Thomas Farr, in his recent post, links the mass protests in the Arab world, combined with the persecution of Christian minorities in the region, and what he called “the Obama administration’s striking indifference to America’s statutory policy of advancing international religious freedom.” In my view, if the Obama administration is to do anything with respect to the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), it should seek to repeal it and to dismantle the whole policy and institutional structure that it entails, because this statutory policy is an insult to and betrayal of victims of human rights violations throughout the world, including Christian minorities in the Arab world. As I argued earlier, “Religious freedom can neither be advanced in isolation of other fundamental human rights nor sustained by imperial imposition.” Farr recalls that I, among others, strongly oppose the IRFA, but he does not respond to the reasons I gave for my position.

In this post, I will attempt to clarify my position by offering a historical view of how our celebration of what we now call the American Revolution requires us to support the maturation of what are now “mass protests” into the Arab Revolutions. The primary role in that process must be that of Arabs themselves, with each society acting in its own context. But the role of citizens of the United States is a matter of individual personal responsibility, because it is immediately connected to our attitudes and behavior. To the question posed in Thomas Farr’s title—“Where lies wisdom, where folly?”—I say that the universal measure is always the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you would have them do unto you. My strong opposition to the IRFA reflects my opposition to the United States’ failure to uphold the Golden Rule in its foreign policies. If the United States wishes to preach to others the imperative of protecting human rights, it must first apply that injunction to itself. My point is not that civil rights are violated in the United States, though there is sufficient reason for concern on that count; rather, the point is that domestic respect for the civil rights of citizens is not the same as the protection of human rights for all human beings equally, by virtue of their humanity and not their status as citizens. The United States does not have the moral standing and political legitimacy to uphold human rights anywhere in the world, unless it is willing to be judged by the same standards that it claims to apply to others.

I speak here of the official and consistent policy, commonly referred to as the Bricker Amendment of 1953, of not ratifying any human rights treaty that would require changes in the laws and practices of the United States. The unmitigated folly of this policy is that the United States claims the right to tell other countries to change their laws and practices to conform with human rights standards when it has officially and publically declared that it will never do so itself. It is ironic, also, that the United States refuses to do so, when it has less reason to fear being found at fault than many states that have been willing to submit to judgment according to international human rights standards. Freedom of religion must be protected everywhere, not because it is “America’s ‘First Freedom,” as Thomas Farr calls it, but because it is one fundamental universal human right among others. Wisdom, for the United States, lies in being part a global joint venture to protect human rights, and folly lies in the pretension to dictate to others what it is not willing to apply to itself. It is this utterly untenable position that I called “the ‘White Man’s Burden’ to civilize the rest of humanity,” which Thomas Farr found to be a “highly provocative charge.” Incidentally, this phrase was coined by the English poet Rudyard Kipling in reference to the imperialist venture of the United States in the Philippine Islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As to the title of this post, history is what individual people do or fail to do, especially in purportedly democratic states like the U.S. What the Obama administration or Congress do or fail to do cannot be disassociated from the attitudes and behavior of the citizens of the United States. My title is meant to emphasize that it is because of the success of the American Revolution over time that citizens of the United States can now change the policies of their country to a greater extent than Arabs are able to, at least in the short term. My point is not that Arabs are helpless victims who must wait for the United States to save them from their regimes; rather, the issue for me is our responsibility in making or changing the policies of the United States here and now, regardless of what Arabs or any other people can do for themselves in their countries.

In my view, our failure to support the capacity of Arabs to do what we take for granted will doom the American Revolution to failure over time. To briefly explain what some readers may find too provocative an assertion, nothing human can be perfect, and all human achievements will diminish and eventually come to an end. Just as it has evolved since its inception, the United States, as the outcome of the American Revolution, will also end in time. There will be a time when there is no United States, though people will continue to live and, I hope, thrive in this part of the world. How soon and complete the decline and fall of the United States will be depends on our ability to uphold the values and actions that sustain this political experiment in its historical context. It is also important to recall here that both the rise and fall of the United States, like any other human process, unfolds over time, that is, in history. So, the fact that we don’t see the demise of the United States as imminent does not mean that it is not in the process of happening. In fact, it is bound to happen, as with all things human.

The Golden Rule is also instructive in regard to the obsession of political and opinion leaders, the media, and the U.S. public at large with the risk of the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt and other countries in the Arab world. The unstated premise and conclusion of this obsession seems to be that we should not support democratization in the Arab world if the likely or even remotely possible outcome is the coming of “Islamists” to power in this strategically vital region for “American interests.” Although I am not able to prove my claim, I am confident that a very similar discourse was current in Britain at the time of the American Revolution. The imperial elite of Britain must have been worried about the negative impact of the American Revolution on their interests, without any consideration of what that Revolution meant for the freedom and well-being of the American revolutionaries and their society.

Let me try to explain further, in the hope of minimizing the risk of miscommunication, which is particularly serious when we deal with profound transformations that challenge our deeply held assumptions and prejudices. I personally am opposed to the Muslim Brothers and have struggled to challenge their views of Islam and politics since the 1960s. Their ideological confusion and devious politics have caused horrendous loss and pain in my home country, Sudan. I therefore have no illusions about the serious costs of their coming to power anywhere, especially in a country like Egypt. My concern, however, is how to effectively confront and combat that risk, because I realize how serious it is. This is not an attempt to downplay the drastic implications of the Muslims Brothers coming to power. But it is from this perspective that I call for unconditional commitment to equal liberty for myself and others, especially those who disagree with me. In fact, I am free only to the extent that my opponents are free. My friends do not need this commitment from me, because they have my love and support. It is my opponents who need my principled commitment. My primary focus here is on what Muslim societies need to do for themselves and for their own reasons, regardless of what the United States wants or needs.

The primary task of sustainable democratization and protection of human rights throughout the Muslim world is for local populations to expose and challenge the myth of an Islamic state—to realize that Sharia cannot, ever, be enforced by the state. When Sharia is enacted as state law, it becomes the secular political will of the state and not the religious law of Islam. Muslims must realize that a secular state is a necessary condition of the possibility of a Muslim person and society. It is equally clear, however, that only Muslims can do this by and for themselves, within their own societies. This is the only morally legitimate and politically viable source of democracy and self-determination. The failure of the United States to stand by this principle in the case of the Arab Revolution is a betrayal of the values of the American Revolution. It can also be reasonably argued that such “conditionality” of support for democratic transformation, dependent on the exclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a pretext for continuing neocolonial political domination and economic exploitation of the Middle East.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a coalition of social, religious, and political movements, which can assume a variety of organizational forms and operate through a range of strategies. Whether they operate openly and legally through “front” organizations or are forced to work underground, their religious and ideological appeal has several sources. One source, for instance, is their ability to present themselves as the “true voice” of their communities, the “authentic” expression of their people’s right to self-determination. More concretely, they have been able to present themselves, until very recently, as the legitimate and effective alternative to corrupt and oppressive regimes, like that of Mubarak in Egypt or bin Ali in Tunisia. Another source of legitimacy is their appeal to romantic and simplistic notions of Islamic history, as if it were a computer “software” program that present-day Muslims could simply “install and run” as a panacea to all of the social, political, and economic problems of the post-colonial condition. Moreover, Islamists thrive under conditions of political repression, because of their ability to operate through mosques and “Islamic centers,” while benefiting from popular sympathy as “victims” of secular oppressive regimes. As we have seen through decades of experience, in the Arab world in particular, Islamists tend to blame the lack of democratic freedoms for their failure to explain clear and specific programs for socio-economic and political reform.

In other words, having to operate under oppressive conditions enables them to continue to speak in vague, emotional terms about their being the “obvious and natural” alternative, without having to explain what they intend to do and how. As these and other possible factors clearly show, the response to the risk of Islamists coming to power in the Arab world must begin by allowing all Islamists, including the Muslim Brothers of Egypt, to operate legally and openly, in free and fair competition with all other political forces in the country. Ensuring democratic governance and protection of human rights for Islamists is the only way to expose and defeat their confused ideology and dangerous politics. As we have seen in the case of Hamas in Gaza, conditional support for democratic transition is counterproductive, because it enhances the perceived legitimacy and political efficacy of Islamists in their own societies.

It is therefore clear that both principled and pragmatic reasons unite in urging unconditional support for democratization, regardless of narrow, short-term calculations of the risks it may pose to our interests. After all, Muslims are by far the primary victims of Islamist violence and authoritarianism. Terrorism is a human problem, not an American or Western problem. In the same way that Israel remains democratic under constant threats to its very existence, Arabs states can and should be democratic despite the risks of Islamist politics. If Islamists come to power in any country, we will deal with that reality, just like the people of the country have to deal with it, though with fewer resources than we have and greater potential cost to their societies than we will have to cope with. In the final analysis, this is the only way to individual freedom, social justice, and sustainable political stability.

The first is the emergence of mass protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, combined with an outbreak of severe persecution against Christian minorities in the region. The second is the Obama administration’s striking indifference to America’s statutory policy of advancing international religious freedom.

The subject of religious freedom, especially as an element of American foreign policy, has long been controversial. Not surprisingly, contributors to the Immanent Frame debate staked out varied positions.

Four critics in particular, however, questioned whether religious freedom as it is conceptualized in the United States has any applicability elsewhere, and whether American foreign policy can legitimately seek to advance international religious liberty at all. The four are Professors Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, and Peter Danchin.

An-Na’im’s offering stands alone, while those by Sullivan, Hurd, and Danchin are “the product of ongoing conversations” between themselves and Professor Saba Mahmood. Each has a different approach to the subject, but there are also striking commonalities. For example, all four essays mischaracterize the purposes and the effects of U.S. religious freedom policy. The essays were written as if the 1998 IRF Act (the statutory basis for U.S. policy) were narrowly drawn by the Christian right, honed and implemented by the United States as a tool of imperial power, and imposed on a victim-world—especially in the lands of Islam.

Further, each appears to harbor mistaken assumptions about the United States’ founding, the American religion-state model, and what that model might offer highly religious societies outside the West. Taken together, the four critics represent a thoroughgoing rejection of American exceptionalism, a deep suspicion of American power and influence, and a highly tendentious reading of the Constitution’s establishment clause. A fair summary of their views would be that U.S. IRF policy is imperialistic, immoral, unconstitutional, and unwise.

In this posting, I will focus on the origins, goals, and actual implementation of U.S. IRF policy. In particular, I address the charge that it has been an exercise in American imperialism and that it attempts to infiltrate “non-establishment norms” into Muslim nations.

U.S. IRF policy: a ship with an important mission, but no captain . . . and not much cargo

A dearth of religious freedom and a surfeit of religious persecution clearly constitute a global problem of significant proportions. According to a 2009 study by the Pew Forum, seventy  percent of the world’s population lives in nations where religious freedom is severely restricted. The problem is especially acute in Muslim-majority nations, China, Russia, and India.

This represents a humanitarian tragedy—millions of human beings are subject to depredations such as torture, rape, or unjust imprisonment because of their religious beliefs or those of their tormentors. The problem also implicates vital American interests, including our national security. Studies in international relations and empirical sociology tend to confirm what common sense would suggest: the absence of religious freedom undermines democracy and feeds religious terrorism.

After reading the Pew Report, however, one is entitled to conclude that the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) and the policy it mandated have had little impact on levels of religious freedom in the world. While the IRFA’s relative ineffectiveness can be attributed to all three administrations under which it has operated, the Obama administration has thus far proven especially negligent. It has not allocated resources or sustained attention to either the humanitarian or the national security dimensions of the problem.

Most recently, the slaughter of Catholics at worship in Baghdad and the continued flight of Iraq’s dwindling Christian population; the murder of Egyptian Copts at church in Alexandria; a Pakistani Christian mother’s death sentence for insulting the prophet Muhammed; the murder of a Muslim governor for defending the Christian mother; Afghan criminal prosecutions against Muslim reformers on charges of blasphemy; past and prospective stonings in Iran; the destruction of Indonesian churches by mobs reacting to a court’s failure to execute a Christian judged guilty of blasphemy; a massive roundup of Iranian Christians—such outrages have been met by little more than rhetorical condemnations at the State Department (and in some cases, not even that).

Given increasing religious persecution in the Middle East (and elsewhere), it is deeply troubling that the Obama administration, over half its tenure gone, has no  ambassador at large for international religious freedom, a position mandated by IRFA. The need for a seasoned diplomat in this position is stronger than ever. Mass political protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East may not now be driven by religious ideas and actors, but it is inevitable that they will play a role, for better or worse, in the years to come. Getting the religion-state nexus right will be critical if these countries are to avoid theocratic authoritarianism, forestall the growth of religious extremism, and establish liberal, stable self-governance.

Nowhere is this issue more sharply joined, and more strategically important for the United States, than the question of the Muslim Brotherhood’s role in any future Egyptian government. Some pundits have opined confidently that the Brotherhood in power means the death of liberalism in Egypt, a mortal threat to minority Christians, and the abrogation of the Camp David Accords. Others have demurred: the Brothers are Muslim liberals aborning, they say, and we should stay out of their way. The sad reality is that (as I have argued elsewhere) the United States has no idea what the Brotherhood’s proximity to political power would mean, and especially the role that religious conviction might play.

There are many reasons for the religion deficit in our current diplomacy, some of them deeply rooted in contemporary Rawlsian strict-separationism, others in the deficiencies of modern “realist” thought. The great irony is that, unlike Western Europe, the United States has constructed over two centuries a system of religious freedom in which minorities are protected and majorities are not required to abandon their religious beliefs at the political door.

For this reason, one might think American diplomats could convey to Muslims that a democracy grounded in religious freedom is not anti-Islam and is necessary to the rooting of democracy. Muslim-based democratic politics, even Islamic political parties, are not unthinkable. Indeed, they are probably inevitable in highly religious Muslim societies. Islamic democracy can succeed if religious actors accept the limits that liberal democracy demands, such as equality under the law for all religious communities, and forswearing the police powers of the state to privilege Islam. More to point, if they do not accept those limits, democracy will fail. The likes of Mubarak, or his theocratic counterparts in Iran or Sudan, will either return to power or stay where they are.

One might think American diplomacy capable of conveying that message, but one would be wrong. Official ineptness on this score has been on stark display under the Obama administration, which has discerned no relationship whatsoever between religious freedom and the rooting of democracy. The administration’s insouciance on IRF policy is perhaps most starkly reflected in its unconcern about filling the position of IRF ambassador.

In November, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing for Suzan Johnson Cook, President Obama’s nominee for IRF ambassador at large. The nomination was reportedly held up in committee by a Republican Senator, but neither Senate Democrats, the State Department, nor the White House complained. The administration has now re-nominated Johnson Cook. But even if she is quickly confirmed, it will be difficult for anyone—foreign governments, religious extremists, or American diplomats—to conclude that religious freedom is a priority for this administration.

In fact, the indifference to this key office, and to IRF policy, of the Obama White House and the Clinton State Department has been stunning. When the new ambassador finally steps into the office, well over half of Obama’s term will be over. Meanwhile, senior envoys have long been in place to tout more favored administration initiatives, from closing Guantanamo and outreach to Muslim communities to addressing disabilities and managing climate change. A State Department program to advance Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered rights at the UN and elsewhere has been in full swing for well over a year, pursued by the Secretary of State and many of her most senior officials.

And yet, the legally mandated policy of advancing religious liberty—America’s “First Freedom”—has been rudderless since the President took office. Moreover, it appears that the  IRF ambassador, whoever he or she turns out to be, will be a captain without a crew: notwithstanding the law’s mandate that the ambassador head the office of international religious freedom (as all previous IRF ambassadors have done), it seems that this IRF office will work under another official, not under the ambassador.

Nor will the ambassador have much policy leverage. Unlike other ambassadors at large, she reportedly won’t work under the Secretary of State, but will report to an official several steps removed from the Secretary. The State Department will soon issue its list of the “countries of particular concern” (CPCs), which are those guilty of particularly severe violations of religious liberty. But that annual condemnation has had, with one or two exceptions, minimal effect in the countries it targets. It is little more than a rhetorical scourging, irritating to its objects, but—as most of them have learned—carrying few, if any, policy consequences. Along with an annual report, a handful of public speeches devoid of policy significance, and occasional but unfruitful “human rights dialogues,” the CPC listing constitutes the bulk of U.S. IRF policy.

Should it choose to do so, the administration could broaden and deepen that policy, integrating it into U.S. strategies such as democracy and civil society programs that empower indigenous reformers, counter-terrorism diplomacy, and public diplomacy. It could provide U.S. diplomats systematic training in the religious ideas and actors that have such an impact on American interests.

However, despite the efforts of some within the State Department, and despite urging from groups across the policy spectrum (including the Chicago Global Affairs Council task force discussed below), it has declined to do any of these things. When the 60-page U.S. National Security Strategy was unveiled earlier this year—including a full section on the employment of America’s “values” to advance its security—religious freedom was simply missing from the analysis. The administration apparently sees no relationship whatever between international religious freedom and American national security. Militant Iranian Shiism, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Palestine’s Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Afghanistan’s Taliban ideology, and even Islamist terrorism — none of these seem to have anything to do with religion, and religious freedom no role as a prospective antidote.

Fevered imaginings: the Chicago Report and its critics

This brings us to the aforementioned Immanent Frame debate. As noted, our critics seem to believe that U.S. IRF policy is neither passive nor subordinate to other policy imperatives. In their telling, it is a jingoistic, Christian-centered, and powerful tool of American imperialism.

The four were responding to a piece by Scott Appleby, which described a report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the result of a two year study by a task force of over thirty American scholars and policymakers. The report focused both on engagement of religious actors and on the role of religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy. (Appleby co-chaired the task force with Richard Cizik. I was a task force member.)

The study concluded that “the growing salience of religion today is deepening the political significance of religious freedom as a universal human right and a source of social and political stability.” It recommended that the Obama administration appoint an IRF ambassador with the skills to advance religious freedom vigorously and wisely, both in order to protect religious minorities and to entice otherwise illiberal majority religious communities into the bargain of democracy, accepting its limits as well as its benefits.

Success in this endeavor, the report noted, could increase political stability in the Middle East, as well as “undermine religious extremism, violence and terrorism” more broadly. Achieving these goals are in the vital national interests of the United States.

It should be noted that some of the scruples voiced by the four critics were represented on the task force. Appleby’s essay highlighted the “cordial, but occasionally sharp” disagreement among task force members about U.S. religious freedom policy. In fact, some members initially insisted that the report address religious freedom very generally, if at all, and stay away from the subject of official U.S. involvement. Their major concern was, as Appleby put it, that  “’[r]eligious freedom’ is perceived by many peoples around the world,  not least Muslims in the Middle East, . . . not as a universal human right, but as a superpower-charged means of advancing hegemonic U.S. (read Christian or, worse, from their perspective Judeo-Christian) interests.”

Appleby noted that “this particular strain of anti-Americanism is inflamed by isolated episodes of Christian missionaries proselytizing defiantly (or clumsily).” Some “foreign opponents of U.S. influence” even imagine that missionaries are U.S. government agents sent to “impose on vulnerable populations ‘The American Way of Religion’—i.e., voluntarism, church-state separation, [and] a free marketplace of religious ideas….”

Notwithstanding these concerns, the Chicago task force ultimately recommended a strong U.S. religious freedom policy. I believe most members were convinced by the following argument: Religious freedom is not just for Christians, or minorities, or Americans, or any other single group. It is the birthright of every human being and the legal right of every religious community. To stand against religious persecution is a moral imperative, especially for the government of the United States.

Moreover, religious freedom has long been affirmed and protected by international law and is one of the cornerstone rights in the UN’s landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  It is, in other words, not a parochial, partisan, or sectarian claim, but a universal human right. The IRFA explicitly invokes Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, and international human rights covenants as the standard for U.S. policy.

Finally, religious freedom is a linchpin of ordered liberty and the very antithesis of religious extremism. By guaranteeing equality under the law for every person and community, religious liberty protects majorities as well as minorities. If the purpose of U.S. foreign policy is to engage the world in defense of American interests, it must become more effective than it has been in carrying out its statutory mandate to advance religious liberty abroad.

American imperialism and “non-establishment norms”

To our four critics, these arguments are, to say the least, unconvincing. In his post, Professor An-Na’im makes the highly provocative charge that the goal of U.S. IRF policy is to assume “the ‘White Man’s Burden’ of civilizing the rest of humanity” through acts of “imperial imposition.” The IRFA “is a hypocritical . . . example of American exceptionalism,” he writes, because the U.S. “is unilaterally appropriating the right to protect religious freedom abroad, while deliberately refusing to apply any [sic.] international human rights standards to the United States itself.”

As a sovereign nation, An-Na’im concedes, the United States can attempt to advance religious liberty, but “it has no right whatsoever to claim, or to pretend, that it is doing that in the name of ‘international’ religious freedom.” The U.S. may do so legitimately only as “a participant in a global joint venture,” and “only insofar as this approach is applied to all human rights, peace, and social justice issues, and not to religious freedom alone.”

These views are generally shared by the other three critics. For Sullivan, “[t]he Chicago Report reflects . . . a particularly American style of imperialism” and (agreeing with Hurd) “a particularly toxic form of ‘American exceptionalism.’” Hurd labels the report’s recommendations as “the global securitization of religion . . ., an attempt to create a particular kind of world, one defined by the projection of American [religious] power . . . .”

In three extensive essays, Danchin compares the report’s authors to Europe’s “political moralists,” who “subordinated principles to ends and became thereby accomplices to war, imperialism, and colonialism.” He argues that a “latent assumption” of the report is that the world can be divided into good (secular) and bad (religious) Muslims. Like U.S. foreign policy, it pits one against the other “in hopes of fomenting a civil war within the Islamic world.”

For Danchin, all of this has a certain tragic logic. The IRFA, he writes, was the product of lobbying by conservative Christian groups. He sees those groups as a danger not only to international peace, but to the domestic separation of church and state.  He expresses the earnest hope that “the liberal wing of the Supreme Court can try valiantly to hold the line domestically in a still majority protestant [sic.]—but rapidly changing and diversifying society . . . .”

According to Danchin, it is therefore not surprising if (as Charles Taylor has noted) Muslims perceive that “the right to religious freedom in international law appears inextricably linked to distinctly Christian origins—either to a quasi-religious form of post-Enlightenment Deism or to the political rise of Western secularism, and, in either case, as a form of foreign and imperial imposition.”

The bill of particulars goes on. Danchin argues that the religious freedom policy recommended by the Chicago report aims to “change the identity of Muslims and Muslim communities” by infiltrating into their societies the anti-establishment norms of the American constitution, i.e., “secular liberalism in its ‘Establishment Clause’ form.” This would require the removal of religious ideas and actors from political life, or, as Danchin puts it, the movement of religion “to the private sphere of conscience or belief” and the adoption of state neutrality among religions and “between religion and non-religion.”

This interpretation of the First Amendment is accepted to one degree or another by the other critics. They, like Danchin, seem to believe its primary domestic purpose is to keep evangelicals in line. But they also believe that the privatization/neutrality approach to religion and state cannot work in highly religious societies. Here they are surely correct.

Any serious reading of American constitutional history will show that the First Amendment—emphatically—does not privatize religion, remove religious actors and ideas from public life, or require the kind of “neutrality” suggested by the critics. But that misconception remains highly influential within the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Indeed, a recent CSIS study provided strong evidence that American diplomats believe U.S. religious freedom policy, and the attendant need to engage religious actors, is unconstitutional.

This is a major reason for the relative ineffectiveness of U.S. policy. It feeds a reluctance to work with majority religious communities in facilitating the legal and cultural institutions and habits that might actually advance religious liberty. Given this constitutional scruple (especially when combined with other reasons for inaction), what remains is a lowest common denominator approach on which all can agree: rhetorical condemnations of persecution. Unfortunately, this approach has, over the twelve years since IRFA’s passage, neither advanced religious freedom nor reduced religious persecution.

It is therefore deeply ironic, and doubly tragic, that many religious actors abroad—Muslim, Hindu, and Christian Orthodox—think that America’s purposes are precisely to remove them and their ideas from political life. In truth, many senior American diplomats are probably sympathetic to that goal abroad, as they are sympathetic to it domestically. But, contrary to the arguments of our four critics, such sympathies have not led the United States in its IRF policy to push anti-establishment norms, or, quite frankly, any other norms.

I want to conclude by asking whether the legislative history and subsequent implementation of the IRFA justify the critics’ charge of imperialism. We have already seen that, if IRFA’s backers intended to establish a new American imperium via IRF policy, they have failed miserably. The truth is, of course, that they intended no such thing. The charges are simply wrong, although they do echo the assertions of those governments and extremists abroad who would stand to lose if U.S. IRF policy were effective and religious freedom were embraced by their societies.

Allen Hertzke has written the definitive work on the passage of IRFA. It resulted from a typically American legislative campaign that in the end garnered broad consensus across the country’s religious and political landscape. (I have written on the origins of the law and its implementation as well. See chapters 4-7 here.)

The campaign was initially triggered by Christians and Jews who, moved by the terrible fates of persecuted Christians abroad, concluded that their government was not doing enough to address the problem. Early drafts of the bill focused on nations where Christians were most at risk—especially China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, and a handful of Muslim-majority nations. This initial Christian-centered approach, while perhaps flawed, was driven by well established facts (see also here) on who was being persecuted and where. The Muslim regimes named or referenced in the initial bill—e.g., Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Egypt—were then and remain today havens of religious persecution, mainly of Muslim, but also of Christian, minorities, as the aforementioned Pew Forum study amply demonstrates. Moreover, some attention was given in the early legislative drafts to non-Christian victims of abuse, such as Tibetan Buddhists and Iranian Baha’i. It was a kind of “pork barrel” approach to identifying the victims.

In retrospect, it seems clear that the early campaign leadership from American evangelicals, the bill’s initial focus on Christians, and the naming of particular Muslim nations as persecutors, would lead to the false charge that the IRFA was pro-Christian, anti-Islam, and motivated by a kind of cultural imperialism—the desire to “remake” Muslim societies in an American image. American Christians, it is true, were highly motivated to relieve the sufferings of their co-religionists, and many were suffering at the hands of Muslim governments. It is also true that, while there were discussions of Muslim victims of religious persecution (e.g., in India, China, and some Muslim-majority countries), the early legislative drafts did not emphasize Muslims as victims.

Whether one can infer from these facts an imperialist, racist, anti-Islamic bias is, to say the least, highly questionable. Much of the modern legal architecture of human rights arose in response to the suffering of particular minorities, such as European Jewry or American blacks. Would anyone make the case that the postwar human rights regime is illegitimate because it originated in outrage against the treatment of Jews? These charges perhaps tell us more about the biases of the accusers than about the realities of American foreign policy.

In any case, the initial drafts of IRF legislation did not survive, and the final bill removed any reference to particular religious communities or particular nations. The IRFA, as passed, mandated that the United States stand with the persecuted of all nations and faiths, oppose persecution wherever it existed, and advance religious freedom as a remedy. The final legislation was supported not only by evangelicals, but by the Catholic Bishops’ conference, liberal Protestant and Jewish groups, Baha’is, Sikhs, and secular human rights groups. Its aims have subsequently been endorsed by Muslim organizations as well. In the end, the most significant opposition came from Republican conservatives and Democratic liberals who wanted, for different reasons, to ensure that economic sanctions against persecuting regimes were not automatic (which is why, in the final bill, they were  discretionary).

In sum, there is nothing in the language of the statute, in the nature of the groups that backed it, or in their goals that can support a claim of imperialism, let alone the motive of taking up “the White Man’s Burden of civilizing humanity.” Unless, of course, one takes the position (as Professor An Na’im and the other critics may well do) that the very act of passing the legislation was, per se, an act of imperialism. That position, it seems to me, is difficult to sustain. The goal of IRFA’s most ardent supporters was to reduce the suffering of co-religionists, not to extend American hegemony.

Moreover, the neoconservatives and others who planned and executed the American-led invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq generally ignored the religious nature of Iraqi society and did not address the question of whether religious freedom might play a role in stabilizing the country. For the most part, as the sorry fate of Iraqi Christians attests, U.S. diplomacy has still not taken up that question in earnest. As for the allegations that the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan constitute imperialism—or, as Danchin puts it, the imposition of a “military dictatorship”—I believe the record of U.S. actions in Iraq under both the Bush and Obama administrations amply demonstrates that these charges are simply false.

But even if the charges were true, religion and religious freedom policy have played virtually no part in U.S. policy planning or execution. Had it been otherwise, it is entirely possible that Islamist extremist ideas would have less purchase in Afghanistan than they do today, that religious minorities in Iraq would be less endangered than they are today, and that both nations would be closer to stable democracy than they are today.

The sad reality is that American policy has been largely ineffective in the lands of Islam and elsewhere. It has been isolated and circumvented by all the administrations under which it has operated, most especially under the Obama administration. What it has manifestly not been is imperialist, racist, unconstitutional, or a tool of American power. Notwithstanding the assertions of our four critics, the Chicago report was on to something. Should an American President and Secretary of State summon the will, U.S. policy could help yield religious freedom, and with it stability, ordered liberty, prosperity, and peace. As the people of Egypt are teaching us, these are the aspirations of all peoples, of every faith, everywhere.

Alongside this and numerous other recent U.S. policies, the Chicago Council Report looks increasingly futile and, in key places, wrong-headed—even if, doubtless, well-intentioned. One of the Report’s aims was to elaborate on President Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech offering a new opening to Muslims worldwide—a wonderful idea, but one that, only a year later, already appears moribund. As a core proposal, the Report suggested that the U.S. government, under the aegis of the National Security Council (NSC), should pursue an international “religious freedom” agenda. As a key tactic, the government should use American civil society to engage religious—particularly Muslim—communities abroad, helping them stave off “extremism,” and helping us protect our national security.

It is encouraging that at least one recent audience in an unnamed Gulf Arab country would still welcome American engagement, as Nakhleh relates. But a May 26 New York Times article paints a less rosy picture. Pakistan, the world’s second largest Muslim country, is pervaded with conspiracy theories about American perfidy toward the country and toward Muslims generally. Disturbingly, as Glenn Greenwald documents, many of these rumors have at least some colorable basis.

To date, Obama’s Cairo promises of improving relations with the Muslim world and with ordinary Muslims have gone unmet. We remain in Iraq. We remain in Afghanistan. We maintain our detention centers in Guantanamo and Bagram. We continue unmanned drone strikes with substantial “collateral damage.” We have done little to pressure Israel to withdraw settlements from the West Bank or to bargain seriously with the Palestinians. Suspicions of the U.S. therefore remain strong. It is true that Obama recently appointed a Muslim as special envoy to the OIC (as President Bush did too). Sadly, there may not be much else that is positive to report, since the Obama administration has continued or intensified many of the Bush era policies that have harmed our relations with the Muslim world.

Unless these key policies change, a government-managed plan of “engagement” with Muslim communities will not work. This goes first and foremost for the charmingly euphemized “kinetic” (read: military) option we have favored thus far. Almost ten years since 9/11, the U.S. mainland has suffered the highest number of terrorist attacks ever (if we believe the Department of Homeland Security)—though their actual impact on “national security” has been minimal. And, in Obama’s view, this approach will likely leave the U.S. fighting terrorists for ten more years—undoubtedly an understatement, since terrorism as a tactic cannot be “defeated.”

Yet it is equally unlikely that the more peaceful engagement envisioned by the Chicago Council Report will work in these circumstances. Certainly, religion should be recognized as an important factor in international politics. The U.S. government would also do well to improve its understanding of religion in world affairs, and diplomats and others should continue to interact with religious leaders abroad. Any such interactions, however, will pale before the worldwide attention sparked by continued use of the “kinetic” option. The Report’s proposal therefore comes off sounding like the Bush administration’s much ballyhooed, but ineffective, public diplomacy campaign toward the “Arab street”—that is, a public relations fig-leaf, this time carried out by representatives of American civil society.

Worse, the suggestion that the government, in the form of the NSC, should “coordinate” American civil society’s engagement is more than futile. If implemented, it could dim one of the few bright spots in American relations with the Muslim world: our civil society’s rich, pre-existing, and—most importantly— autonomous engagement with the Muslim world. A few examples of this engagement include the University of Notre Dame’s invitation to Tariq Ramadan to join their faculty; the work of left-leaning NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch, which report on human rights violations by all sides in the Israel/Palestine conflict; and the efforts of right-leaning NGOs, such as C-FAM and Brigham Young University’s World Family Policy Center, which work with Muslim scholars and diplomats to promote their own, admittedly debatable, vision of “family values.”

These diverse interactions are already put at risk by the government’s continuing overt and covert military operations, occurring potentially anywhere in the world, against people whom our security agencies unilaterally (and, given their track record on related issues, often wrongly) label as “terrorists.” The Chicago Report heightens that risk, imagining civil society “partners” “coordinated” by the NSC, which would be charged with “identifying . . ., training, and tasking the appropriate American interlocutors/sectors” for specific “assignment[s],” and highlighting the “responsibility of nonstate, nongovernmental actors” to ensure “widespread ‘ownership’ of a national engagement effort.” If implemented, this vision would destroy what the Report ostensibly values—the “unequivocally indigenous and autonomous” networks of engagement that already exist. It would raise the specter that any civil society interaction with religious communities may be directed by the NSC, and usher in the “securitization of religion.”

(In an earlier post, William Inboden cavils that the term “securitization of religion” inappropriately mixes national security issues with one of the supposed causes of the economic crisis. In fact, the phrasing is apt, given how the American security establishment has misjudged, misplayed, or just plain missed important developments in recent international politics—in a way reminiscent of the shortsightedness with which our financial wizards misjudged the securitization of financial instruments. Inboden also suggests that any NSC role would be largely administrative. Yet, even if true—and the terms of the Execute Order suggest otherwise—appearances matter very much in this area, particularly when Islam is clearly targeted as the primary religion for “engagement.”)

In many countries, Muslim civic and community leaders already challenge secular or Islamist authoritarians. As Nakhleh also states, “vast majorities of Muslims . . . abhor violence and the killing of innocent civilians.” For these groups, interactions with American NGOs potentially or actually coordinated by the NSC would be poisonous—even if many Muslims long for an end to dictatorial regimes. In fact, few actions could more quickly puncture the credibility and erode the influence of indigenous democrats. Even on its own terms, the Report’s proposal is illogical: its central idea is to “empower” majorities to improve their societies “from below,” yet the source is to come “from above”—from American civil society, under the watchful eye of the NSC.

Nothing inherent in Islam prevents democracies from developing and economies from flourishing. Of course, democracies in Muslim countries will differ from America’s, not least with regard to ideas of religious freedom. Many Americans will disagree with the laws and policies of Muslim democracies. But, as Nakhleh points out, Islamic political parties in Turkey, Morocco, Malaysia, and Indonesia have won power democratically and have proceeded to advocate for civil rights, gender equality, and religious freedom. By contrast, a number of Islamic dictatorships continue to be heavily supported by the U.S.

But we should not be deluded into thinking that bringing development or democracy to the Islamic world will necessarily make for harmonious relations between Muslim countries and the U.S. To take just one example, the Iranian democracy movement—like the Ahmadinejad regime—favors Iran’s nuclear program. Nor is it the case that development, or even democracy, will necessarily allow peaceful Muslim majorities to “face down” extremists. If by “face down” one means extirpate them, the experience of developed and democratic countries, where indigenous extremists still exist, suggests that this is impossible. If by “face down” we mean marginalizing them, this has, to a large extent, already been accomplished in the Muslim ummah.

Why, then, do the extremists seem to dominate the airwaves? Why, in particular, when there are so many other peaceful civic organizations working on myriad issues in most Islamic countries—as the Task Force Report itself recognizes? The primary and perverse reason is that the U.S. foreign policies noted above create popular anger and support the perception that the U.S. is anti-Islamic. This lends credence to radical voices in the Muslim world. Only a tiny fraction of those voices or their listeners in fact take action, let alone violent action, let alone against Americans, let alone in the U.S. itself. But on those rare cases that they do, what Colin Powell has termed our “terror-industrial complex” leaps into action.  By throwing the full weight of the Presidency and the national security establishment against common criminals and obvious losers—men literally holed up in caves and deluded twenty-something students—we vastly exaggerate their importance, distort our view of the Muslim world, and harm ourselves. Unfortunately, the Report itself contributes to this threat inflation with its loose and inaccurate talk of “vast terror networks” and “extreme religious views” empowered by globalization.

If the Chicago Report is really only a pragmatic effort to implement Cairo’s ideas, and especially the improvement of U.S. relations with Muslim communities, its best approach would have been to boldly advocate changes to the key policies noted above—namely, an unending and misguided “war” on terror, which distorts key aspects of foreign and domestic policy, and a mistaken belief that American and Israeli national security interests coincide. It might also have behooved such a distinguished panel to question some of the assumptions of the “war on terror,” starting with the quasi-religious basis on which it is being waged: in apocalyptic language, against unseen and eternal devils, with nary a thought to its effects.

Another idea would be to balance the emphasis on Islamic extremists with more coverage of those who use violence in the name of other religions—Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, for example. Of course, these extremists may not pose a threat to the U.S. (though if the U.S. became serious about promoting a two-state solution in the Middle East, some of them unfortunately might). Yet, highlighting their violence in proportionate measure with that of Muslim extremists would go far in aiding the report’s legitimacy in Muslim eyes.

At a minimum, the Chicago Council Task Force should rethink its conception of government management of civil society engagement with religious communities overseas. There is every reason to treat religion as a key issue in international politics. Indeed, our government should learn as much as possible about religion as an important political force, and Americans’ interactions with the Muslim world should be encouraged. But suggesting that the NSC should in some way manage civil society’s interactions with religious groups abroad risks harming the many “authentic” interactions that already occur and retarding the indigenous development of Muslim democracies.

The views below are based on discussions I had with other Task Force members during the writing phase of the report.  They are also colored by my experience in government, my familiarity with the thinking of some folks at the NSC on the topic of engagement, and my conversations over the last decade with hundreds of Islamic activists, NGO-types, Islamic political party officials, and Muslim thinkers across dozens of countries.  I concur with the argument made in the report, and in President Obama’s Cairo speech, that engaging religious organizations across the world would empower them to improve their societies from below and to serve the common good of their compatriots, and would also, indirectly, serve the interests of the United States, broadly defined.  In order for this approach to succeed, however, it must be pragmatic, nuanced, and not terribly doctrinaire or ideological.  Speaking from the perspective of the Muslim world, which has been my focus in the government for almost two decades, I want to emphasize that many Muslims are suspicious of this effort, particularly because of their experience with our policies since 9/11.  Many Muslims, however, have been elated by President Obama’s approach to engagement, and are eagerly interested in improving their relations with the U.S., knowing full well that the process will be fraught with challenges.

On a recent trip to a Gulf Arab country, I was gratified and pleasantly surprised by the response to the President’s focus on engaging Muslim “communities,” as opposed to “regimes,” and to the broad scope of such an engagement strategy—in economics, education, health, energy, rule of law, political reform, women’s rights and opportunities, entrepreneurship, and human rights.  Following the talk on engagement that I gave in that country, one person said, “Now that your government realizes that vast majorities of Muslims do not support radicalism and violence, let’s work together to remove the suspicion, anxiety, and mistrust from our relations and create better futures for both of us.”  In fact, I mentioned the Chicago Council’s report on this issue as an example of how the private sector in the U.S. is engaged in the process.  One thing that was apparent during the Q&A period was the audience’s interest in having a broad swath of engagement strategies across the U.S. government, as compared to the traditional role of the State Department and USAID.  The discussion focused on three points, which, in their view, underpinned the President’s Cairo speech:  that Muslim disagreements with the United States have been driven by specific policies, not values of good governance; that the low standing of the United States in Muslim countries, which has been largely driven by perceptions of a “war against Islam” in the previous administration, is reversible; and that effective U.S. engagement must be balanced, pragmatic, and based on mutual respect, justice, and fairness.

The report, I think, has succeeded in highlighting the rise of religions as a driver of the policy of states and non-state actors; in explaining why the U.S. should engage religious groups; and in delineating the who, how, and what to engage.  A few commentators on this blog have made important points about religious freedom, secularism, and the role of religion in the public sphere.  I view the report, on the other hand, not as a treatise on these issues, but as a pragmatic policy proposal that aims at implementing some of the key themes of the Cairo speech.  Improving the lives of average people through their community organizations by providing better health and education, cleaner water, higher paying jobs, and entrepreneurial opportunities would help empower these communities to seek a different form of government and, ultimately, to have a say in what’s happening in their countries.  Engagement for the common good and for a better life is a sure way to achieve social and civic peace, a more hopeful young generation of men and women, domestic stability through dialogue, and international peace.  Starting the engagement with a frontal advocacy of religious freedom will likely be misunderstood in many Muslim societies and will make many indigenous communities more suspicious of our intentions.

In fact, any talk of religious freedom as a key driver of the new engagement strategy will be rejected outright.  Saudi Arabia will not play if they hear we are pushing for the rights of the Shia minority—neither will Egypt, with its Coptic minority; Malaysia, with its Darul Arqam minority; nor Turkey, with its Alawite minority.  Religious freedom, broadly defined, is a worthy goal that I wholeheartedly support, but it should not drive the proposed engagement policy.  Regimes are already suspicious when they hear U.S. talk about engaging communities vice regimes; they will become doubly suspicious if they think we are trying to empower their minorities, whom they do not trust in the first place.  Some Muslim regimes would welcome our emphasis on majority rights, but not on minority rights.  Islamic political parties themselves—for example, AKP in Turkey, PJD in Morocco, PAS in Malaysia, and PKS in Indonesia—once empowered from below, and now active participants in the political process, would begin to push for civil rights, gender equality, and, yes, religious freedom.  In Indonesia, Nahdaltul Ulama and Muhamadiyya, the world’s largest Islamic NGOs have been pushing for these ideas without being forced to do so from above.

The report does not aspire to be either a definitive document or a theoretical treatise on the linkage between democracy and religious freedom.  Nor is it intended to be a defense of the democratic nature of the American political and social system.  Instead, the report is a set of useful proposals to policymakers in the Obama administration as they endeavor to translate President Obama’s Cairo speech into tangible programs and strategies for engagement.

I would like to offer a few concluding comments:

First, religious communities have emerged all over the world as active participants in the shaping of public policy in their societies. Thus, if the United States and other Western countries plan to pursue initiatives to help those societies improve themselves, they must engage religious communities.  As President Obama and his senior counterterrorism advisor have said both before and since the Christmas Day 2009 and Times Square 2010 failed terrorist plots, U.S. national interest dictates that we engage broader segments of Muslim societies in an effort to delegitimize the radical paradigm and undercut the extremist message of al-Qa’ida and its regional affiliates. Many Muslims agree that in order to undercut the radical ideology of a small minority of extremists, we would need to engage the vast majorities of Muslims who abhor violence and the killing of innocent civilians.  The report affirms this global view without becoming an apologia for a specific U.S. foreign policy.

Second, the report correctly recommends that the United States expand its civilian capacity through the involvement of numerous government departments in engaging the Muslim world, under the strategic direction of the National Security Council.  Whereas USAID and the Department of State have traditionally been the main, and often sole, players in global development projects, building a whole-government approach would mean that such other departments as energy, labor, education, commerce, and justice should also be involved in development projects ranging from education to micro-investment and good governance. The recent appointment of Rashad Hussain, an American Muslim attorney, as Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) is but one example of American Muslims’ involvement in the U.S. government’s outreach to the Muslim world.

Third, engaging the Islamic world would a) serve the national interests of the United States; b) give credible mainstream Islamic organizations a stake in the future of their societies; and c) empower mainstream Muslims to face down the narrow, intolerant worldview of extremists and to offer a more inclusive vision as an alternative.  Religious groups—many of which are indigenous, credible, and influential—are already involved in a myriad of activities at the local level that touch people’s daily lives, including schools, hospitals, relief programs, and social services.  I concur with the report’s statement that “religion should not be viewed only as a problem, but also as a source of creativity, inspiration, and commitment to human flourishing that can and often does provide enormous opportunities.”

Fourth, The challenge of empowering indigenous Muslim communities is global and therefore must be addressed through global partnerships—perhaps including both European countries and a couple of modernizing Muslim countries, such as Turkey and Indonesia. Empowering civil society communities from below is the first step in the process of building a democratic culture conducive to good governance, the rule of law, and the freedoms of expression, association, and religion. To be credible, engagement also must include working with Islamic political parties across the Muslim world, including, for example, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Palestine’s Hamas, Lebanon’s Hizballah, Turkey’s AKP, Morocco’s Justice and Development Party, Jordan’s Islamic Action Front, Kuwait’s Islamic Constitutional Movement, Bahrain’s al-Wifaq, Yemen’s Islah Party, Malaysia’s PAS, Indonesia’s PKS, and Kenya’s Islamic Party.

Fifth, while al-Qa’ida continues to target Western countries as well as recruit potential “jihadists” from those countries, the most effective way to face down, and ultimately defeat, such a threat is by reaching out to the vast majorities of Muslims across the globe. President Obama’s speech and his recent appointment of a distinguished American Muslim as Special Envoy to the OIC reflect his belief that we cannot defeat terrorism by the force of arms alone.  Helping Muslim communities attain their potential and empowering them to serve their societies through tangible initiatives—including economic development, job creation, modern education, new and cheaper sources of energy and, most importantly, clean water—promise to be a strong defense against hate and a promoter of domestic stability and good governance.

“Proselytism” is a form of religious expression with a mind to change another person’s beliefs. Anti-proselytism laws prohibit that sort of behavior. But what sort of behavior are we talking about?

Decent laws and sound moral reasoning exclude trying to change another’s beliefs by force or fraud or where the effort is incompatible with parents’ rightful authority over their children. That sort of thing is not at issue here. Tom Farr’s question is about “win[ning] adherents by persuasion,” not by trickery or by duress or by pied-pipering kids.

Basic components of religious liberty are not at issue either. Sound reasoning and good law protect (to take the phrasing of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 18 ) religious “worship, observance, practice and teaching”—in private and in public, alone or in community—against state interference. These activities constitute “religious expression” if anything does; and any of them could be engaged in, at least partly, for the purpose of converting others. Commonly, they are.

For “proselytizing” rarely involves any sort of explicit “ask” or plea for conversion. I am not sure about Islam, but its expression may have parallels to the universal extension and propositional character of the Christian kerygma: Christ died for everyone’s sins, yours just the same as mine. The greatest missionary this world has ever known did not proselytize by asking people to convert. Saint Paul instead told people how things really are. Or (to paraphrase and to adapt the prologue to Luke’s Gospel), Paul gave his audiences “an orderly theological account of the things which had been accomplished among us, so that they may know the truth and, by knowing the truth, may come to believe it.” People neither then nor now respond very well to hectoring and table-thumping. How would—could—a proselytizer do better than to ask an audience today to listen to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, or to ask them to read of one day in the life of Mother Teresa, or to show them a streaming video of the many Christians who flocked to Port-au-Prince earlier this year.

In any event, the spirit blows where it wills.

The distinguishing feature of proselytizing is an aim that typically supervenes upon “ordinary” religious expression. It is an accompanying mental state, or maybe just the unintended effect of bearing witness to the truth of one’s faith. Proselytizing is not an observable form of distinct behavior, and so anti-proselytizing laws are quixotic and notional, or they are certain to sweep up more elemental religious expressions—teaching, preaching, worship—which are eminently deserving of protection. This is enough to establish that these laws are unjust, and no additional evaluative premises would be needed to establish that they would be deemed unconstitutional in any American court.

No doubt, some missionaries are so aggressive that they need to be restrained by just laws against forcing conversion. But, more often, the problem (where there is one) is that they are annoyingly persistent and self-righteous. These folks should be corrected and ignored; they should not be arrested. Almost all missionaries are guilty of a peculiar Original Sin, namely, they present their own cultural instantiation of the faith—Irish Catholicism, say, or Midwestern evangelicalism—as part and parcel of the gospel. This Original Sin naturally leads to unjustified criticism of local customs and folk traditions which are not incompatible with the faith.

Of course, anti-proselytizing laws are not so vulnerable to criticism as it may seem so far. These laws are a corollary of anti-conversion strictures. Together, they form a coherent matrix much more real than notional, especially where they are supplemented by laws against apostasy. What justification is on offer for the matrix? Proselytizing is often criticized under the generic rubric of “interfering” and even “attacking” other religions, usually indigenous ones honeycombed with folk traditions. What sorts of behavior does the larger criticism refer to? And what are the pertinent norms for judging the validity of that criticism?

I’ll take up the latter question first. John Witte poses it in this way: “How does one craft a legal rule that respects Orthodox, Hindu, Jewish or Traditional groups that tie religious identity not to voluntary choice, but to birth, caste, blood and soil, language and ethnicity?”  The authors of an essay in Rosalind Hackett’s recent collection, Proselytization Revisited, assert that “it seems logically impossible to interpret the principle of religious freedom in a way that is neutral between religions like Islam and Christianity and the traditions of Hindus, Buddhists and Jains” (their emphasis).

The authors are scandalized by this “impossibility.” Should they be?

I think not. Why should we expect the “principle of religious freedom” to be “neutral” about the freedom to talk to others about what is true and what is not true? The “principle of religious freedom” protects “worship” in “groups,” for example. Many religions involve no worship at all and are relentlessly individualistic. Does the thought that religious liberty is therefore unjustly partisan leap to mind? Religious liberty also protects belief. Religions which define themselves otherwise—by ethnicity or place of birth, for example—are not thereby victims of bias.

The core claim circulating in the above quotation is, I think, that “religious freedom” ought to be about “religious identity,” and that it should, then, (somehow) be neutral as to various modes of establishing that “identity.” This is not the law anywhere I know of, and there is little critical support for such a position. One reason for the scarcity of support is that “identity” is not a perspicuous term. It is, in any event, a decidedly non-neutral proposition.

The matrix is also sometimes justified by appeal to norms of fairness—that evangelical religions (such as Islam and Christianity), which claim to be uniquely true, have an unfair advantage in recruiting compared to religions that make no equivalent claim (such as Buddhism and Hinduism).

The appeal of truth is surely different from the appeal of the putatively more vulnerable religions. But it is scarcely apparent which sort of appeal is, all things considered, more, well, appealing. It seems to me that the appeal least likely to win adherents is precisely that the body of teaching is simply true, most especially where (as with Christianity) the truth claims include promises of hard times in this life for believers.

Let’s take a careful look at more developed justifications for the matrix.

We get glimpses of more substantial defenses in such drive-by reports about anti-proselytizers as John Witte’s, which asks, “How does the state balance one community’s right to another person’s or community’s right to be left alone to its traditions?” Tom Farr frames the question in terms of a “right to win adherents by persuasion” balanced against a “right of communities to defend their respective traditions.”

Here is a short but nonetheless packed version (also from the Hackett volume) of these terse verbal signs:

[Attempts] to proselytize are experienced as violations of the integrity of a community. Since ancestral practices are considered to be the common inheritance that holds a community together, any denunciation of them as false religion and idolatry is viewed as an attempt to destroy the social fabric. From this perspective, successful conversions to Christianity and Islam create tears in this social fabric. Religious conversions disintegrate communities and families by drawing individuals away from these ancestral traditions. … [A] stance on non-interference is central to those traditions.

Here we have ample reason for caution before criticizing, for we can see at a glance that important questions about religion, social solidarity, and, perhaps, an acidic sort of individualism are involved.

We are painfully aware of how little we understand about the cultural unity which a political society today requires for fruitful collaboration among its members, a cooperation which cannot be secured solely through the coercive means of law, a cooperation which should not be attempted by state-driven ideologies of collective identity, a cooperation which must include spontaneous willingness to sacrifice one’s interests for the good of others, even at very great cost to oneself. Religion supplies one way to thicken these bonds; a shared and, yes, a stable faith can generate community.

We are also painfully aware of the fragility in many places of peace among different religious groups, and of the special difficulty of sustaining collaboration for common purposes across religious boundaries. Proselytization is in some places a source of such conflict; prohibiting it may be a means of keeping the peace among contending religious groups.

Now, the embeddedness of religion in culture and in social life is an undeniable and, in general, a welcome fact. Pope John Paul II once wrote: “At the heart of every culture lies the attitude man takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence.”

But the late Pope’s observation does not imply approval of any static or closed culture; and, in fact, John Paul II often spoke enthusiastically in favor of a critical theological culture and never uttered a word of approval for any state establishment of religion, even where Catholicism was, or might have been, that religion.

Abdullahi An-Na’im argues that the proselytization question involves an individualistic conception of freedom of religion, which “cannot adequately address the concerns of communities about proselytization and its consequences.” What’s needed, he says, is a “dynamic and creative understanding of collective rights.” I agree that international legal norms of religious liberty and the local constitutional law of many western countries is deficient—perhaps even gravely deficient—when it comes to comprehending and protecting institutional religious activity.

There is a great deal more that could be said about the compact but rich passage I quoted above. Here, I shall make one further comment, and it is a very critical one: If one thinks of religious liberty in the way that the authors of the fuller defense evidently do think of it, then you end up decapitating it. The duty of any political community to respect religious liberty as it is defined in countless constitutional, legal, and, yes, religious documents, and the extension of this duty, even to people whose beliefs and practices are largely false or misguided, is rooted in the basic moral (not legal or social) duty of everyone to seek the truth about reality, including reality’s furthest reaches—which reaches transcend the concerns of the political community itself. The political community’s duty is further rooted in everyone’s moral duty to shape his or her life according to what one judges to be the truth about reality. From here—this foundational ground—one can see straightaway that anti-conversion and anti-proselytizing laws strike at the heart of religious liberty.

From here, you can see, too, that if one thinks that religious liberty attaches to an established social order in which religion plays an important role, and if one credits reports that even peaceful encounters with articulated alternate conceptions of reality are “experiences” of attempted “destruction,” then one might well affirm some putative right to “non-interference.” But then one will have drifted very far from a sound understanding of religious freedom—the understanding on offer in so many authoritative documents—and one will have abandoned its foundations altogether.

* * *

I view my task not as that of winning points in a debate on the grounds of logical or rhetorical argumentation. I concede defeat already. No layperson could ever win a debate with an American law professor, much less with Gerry Bradley.

My task is to complicate the framework and the context of our arguments. In fact, I would like to argue for and against proselytism simultaneously, not because of indecisive avoidance, wanting to both have my cake and eat it too, but because of a recognition of the tension between two goods.

I would like to divide the rationales for and against proselytism into three groups—theological, legal-juridical, and socio-cultural—and to argue both for and against proselytism on each of these grounds.

1) Theological Rationales

I fully acknowledge the religious duty to preach the good news, to proclaim the Gospel.

For some religions at least, certainly for Christianity, this is a duty, an obligation which must be taken very seriously as central to the religion.

But against this religious duty there is the moral obligation, which I must take equally seriously, to respect other versions of the good news, other gospels, which other religious persons, other humans, take equally seriously.

In the case of the Christian Gospel, the mystery of salvation is complicated by the historicity of revelation and of God’s economy of redemption.

Just think of the genealogy of Jesus as it appears in the gospels as being linked directly to Abraham. This clearly reveals that the incarnation is linked to a particular genealogy of the children of Abraham that has nothing to do with other, unrelated ancestries.

Here we are confronting the fundamental theological-philosophical paradox, which becomes evident with the multiple competing universalisms that emerged with the axial revolutions: Jewish, Greek, Confucian, Buddhist, etc.

Every universalism is particularistic and irremediably so.

The mystery of salvation, for a Catholic at least, consists in the fact that the principle “extra ecclesia nulla salus”—or, there is “salvation only through Jesus Christ”—would exclude perhaps as much as 90 percent of humanity from God’s plans of salvation. This remains a mystery of faith and no easy rationalization; not even the Catholic doctrines of natural law and human moral reason can explain the mystery away.

Once one confronts this mystery, theologically, one must acknowledge in full humility that we cannot be sure we understand the ways of God, and that we should be careful in appropriating for ourselves the plans of God for humanity or for creation, even when we affirm our faith in God’s particular historical revelation through Jesus of Nazareth.

2) Legal-Juridical Rationales

I accept and defend the right to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion as inalienable individual rights.

I am willing to concede gladly that this is the first basic modern individual right and the foundation of every other right.

Paradoxically, it emerged precisely out of the wars of religion in early modern Europe, and against the Westphalian principle of cuius regio, eius religio.

The right to exit—to emigrate—then became fundamental. No monarch could coerce his subjects into any particular religion. They had no right to stay in his realm, but they had the right to emigrate. That’s the way Europe solved the problem of religious pluralism—by the ethno-religious cleansing and territorialization of religion.

This is the fundamental inalienable right of every individual: the right to exit, the right to conversion, the right to be born again, which the religious sects brought to the American colonies.

But this individual right cannot be translated into another equally inalienable right—that is, my right to proselytize and to convert others. Individuals may have a right to conversion, which should be legally protected by every state that has signed any of the modern universal declarations of human rights.  But this does not necessarily imply a parallel, juridically enforceable right to proselytize.  The individual’s right to exit his or her religious community does not necessarily entail the right of outsiders to enter that community in order to encourage others to exit.

I have a right to the free exercise of my religion, but this right will inevitably clash with the right of others to the free exercise of their religion(s).

Here I think it is necessary to introduce a distinction between the national legal context, where I would be more reluctant to set clear limits to the right to proselytize, and the global international context of multiple legal-constitutional jurisdictions, in which the right to proselytize would need to be translated into the right to go anywhere in the world and preach my gospel, which bumps into the right of states to control their borders, to control entry and exit.

Indeed, I am not sure that the most adamant defenders of the right to proselytism are willing to defend the right of anybody to enter the U.S. and settle here, and therefore the need to demolish the wall we are erecting on our Southern border.

Here we enter into all the difficulties and contradictions of an international human rights regime enforced by sovereign states.

I am adamantly opposed to the principle cuius regio, eius religio: that sovereign states have the right to determine the religion or religions of their subjects. But there is inevitably a need for state regulation of religious pluralism, which, however, will take many different socio-cultural and constitutional forms.

3) Socio-cultural Rationales

The working definition of proselytism we were given—“the effort to win adherents for one’s religious community through persuasion”—itself illustrates the problems internal to the concept of proselytism.

A world of religious communities in which proselytism is a zero sum game—in which my win is your loss—is a recipe for inter-religious conflict on a global scale.

The very definition is based on three problematic presuppositions:

a) That individuals can change religious communities at will, that religious communities are nothing but voluntary associations, confessions or denominations.

Against such a notion, one must remember Hannah Arendt’s discussion of what she called “natal religions,” that is, those religious communities that one enters into through birth. Judaism and Hinduism are such religions.

It is not only that such religions are hardly reconcilable with the right to exit, but that they do not acknowledge the right to enter, to conversion, and therefore have no urge to win adherents, other than through high levels of fertility.

In a similar group of religions one must recognize all those linked to ancestor cults, such as the Asian Confucian religions and Chinese folk religions, but also many African religions, in which kinship obligations binding the living and the dead across generations are central.  Here, to exit means to abandon one’s kinship obligations and solidarity for egoistic individualism.

Even if one acknowledges the individual pursuit of happiness as one of the fundamental modern rights, one of those truths that we may hold as self-evident, and in this context, the search for salvation, for eternal individual happiness, could be understood as an expression of this fundamental right, we should be weary of defining this right in strictly egoistic individualist terms that would be opposed to the duties to my community.

b) That individuals need to choose, to belong to one particular religious community rather than another, rather than being able to belong simultaneously to multiple religious communities or to none at all.

It is like our old binary racial categories: you were either black or white, until the census introduced a monkey wrench into the system by letting people pick ‘all of the above.’

This is not the way Chinese, for instance, tend to think of religion, which is not as a community to which one belongs exclusively. When asked by surveys whether they are Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, etc., Chinese could as easily reply, “all of the above,” as they could, “none.”

Both responses, however, would be, strictly speaking, wrong.

The very notion of belonging to a religious community is not necessarily self-evident.

And this brings into focus the tension between two forms of religious belonging, which, following Max Weber, could be distinguished as:

a) Community cults, to which individuals belong by virtue of their belonging to some territorial, kinship, cultural, or national community;

b) Religious communities, which individuals qua individuals enter in search of salvation or of specifically religious fellowship.

If all of the religious communities in the world were of the second type—that is, voluntary associational communities made up of individuals qua individuals—then the principle of proselytism would present no problem and could easily be generalized.  But the principle of proselytism clearly clashes and is in profound tension with the first type of religious community cults, in which the religious community is coextensive with other, non-religious communitarian principles.

c) That conversion happens through “persuasion,” as a kind of cognitive rational choice process through which individuals weigh the pros and cons of the various alternatives and settle for the one which makes most sense to them.

This is a very problematic definition of the way in which religious conversion, affirmation, or submission (in Islam) phenomenologically happen.  Religious discourses in many traditions often acknowledge such a phenomenological experience in such concepts as those of calling or grace,  according to which we do not so much choose as we may be chosen, we do not grasp so much as we may be grasped by faith and grace.

In any case, the experience of religious conversion is often in tension with the utilitarian, liberal, individualist notion of rational choice, as much as with a Habermasian conception of a world of undistorted communication, in which the better—and more rational—argument ought to prevail.

The sociological reality is one of irremediable embeddedness of both individuals and communities, one of the particulate historicity of religious communities, inevitably tied to particular cultures and conceptions of the world.

Moreover, the histories of colonialism, of civilizational conflicts, of imperialism, are not easily erasable, and these form the context within which today’s practices of proselytism take place.

In our global context, we need to come to terms with the irremediable plurality of world religions and human cultures.

We ought to develop a respect for this plurality, especially for the most endangered species, rather than aspiring through proselytism to a single universal religion or culture.

Ultimately, it all depends on how we define “persuasion.” If one could envision a form of persuasion that would be devoid of any force, of any unequal relation or power, of any subjection, of any seduction, of any non-rational factor…. Of course, such a persuasion is unreal.

I can embrace the proselytism of Mother Teresa, the one who bears witness to one’s faith by serving the most disprivileged. But, without any ulterior motives?

We could aspire to a system of global denominationalism, in which everybody is ready to affirm with Mother Teresa: “I love all religions, but I am in love with my own.” I could embrace a proselytism which is compatible with such an attitude.

In my opening post, I suggested that a second assumption underpinning the Chicago Report is that American foreign policy should more effectively engage with and support the “good Muslims.” In this post, I seek once again to consider the coherence and plausibility of this prescription. Is it really true that you can read people’s political behavior from their religion or culture? Again, as Mamdani asks:

Could it be that a person who takes his or her religion literally is a potential terrorist? And only someone who thinks of the text as not literal, but as metaphorical or figurative, is better suited to civic life and the tolerance it calls for? How, one may ask, does the literal reading of religious texts translate into hijacking, murder, and terrorism?

This raises the complex question of what, in the words of Saba Mahmood, “constitutes religion and a proper religious subjectivity in the modern world,” and how such a conception relates to the language and normative structure of religious freedom in international law and politics. It is not possible here to address the details of such a complex set of issues, but let me offer just a couple of observations and lines of inquiry for future thought and discussion.

A useful place to start is Kant’s essay on Toward Perpetual Peace, discussed at the start of these comments. Recall that Kant’s chief complaint with the “sorry comforters”—Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel—was that their versions of natural law lacked all “legal force” in restraining the belligerence of nation states. For Kant, law is not just a vocabulary of governmental technique or an instrument of governance. It is, rather, a political project to bring about what he enigmatically termed the “Kingdom of Ends.” To end war, one must eradicate the warlike disposition of nations and, indeed, of mankind itself. Perpetual peace can thus only be achieved in the form of a world republican federation governed by a law of global justice, what Kant called “cosmopolitan right.”

Herein lies Kant’s suggested path to Enlightenment—the throwing off of the self-imposed immaturity that comes from alien guidance by, inter alia, religion and recognition of the dormant inner “moral disposition” through which man can “eventually become the master of the evil principle within him.” Koskenniemi describes this idea of freedom as follows:

For Kant, freedom was not the indiscriminate realization of one’s passions or interests—indeed, this was immaturity…. Freedom could exist only as looking beyond such contingencies. To be free was to make one’s will harmonious to universal reason—a reason according to which one should always act in accordance with what one can simultaneously will as universal law. Where enlightenment lay in reliance on reason, freedom consisted in the acceptance of what reason dictated as duty.

It is on account of this uniquely “rational” normative understanding of freedom—“acceptance of what reason dictated as duty”—that Kant criticized the early modern natural lawyers.

As Ian Hunter has argued, Kant’s principles of morality and right are grounded in a comprehensive “Christian-Platonic anthropology deeply embedded in the history of north-German Protestant university metaphysics.” On the basis of this metaphysical view, Kant characterized man as “the empirical harbinger of a pure rational being”—homo noumenon—who, by intelligizing the pure forms of experience and governing the will by thinking the idea, or form, of its law, was “supposed to free himself from the ‘sensuous inclinations’ that otherwise tie the will of empirical man (homo phenomenon) to extrinsic ends or goods.” This metaphysical account of human rationality provides the basis for the two central tenets of Kant’s moral philosophy:

These are his conception of the good will as one that transcends distracting sensuous inclinations by spontaneously conforming itself to pure reason’s intellection of the idea of the law; and his conception of moral community as the ‘kingdom of ends in themselves’ that is formed when the universe of rational beings is joined through transparent reciprocal willing in accordance with this intellection.

There are two points I wish to make here regarding this metaphysical view and its projection into Kant’s notions of an “ideal republic” and the ius gentium. The first concerns the type of constraint that is imposed on religion by Kant’s notion of the good will. This is a recognizably Protestant understanding of religion in terms of interiorized (or “privatized”) and “freely chosen” conscience, or belief. In this particular historically contingent form, we see the unique double-bind that, today, still defines the secular liberal notion of religious freedom as an individual right.

As Saba Mahmood suggests, “contrary to the ideological self-understanding of secularism (as the doctrinal separation of religion and state), secularism has historically entailed the regulation and re-formation of religious beliefs, doctrines and practices to yield a particular normative conception of religion (that is largely Protestant Christian in its contours).” John Locke thus justified his theory of the right to freedom of conscience by the Protestant argument that conscience was directly bound to obey and follow God and not men; a theory of “the free and at the same time unfree conscience.”

Such premises in turn provide the defining ideas of the liberal state: neutrality and a putative public/private divide. Religion is seen as being separated from the state and “privatized,” that is, removed to a private, intimate sphere. This leaves a “neutral” public sphere that seeks to maintain its neutrality through rigorous commitment to a scheme of individual rights. The state may thus have no cultural or religious projects, or, indeed, any collective goals of its own, beyond the protection of the liberty and security of its citizens.

This view of religion and religious freedom imposes significant constraints on both the individual and the state. The individual must restrain her will according to the law of universal reason by transcending any “distracting sensuous inclinations” and by containing her religion to the private sphere of conscience or belief. The state, for its part, must remain “neutral” between all religions and beliefs, and between religion and non-religion, by both rigorously protecting the neutrality of its public sphere and not interfering in the (private) autonomous sphere of conscience and belief.

Again, as Mahmood observes, the secular state in this way has not simply cordoned off religion from its regulatory ambitions, but sought to remake it through the agency of the law—a remaking “shot through with tensions and paradoxes.”  In this respect, the process of democratic self-government and the space of public debate can be seen as a space, not simply of expression and rational deliberation, but of formation, in which “coercive, regulatory, and rhetorical power is necessary in order to produce the right kind of citizen subject who can inhabit the norms of a liberal democratic polity” (my emphasis).

The best extant illustration of this liberal double-bind is, of course, the Religion Clauses in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibit the “establishment” of religion while at the same time protecting its “free exercise.” These two notions are—both normatively and historically—deeply intertwined. The state can only maintain its neutrality and duty of non-interference if the individuals subject to the constitutional order both accept the form of separation mediated by the public/private divide and understand their right to free exercise of religion in the rational, protestant terms (as private belief or conscience) that I have described.

It is this deep tension within liberal theory itself that I believe underlies what is arguably the most interesting aspect of the Chicago Report: the unresolved disagreement between members of the Task Force as to whether the Establishment Clause “impose[s] constraints on the means that the United States may choose to pursue” in engaging religious communities abroad. For one group (let’s call them the “Kantians”), the clause “should be understood to constrain the manner in which the United States pursues its foreign policy objectives” in engaging religion and religious communities abroad. For the opposing group (let’s call them the “new natural lawyers”), the primary purpose of American foreign policy is “to defend and pursue the nation’s vital interests abroad.” Thus:

As this report abundantly indicates, ours is a world highly influenced by religious actors and ideas, for good or ill. Accordingly, we believe that in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary … no administration should impose constraints on American foreign policy that are imagined to derive from the Establishment Clause…. Any further interpretation of the Establishment Clause on this issue will inevitably restrict American flexibility in implementing vital programs involving diplomatic counterterrorism and the promotion of democracy and civil society.

This is an impasse which beautifully illustrates several dimensions of Kant’s critique of early modern natural law. For the Kantians, the Establishment Clause is itself a constitutionally entrenched form of universal reason. There are good reasons, therefore, why it should, in principle, constrain all action by the U.S. government, whether at home or abroad. In this respect, Kant was correct—the inner moral law imposes significant constraints on us, on the state, and on the internal and external rights and duties of the state as a member of an international community of states. The difficulty is that, as a matter of socio-political reality, the Kantian view rests on certain contingent presuppositions regarding what constitutes a proper religious subjectivity for autonomous agents in the liberal state. Both within and outside of the United States, there is a widening gap between this normative conception of right and factual reality.

Within the U.S., the increasing presence and influence of the Christian Right and evangelical movements in the public sphere and in policy-making generally, and a corresponding rise in governmental entanglement with domestic religious groups, are radically reconfiguring and putting strain on the historical legal understanding of the public/private divide and the “non-establishment” norm.  At the same time, religious groups are exerting ever increasing influence in U.S. foreign policy-making itself.

Consider, for example, the following instances.

• The impetus behind the enactment of IRFA: it is widely acknowledged that the domestic political pressure to “remoralize” U.S. foreign policy and enact IRFA came from conservative Christian and evangelical groups concerned about the persecution of Christians worldwide.
• The pressure exerted on the Clinton and Bush administrations to take action in Sudan and to term the violence in Darfur as “genocide”: the most observable factor in U.S. engagement in Sudan has been the long-standing pressure by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), a coalition of groups representing fifty-one denominations, 45,000 churches, and a membership of over fifty million people.
• The pressure exerted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to support Israel and Israeli policies in the Middle East, including in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Outside the U.S.—and Euro-Atlantic modernity in general—it is sufficient to note that religion and state have entirely different historical configurations, and that religious identities define differences both between majority and minority groups and between entirely different ways of life. Non-Western religious traditions such as Islam, for one, do not make a distinction between the secular and the sacred, or, as in the case of Hinduism, they might hierarchically subsume the secular under the sacred. As Charles Taylor has observed, viewed from a non-Western perspective, the right to religious freedom in international law therefore appears inextricably linked to distinctly Christian origins—either to a quasi-religious form of post-Enlightenment Deism or to the political rise of Western secularism, and, in either case, as a form of foreign and imperial imposition. Indeed, this problem is more acute in the case of secular liberalism in its “Establishment Clause” form, which, once unmoored from Western secularism and imported into comprehensively religious societies, “understandably comes across as the imposition of one metaphysical view over others, and an alien one at that.”

Given this internal and external socio-political reality, the position of the Kantians seems hopelessly utopian, even dangerously naive. While the liberal wing of the U.S. Supreme Court can try valiantly to hold the line domestically in a still majority protestant—but rapidly changing and diversifying—society, the international situation in the post-September 11 context appears to raise far more urgent and far-reaching problems of political governance. This is the dominant issue for the new natural lawyers. Like the formal notion of sovereignty in international law discussed before, the formal legal constraints imposed by the Establishment Clause seem at once over- and under-restrictive: over-restrictive because they prevent the U.S. from engaging good Muslim communities in the promotion of human rights, democracy, and the values of civil society; and under-restrictive because, while it is “unrealistic and insensitive to insist that our Establishment Clause should be adopted by other countries without regard to their differing political and cultural circumstances … [all the same,] non-establishment norms facilitate a country’s development of religious tolerance, political stability, and other characteristics essential to a well-functioning liberal democracy.”

To summarize the position: we should not be constrained by the Establishment Clause because our vital interests demand smart strategic action and engagement which should be exercised (paradoxically) to encourage them to internalize the normative constraints of non-establishment. Our long-term security can be ensured only if we effectively change the identity of Muslims and Muslim communities by enlightening them as to the nature and demands of modernity. In the face of this imperative, the secular constraints imposed by the Establishment Clause may be, as Winni Sullivan puts it, “good policy at home,” but they should not limit our flexibility of action and engagement abroad as we advance our “more serious and reasoned” efforts to educate Muslim communities regarding the natural causation between non-establishment norms and natural social ends (religious tolerance, political stability, and liberal democracy).

In presuming that the autonomous subject (whether the individual or the state) envisaged by Kant in his Perpetual Peace is the product of, as opposed to a precondition for, secular liberal constitutionalism, the Chicago Report again reveals ignorance not so much of the role of religion in world affairs as of history and, in particular, of liberalism’s emergence from particular, historically contingent conceptions of rationality and religious subjectivity internal to Western Christianity.

This leads to my second observation on Kant’s cosmopolitanism and his derivation of a pure norm of right from man’s “rational being.” Given the regional character of Kant’s view—not only to but within Europe, and to a local branch of Protestant German metaphysical philosophy at that—it is difficult to see how this account of universal reason could form the basis of a global normative order, able to harmonize rival European and non-European cultural and political metaphysics.

As Ian Hunter has observed, unlike the sorry comforters who acted as juris consults to historical states, the Kantian political adviser (or “moral politician”), who “oversees the transformation of the maxim’s of state prudence into the cosmopolitan principle of justice,” could not in fact engage the interests of the territorial prince. This was because “the advice he had to offer—‘Convert your own state into a rational republican community and then amalgamate it with a world republic or federation of republics’—was not given in a political capacity or persona; neither was it addressed to a political personage: the Prussian prince or political class.”

Hunter proceeds to note that, by comparison with the “territorial construction of jurisdiction and the European localization of the law of nations” found in Pufendorf and Vattel, the “global spatialisation of justice in Kantian philosophical international law initially had no direct anchorage in a concrete political and juridical order.” But today, two centuries later, that has changed. Kant’s regional political metaphysics is now “tied to the interests of a different national philosophical clerisy … [and today has] a de facto anchorage: namely, in the global projection of United States power and culture.” On this premise, an outlaw state (e.g., Iraq) as much as rogue individuals (e.g., radical extremists) are unjust by definition in relation to the universal conception of justice constituting international law, and may thus be subject to military sanction in the name of the universal community.

In this move, the moral politician becomes himself a sorry comforter, a political moralist now acting as juris consult to a “global hegemon intent on projecting its own politics and culture as ‘universal’” in a way that turns Kant’s theory of cosmopolitan law into an instrumental project of technical governance and control. If correct, the real challenge that confronts us is whether it may be possible to recover the non-instrumental dimensions of Kant’s project of freedom without necessarily adopting the historically and culturally contingent aspects of his metaphysical philosophy.

In this respect, the significance of Kant’s ideal of the moral politician lies in the notion that principles of right (the communal will of a rational community) are necessary conditions for a political project which seeks to reconcile national self-interest with a pacific cosmopolitan legal order. Such a project requires both political contestation and the use of critical judgment, which are incapable of being derived from instrumental reason, and which each must encompass the perspective of the whole (the ideal of the Kingdom of Ends). For Koskenniemi, this constitutes a project of freedom in two distinct senses:

First, it holds political judgement open to different, even opposing, alternatives, highlighting the (legal) accountability of the one who makes the judgement. Second, its concept of legal expertise is not that of instrumental skill but a mindset—a ‘constitutional mindset’—that is constantly measuring any judgement or institutional alternative against the ideal of universality embedded in the very idea of the rule of law (instead of by expert decision).

On this view, the significance of autonomy is not on account of a particular conception of the good (e.g., that personal autonomy is a precondition for the good or just life), but rather on account of a moral/political notion of the person as a “reason-giving” and “reason-receiving” being with a right to justification. Further, the significance of critical judgment lies in the notion that human reason must recognize its own boundaries and finitude, and—with full knowledge, not of ends, but of indeterminacy and contingency—accept the unavoidability of conflicts between plural values.

In contradistinction to the approach adopted by the Chicago Report, to engage seriously in such a project would require a “comparative dialogue across the putative divide between Western and non-Western traditions of critique and practice.” For Saba Mahmood, a dialogue of this kind in turn depends on “making a distinction between the labor entailed in the analysis of a phenomenon and defending our own beliefs in certain secular conceptions of liberty and attachment. The tension between the two is a productive one for the exercise of critique insomuch as it suspends the closure necessary to political action so as to allow thinking to proceed in unaccustomed ways.”

It was a project of engagement along these lines that I believe Barack Obama intended to invoke with his speech in Cairo on 4 June 2009. Indicating both that the U.S. was “respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the rule of law” and that “[n]o system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on another,” his notion of a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world” was premised on “mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.” Obama appeared to understand that, while rationality is a shared human faculty, there are in fact no uncontested external or a priori universal reasons, and that all reasons appeal, at some level of justification, to substantive value commitments which may or may not be shared by persons from divergent religious and cultural backgrounds. (“We can’t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism.”) In such a situation, one may maintain good reasons to regard one’s own faith or religious tradition as true, while at the same time recognizing that the primary duty of reason is one of mutual justification.

The duty of mutual justification necessarily gives rise to a need to listen and to seek to understand the situatedness and subjectivity of others. As Beth Hurd puts it, “one of the great challenges of our time is to engage with and listen to those who enact religious agency and live religious freedom in ways that may not conform to these protestant secular understandings of religion and religious freedom.” This in turn requires a degree of openness to the possibility, if persuaded by convincing arguments, to change one’s own positions and the effort to “suspend the closure necessary to political action so as to allow thinking to proceed in unaccustomed ways,” while seeking new forms of coexistence, reconciliation, and compromise. It is disappointing that the members of the Chicago Council Task Force failed to listen and reflect critically upon even this basic premise in the President’s call for a new beginning:

I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things that we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, ‘Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.’

In my previous post, I suggested that one of the latent assumptions underpinning the Chicago Report is that terrorism is “religion-based,” i.e., that there is a necessary (although unexplained) causal link between Islam and Islamic extremism.  In this post, I seek to consider the coherence and plausibility of this assumption.

Consider again story of the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. In using this example to illustrate American ignorance of the role of religion in acts of terrorism, the Chicago Report is curiously silent about one salient fact: that the U.S. is militarily occupying a Muslim country, which, following its earlier intervention and continuing presence in Afghanistan, it has unilaterally invaded in violation of both the UN Charter and international law. The report is similarly silent on the fact that the U.S. project of “occupation as liberation” violates the occupatio bellica (the international law of occupation), which restrains the occupant’s authority to unilaterally transform Iraq’s political order.

Today, we interpret the refusal of Great Powers in an earlier time to recognize “uncivilized” non-European states as equal sovereigns as a moral failure that vitiated the possibility of an inclusive international legal order. We similarly view colonialism as an imperial attempt to impose a Eurocentric standard of constitutional order on peoples and territories lying outside of the jus publicum Europaeum. The argument that Iraq is an outlaw, or “rogue,” state, whose political order must be transformed in order to bring it within the law of “civilized nations,” is thus eerily familiar. By simply eliding the identity of the state in this formula with that of a “liberal democratic governance regime,” Iraqi sovereignty is held to be irrelevant—in other words, the legal status of Iraq as a sovereign state under international law is denied a priori.

But perhaps the most striking reinterpretation of the preservationist ethos of occupatio bellica in the Iraqi occupation has been the suggested right of the occupier to institute sweeping reforms of the political order in accordance with human rights norms. This assertion gets to the heart of the paradox of “occupation as liberation.” The belligerent occupant’s authority to create a new political order based on democracy and human rights derives from force—that is, from its prior achievement of military control over a subject people. As Nehal Bhuta has argued:

The occupant’s ability to legitimate a new order in place of the old depends on his capacity to engender among the occupied population the belief, post facto, in the legitimacy of the occupant’s ‘naked power’ as a precondition for the new basic norm to which the occupied is subjected.

How to achieve this legitimacy? The project of transformative occupation ineluctably turns on a precarious dialectic of subordination and legitimation: the military occupier has to subordinate before it can effectively legitimate, and the more it tries to subordinate, the harder becomes the legitimation. As recognized in the Chicago Report, force alone, though necessary, is insufficient for the new order to become firmly established. The subjects of occupation must cease their resistance and either acquiesce or consent to the basic norms that define the new order. The desperate struggle for the occupier is to convince the occupied population not to resist its military dictatorship on the promise of the justice and legitimacy of the normative order being instantiated thereby.

The desperate struggle we have witnessed against the U.S. occupation, and the ensuing brutal conflict it has produced, must be understood against the background of this dialectic. If so, might we find reasons for the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra other than a supposed link between Islam and Islamic extremism, and the attempt to get religious communities to “rally around their extremist elements”? As Mahmood Mamdani has argued, rather than seeing politics as an outcome of archaic cultural and religious traditions, should we not perhaps see it as an outcome of contemporary conditions, relations, and conflicts?

Instead of ignoring or dismissing history and politics, especially the history and politics of Western imperialism in the Middle East—a topic conspicuously absent from the Chicago Report—there is a desperate need to situate cultural and religious debates in their historical and political contexts. Viewed in this way, terrorism is not a pre-modern “cultural residue” persistent in modern politics. It is, rather, a distinctly modern construction, which, even when it harnesses tradition or culture, does so in the service of a modern project. It is only if we can begin to understand this history—our history and ourselves within it—that I believe we may start to understand the origins and causes of terrorism and its relationship to issues of culture and religion.

To view international politics and relations in this way, however, requires us first to understand and engage ourselves. If undertaken seriously, an inquiry of this kind would require us to draw the culture of Western imperialism out of the shadows and to explore its deep roots and pervasive implications in multiple domains. This is no easy task. In the vast literature on the role of Enlightenment in the making of Western civilization and its discourse—and I refer here to the rich debates on, for instance, rationalism, secular liberalism, democracy, and individual rights as aspects of Enlightenment—there is a remarkable tendency not to mention the influence of imperialism and settler colonialism.

Might we not see the distinctive contours and shape of the Bush doctrine—preemptive strikes and expansion/projection of force as the path to security—as parallel to the historical experience of European colonists in the Americas and Africa? If so, might not contemporary forms of political Islam and attendant violence be better interpreted in terms of different forms of response and resistance to the colonial condition? Recently, Nir Rosen made this point in the following terms:

[If the objective is to stop acts of terrorism, then stop] supporting dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and elsewhere. Stop supporting the Pakistani dictatorship or quasi-dictatorship. Stop supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Be perceived as a fair player in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Stop killing Muslims and Muslims will not want to kill you.

However one views such arguments, they are not to be found in the Chicago Report. If they were there, the easy assumption of the legitimacy (and, presumably, the legality) of killing or capturing “radical Muslim extremists” would need to be comprehensively revisited.

Even a cursory review of U.S. foreign policy in the region over the last thirty years seriously puts in question the report’s two central policy findings, viz. first, that American “ignorance about the role of religion in world affairs has inhibited smart strategic thinking”; and second, that the imperative of U.S. foreign policy is therefore to “engage religious communities abroad.”  Was it not President Reagan who in 1985 “constructively engaged” the mujahideen in Afghanistan, calling them “the moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers”? Looking back, we can appreciate today how effectively U.S. foreign policy was able to harness one version of political Islam to the cause of armed struggle (“holy war”) against the Soviet Union and, following the Iranian revolution against the Western-backed Shah, to convert a religious schism between Sunni and Shia Islam into a political schism. (Tellingly, the report attributes this schism to the “volatility and instability produced by the rise of Al Qaeda, the terrorist attacks on the United States, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which created the first-ever Arab, Shia-governed state.” Myopia of this kind is illustrative, not of ignorance regarding “the role of religion in world affairs,” but simply of history.)

The war in Afghanistan killed more than a million Afghans, turned one third of the Afghan population into refugees, forced the abandonment of more than half of the country’s farming villages (due to aerial bombardment), and ensured the complete collapse of the economy. Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. provided $2-3 billion in weapons (65,000 tons of arms per annum by 1987) and supplies through the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (ISI) as part of the largest U.S. covert action program since the end of the Second World War. Notably, the CIA and the Pentagon worked with the ISI to create a network of deeni madrasas (religious schools) in Pakistan to train legions of young men to join the ranks of the mujahideen.

During this period, militant religio-political groups and madrasas proliferated in Pakistan. By the early 2000s, there were 58 registered religious political parties and 24 armed religious militias in the country. As is often observed, many of these past recipients of U.S. support and engagement are today’s “bad Muslims,” described in the Chicago Report as those responsible for religion-based terrorism and thus constituting legitimate targets for elimination. This history too, and its explanatory potential for today’s patterns and matrices of political violence in the region, is completely absent from the Chicago Council’s narrative and imaginary of violent Muslim extremism, i.e., any notion that contemporary fundamentalism is in fact a distinctly modern project that seeks to unleash terror in the name of liberation.

The point is that U.S. engagement with religious communities for specified strategic ends is hardly new and, far from exhibiting ignorance about the role of religion in world affairs, suggests instead a high level of skill and understanding in harnessing the power and influence of religion in the lives of the people in the region.  All that has changed in our time are the strategic ends. Now that the Cold War proxy battles have been eclipsed by the tasks of transformative occupation and transitional administration, the challenge is for “religious communities to play even greater roles in the positive transformation of their societies” and for the U.S. to foster and channel “vital and autonomous religious agency.” As Winni Sullivan observes, this time, the man for the job of projecting a softer version of American power and influence is not the CIA or the Special Forces, but the National Security Council, which “will serve as the guardian and the definer of the strategic parameters of engagement.” Beth Hurd refers to this in her companion piece as the “projection of American power through the global securitization of religion.”

Sorry comforters indeed.

Read Part III of “‘Sorry comforters’ and the new Natural Law” here.

I read the Chicago Council Task Force Report, “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy,” as a student of the history and politics of international law. From this perspective, the report evokes Immanuel Kant’s famous denunciation of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel in his 1795 essay Toward Perpetual Peace as the “sorry comforters” of the law of nations. For Kant, the principles and doctrines of the early modern natural lawyers not only lacked all “legal force” in restraining the belligerence of nation states, but, by appropriating the voice of international legality to the interests of power rather than right, they were ultimately apologists for such belligerence. Kant accordingly denounced these juristic advisers to historical states as “political moralists,” who, by basing their conceptions of justice on the political governance of conflicting interests in an attempt to humanize relations between warring nation-states, subordinated principles to ends and became thereby accomplices to war, imperialism, and colonialism.

As Martti Koskenniemi has recently argued, the perspective of the political moralist is one of strategic action and rational/managerial control. The ends are not called into question having already been received from natural law—the normative framework guiding and limiting sovereign action is in place. Rather, the only question is one of means: how most effectively and accurately to reach the targeted audience; whether compliance is best achieved with sticks or carrots, hard coercion or soft power; which techniques of governance or “engagement” to employ in order to achieve the necessary ends (self-preservation, security, social peace)? Accordingly, if force is to be used, it must be compatible with and in the service of future peace and security. This turns political judgment into an exercise of technical skill (politics as technē), assuming full knowledge of what there is to comply with.

The degree of instrumentalism of this kind in the report is breathtaking. On the basis that “[r]eligion—though its motivating ideas and the mobilizing power of its institutions—is a driver of politics in its own right,” we are told that today’s challenge is to “isolate those that invoke the sacred to sow violence and confusion,” while at the same time to “better understand and respond to religiously inspired actors and events in a way that supports those doing good.” The United States should “avoid trying to change religious societies through direct action or to promote an uncompromising secular alternative,” as these approaches would “likely backfire with dangerous consequences” (presumably because they will be, or have already been, ineffective, or come at too high a cost, or both). Rather, the U.S. should adopt “an indirect approach that builds, cultivates, and relies upon large networks and partnerships—which will vary by degree—with religious communities.” This new effort to engage religious communities “must be broad and deep” and should be directed by the National Security Council, an ambassador to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (preferably a “distinguished American Muslim”), and “ambassadors to countries where religion plays a significant role.”

From such a policy perspective, the problem with international law—the system of formal rules and customs existing between sovereign states—is that it is unable to achieve peace and security under the conditions of globalization. This critique has had two main strands since the end of the Cold War in 1989 and has become more starkly apparent in post-September 11 debates concerning the role of law in international relations. First, the disaggregating forces of globalization and the burgeoning role of subjects apart from states (individuals; peoples; nations; minorities; religious, ethnic, and linguistic communities; non-state terrorist groups) put in question the state-centrism of the Westphalian international system. The anachronism of the old law of nations must therefore give way to a new Natural Law of global justice. Second, traditional notions of state sovereignty seem at once too broad and too narrow: too broad because they fail to encompass the claims of, and prevent outside engagement with, non-state actors—both good (religious and ethnic communities, as well as civil society actors more broadly) and bad (terrorist organizations and their sponsors); and too narrow because they fail to respond to global threats (terrorist groups and ideologies operating within and beyond territorially defined nation-states) and opportunities (religious and other communities existing within and beyond traditional nation-state boundaries).

What is needed then is a managerial vocabulary, not about sovereignty or formal rules, but rather above sovereignty and about the objectives, values, and interests presumed to lie behind and override the formal validity of sovereignty and existing international legal rules. The challenge for the political moralist is how most effectively to use coercion and other forms of state power to achieve compliance. This is best done through the language of legitimacy deployed skillfully in the name of natural social ends (peace, security, human rights) in a way that neither relies on moral principle nor is frustrated by formal legal rules. By avoiding the twin perils of moralism and formalism, the policy analyst can in this way both avoid marginalization and sound convincing to those in power. The Prince will thus be told: the effectiveness of “hard force” (military action, drone strikes, indefinite detention) might be undermined if he does not also use “soft power” (informal pressure and persuasion through discussion, assistance, reporting, engagement) to achieve a degree of consensus in target communities to give his actions legitimacy.

The two critiques mentioned above define the analytical logic of the Chicago Report. The legitimacy of the use of force (and presumably its legality as well, although this is not expressly stated) by the U.S. and its allies against terrorist and insurgent groups is simply assumed. A “more serious and thoughtful engagement with religion across a host of issues and actors” is thus necessary because, otherwise, “U.S. foreign policy will miss important opportunities,” will be “less capable of waging successful counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan,” and will “undermine our ability to protect citizens from violence perpetrated by religious extremists.” The real challenge is “to marginalize religious extremists, not religion.” The strategy proposed in the report is thus to continue to kill religious extremists while simultaneously engaging Muslim communities through all possible bilateral and multilateral means—through, e.g., the machinery brought into existence by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA) or international organizations such as the UN and its specialized agencies. The aim of this “more serious and thoughtful” engagement is accordingly to articulate religious freedom “in a way that is not viewed as imperialism, but as a means to support religious agency to undermine religion-based terrorism and promote stable democracy” (my emphasis).

There are two latent and interrelated assumptions underpinning this proposed strategy. The first is that terrorism is “religion-based,” i.e., that there is a necessary (although unexplained) causal link between Islam and Islamic extremism. But as Winni Sullivan points out in her companion piece, “for a report about religion there is not much religion in this report.” Rather, the report opens with a dramatic retelling of Al Qaeda’s bombing in 2006 of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, apparently in an effort to foment civil war between Shia and Sunni groups, who, it was hoped, would “rally around their extremist elements” in the wake of the destruction of one of the two holiest sites in Shia Islam. The report tells us that in this moment, “AQI had spectacularly thrust a religiously laced dagger into the heart of Iraq,” but that the U.S. government “completely missed its significance” because it had a “blind spot.” And what was this blind spot exactly?

It would not be the first time that ignorance about the role of religion in world affairs has inhibited smart strategic thinking, whether in the deployment of foreign aid, relationship building with other nations, or the tackling of transnational challenges.

I shall return to this point shortly.

The second latent assumption, as Mahmood Mamdani has argued in a different context, is that the world can be divided roughly in two. There are the moderns and the premoderns: the former are creative makers of their own culture, who can rationally distinguish and separate the good from the bad in their culture and religion; whereas the latter are born into, and are thus prisoners of, their culture and religion, which inescapably determine their identity and politics. The aim of much post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy has been to identify with the former group and to encourage them to confront and contain the latter group in the hope of fomenting a civil war within the Islamic world. This war is to be fought by good Muslims, who accept the basic precepts of modernity (e.g., secular liberal notions of religion as belonging in the “private sphere,” and religious texts as to be understood only metaphorically or figuratively), against bad Muslims, who habitually obey founding religious texts, which thus dictate all aspects of their politics and behavior, and who irrationally bring religion into the public sphere.

Something like this, I believe, is the pretext for the Chicago Report’s call for a renewed, smarter strategy. The only way to deal with the bad Muslims, and the serious security threat that they pose, is to continue with external military intervention (the foreign policy objective of a “global war on terrorism,” adopted by Republican and Democratic administrations alike). At the same time, American security crucially depends on more effective engagement with, and support for, the good Muslims, not only to save them from the extremists but also to create stable, peaceful, and cooperative partners in a strategically and geopolitically vital part of the world.

Both of these assumptions are open to serious question; in my subsequent two posts, I will consider each in turn.

Read Part II of “‘Sorry comforters’ and the new Natural Law” here, and Part III, here.

Of course it quickly becomes evident that the term is being used, not in the financial sense, but to describe the potential salience of religion as a factor in American national security policy. And here it seems that these scholars have two overriding and interrelated concerns. First is a concern about the concept of religious freedom—or at least the “protestant-secular understandings of religion and religious freedom” (Hurd) that allegedly animate the Chicago Council Report.  Second is a wariness about the involvement of the United States Government, especially the National Security Council (in Barnett’s words, “Do we really want the National Security Council to become involved in the governance of religion?”), in the regulation of religion or religious groups abroad.

Winnifred Sullivan and Hurd, in particular, seem to interpret the Chicago Council Report as an attempt to construct a narrow version of religious freedom as a jingoistic, American Protestant-secular hegemony grab, with undertones of neo-imperialism (or, “a particularly American style of imperialism,” as Sullivan puts it).  In Hurd’s words, “Could it be the case that American exceptionalism and a particular notion of American religious freedom and American power are sacralized in this report…?”  Thus, the Report’s counsel that the American national security community take religion seriously as an interpretive category and engage with religious leaders and communities as important actors is labeled the “securitization of religion.”

But attaching the “-ization” label to something, while possibly effective as a rhetorical device, is less persuasive as a substantive critique. As a thought experiment, consider, for example, a report that encouraged the U.S. foreign policy community to take gender seriously and, in particular, to engage with leaders of women’s communities overseas, or one that encouraged similar analysis and engagement with ethnicity or class. Such propositions might also be labeled the “securitization of gender,” ethnicity, or class. But labels aside, as a general principle, a foreign policy system that accounts for and engages with a broad array of social, cultural, and, yes, religious factors, would also lead to a more sophisticated, sound, and hopefully effective policy framework. Encouraging a nation’s foreign policy to take a more comprehensive and sophisticated approach to the full range of factors (including religion) that animate the human condition is not necessarily ominous; it may in fact be wise.

The expressed wariness concerning the National Security Council’s potential role is puzzling as well. The Chicago Report’s recommendation that the NSC have a lead role in prompting and coordinating U.S. Government engagement with religious actors and promotion of religious freedom reflects not a sinister agenda but a simple bureaucratic reality. The NSC’s role is to work across the U.S. Government to ensure that presidential priorities are implemented and that the activities of the diverse government agencies are coordinated. Given the disparate missions, resources, capabilities, and cultures of various government departments and agencies, the only possible way to ensure that a new issue receives sufficient attention and implementation is to have the NSC assume a lead role. Otherwise the State Department, USAID, Defense Department, Treasury Department, Justice Department, Commerce Department, and sundry other agencies will resort to their customary default settings of either ignoring the issue through bureaucratic inertia or distorting the issue through bureaucratic feuding. Just as the NSC would need to take the lead in coordinating a religious engagement and religious freedom agenda, it plays a similar role with respect to other social and political goods and rights that the U.S. government attempts to promote in other countries: economic development, women’s rights, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, prevention of human trafficking, and so on. Yet, while the NSC plays a coordinating role, actual implementation is almost always done by individual departments and agencies themselves. (To be clear, pointing out the good that U.S. foreign policy does in no way implies ignoring the folly and worse that America has sometimes caused abroad—it is just to point out that the involvement of the American foreign policy community in a matter is not inherently problematic, but dependent on context and consequence.)

The critique that religious freedom is peculiarly, even exclusively, “American” is intriguing but ultimately unpersuasive. Yes, religious freedom—at least as an aspiration, even if not always fully honored—is indispensable to the American founding and experiment, and continues to occupy a prominent place in American self-identity. However, religious freedom is also enshrined in international standards (e.g., Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and international laws (e.g., Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) that were developed by a broad multinational and multireligious coalition, and are subscribed to (even if not always honored in practice) by a large majority of nations around the world. Reinforcing these universal standards, religious freedom is explicitly upheld in numerous regional human rights instruments as well.

Moreover, while religious freedom merits respect as a normative right, it is also highly correlated with other social and political goods of the types that a responsible nation’s foreign policy would seek to promote. To take just a few examples: as Brian Grim and Roger Finke have demonstrated, nations that respect religious freedom have lower levels of religious violence, whereas nations with high levels of government restriction of religion also experience higher levels of religious violence. The Legatum Prosperity Index, among other studies, finds a high correlation between religious freedom protections and higher levels of citizen well-being, democratization, economic growth, and overall quality of life. Anthony Gill has distilled the historical relationship between the interrelated developments of religious liberty, rule of law, and economic growth. Few if any nations that respect religious freedom also pose a security threat to the United States. Of course, correlation is not causation, and social, cultural, and political goods often develop together as bundled commodities. Most nations that respect religious freedom also have a tradition of democratic institutions and legal and cultural respect for religious liberty; the causality and sequencing of these developments is highly complex. Likewise, the association of religious freedom with lower levels of violence may reflect some of the functioning of democratic peace theory. Yet, as a normative good in its own right, as well as being associated with other benefits, promotion of religious freedom can claim at least a plausible basis as a foreign policy priority. Whether or not this actually entails the “securitization of religion,” it at least holds considerable value.