capacious understanding of promoting religious freedom would begin to address some of those misperceptions – and I agree they are misperceptions – particularly the one that the international religious freedom act was designed to make the world safe for American missionaries abroad.
For the most part, if you look at what we have done for the last nine years, it has followed a pattern: We identify the persecutors and the persecuting behavior with the excellent international religious freedom report, supplemented by the reports from the commission. We denounce the persecutors and their behavior, as required by the law. We try to rescue the victims as best we can. We try in many ways to help them get out of harm's way. Then we threaten [offending governments] with any number of possible actions from a démarche on one end all the way to serious economic sanctions, which I believe we have done in one case, that of Eritrea.
It's fair to ask, after almost a decade of doing this, what impact have we had on international religious persecution? I would answer in two ways. First of all, it's very important [to note] there are hundreds of people, maybe even thousands, walking the earth free today because of our religious freedom policy.
But if you ask the macro question, has religious persecution diminished internationally the last decade, the honest answer has got to be, no, it hasn't; indeed, an argument could be made it has increased. In those cases where we have had a real impact, it's been because of military intervention, [not] religious freedom policy.
In Serbia-Kosovo, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, after we overturned those totalitarian or despotic regimes, religious persecution went down precipitously, as did other forms of human rights abuse, but then after a few years, in all three cases, they began to come back. I would argue we do not have today in any of those three cases regimes of religious liberty, nor have we attempted through our religious freedom policy to encourage them.
What do I mean by [encouraging] regimes of religious liberty? One way to do it is provided by a Columbia University scholar named Al Stepan who has written about the "twin tolerations."
Stepan noted that historically, transitions to democracy successful among societies with powerful religious communities do not occur by the privatization of religion, or the strict separation of religion and state, but by a theological buy-in by the powerful religious community so they are embracing democratic norms, not in spite of their religious teachings, but because of them.
This is how we should begin to think about religious liberty and promoting stable self government around the world, especially in the Muslim world.
You can divide American foreign policy thinking on this into pre- and post-9/11 [categories.] Before 9/11, American diplomacy assumed a direct line between political Islam and Islamist terrorism. We were traumatized by the 1979 Shiite revolution in Iran – our incapacity to understand what was going on there, much less what has happened since – and the terrorism with which we have been afflicted with since then. Then came 9/11, and this reshuffled the cards of our thinking about political Islam. But I would suggest the democracy promotion effort that ensued after 9/11 was essentially a secularist effort.
We took the money we had been spending with the NED [National Endowment for Democracy] for 20 years, [and] moved it into the Middle East. We taught people how to engage in constitution building and political parties and civil society building, but we did not engage, and we still do not engage, the main drivers of political society in the Muslim world, and that is Islamist communities.
The best example for this, in my view, is the Muslim Brotherhood. It's not the only example, but in Egypt we've talked to the Muslim Brotherhood ad hoc for 20 years or more. We've had no policy to do so. It's time for that, in my view, to change. We need to develop guidelines to discern which members of the Muslim Brotherhood are capable of being enticed to democratic norms, and we need to engage them publicly with our public diplomacy, our private diplomacy, and our democracy-promotion funding.
I don't mean to imply the Office of International Religious Freedom should take all of this on itself. I believe it should be institutionalized in many of the ways John Shattuck has suggested.
We need to have the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs thinking about religion. We need to have the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs and the European Bureau and the South Asian Bureau not thinking of this as the compartmentalized issue they do now, but as something that is part of what we need today to engage a world of public religion. It's an important opportunity.