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.

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.

My first thought upon reading the Chicago Council’s report “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy” is that the title is misleading. This report is not about engaging religious communities abroad—one hears little if at all from such communities—nor does it say anything particularly new. There is, however, an imperative. This report is an attempt to create a particular kind of world, one defined by the projection of American power—a certain kind of religious power.  The report, as Winni Sullivan observes in her companion piece, endorses an establishmentarian position in American foreign policy, meaning that American policy could discriminate among religions, and fund and promote religious activities that meet with U.S. government approval. This is a different kind of religious power than what Sullivan describes as the “periodic and not altogether successful efforts” at disestablishment that we have undertaken at home. Assuming that we agree with Sullivan, as I do, that “established religion is by definition not accepting of ‘pluralism, freedom, and democracy,’” it becomes clear that this report is not about engaging religious communities to promote either religious freedom or democracy. It is about the projection of American power through the securitization of religion. Perhaps a more apt title, borrowing in part from the language of the report itself, would have been “‘Savvy, selective, strategic, and targeted’: the projection of American religious power and the global securitization of religion.”

I want to point to a few moments at which the report works especially hard to achieve these objectives. The first is in its definition of “religious freedom,” understood as the right to, “advance values publicly in civil society and political life.”  Religious freedom is to be articulated “in a way not viewed as imperialism, but as a means to support religious agency to undermine religion-based terrorism and promote stable democracy.” Yet 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. In focusing exclusively on “values and beliefs,” the report not only fails to engage with, or allow spaces for, religious practice, habits, and ways of being in the world that cannot be reduced to values and beliefs, but actively closes down such “religious agencies,” save those that are deemed to be “undermining religion-based terrorism” in the eyes of the National Security Council (NSC). In tacitly sanctioning a protestant understanding of religion as the (only) legitimate way to be religious and modern, it forecloses upon a range of understandings of religion and arrogates to the NSC the authority to decide who is “civil” enough to be allowed into the public sphere, and who isn’t. As Saba Mahmood has observed of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) itself, the report illustrates, “how the exercise of sovereign power tends to subsume the secular principle of religious freedom.”

This rather astonishing exercise of sovereign theopolitical authority brings me to a second point involving the government regulation of religion. The report states: “We know that government regulation of religion can lead to increased persecution and religious violence, forces that increasingly escape confinement within national borders.” This is a striking statement. What is the Task Force calling for, if not increased government regulation through the securitization of religion? In recommending that the NSC direct, not only governmental, but also nongovernmental engagement with religious actors and communities overseas, it vests in the government the authority and institutional capacity to regulate religion both directly and through nongovernmental proxies, calling explicitly for “practical religious literacy” on the part of governmental and nongovernmental offices and institutions. Will this lead to increased persecution and religious violence?

It won’t, according to the logic of the report, because the secular state in general, and the United States in particular, is ontologically incapable of particular kinds of violence, “religious” violence, in particular. Violence undertaken by the American state is by definition not religious. So, religious violence is something undertaken by others, while secular violence disappears from the picture altogether, or is quietly subsumed and legitimized under the rubric of “marginalizing extremists.” Yet, is it not the case that, like the errant “religious actors” described in the report, the United States also, at some times and in some places, “inspire(s) or legitimate(s) violent conflict by framing it as an act of justice”?  How is it that the United States manages to exempt itself from the critical scrutiny that it so avidly prescribes for its (religious) others? Could it be the case that American exceptionalism and a particular notion of American religious freedom and American power are sacralized in this report, such that they are, in the words of the report, lending “a sacred aura and intensity to disputes and campaigns that also have significant secular dimensions”? As religion is increasingly nationalized through this heady cocktail of religious freedom and American exceptionalism, should we now brace ourselves for “calls to defend that which is held sacred […] increasingly employed as a conflict escalator”? Should we not at least consider the possibility that the United States, in its new role as self-appointed theologian, might “invoke the sacred to sow violence and confusion”?  It is in closing down the possibility of this kind of self-scrutiny that the report moves in dangerous directions.

In another example of the inherent goodness of American power, failed states, in the eyes of the Task Force, are responsible for terrorism, and never the international actions of the United States (such as in the invasion of Iraq) or other actors.  The United States floats above and outside the world, guided expertly by the NSC through the rocky shoals of political theology and toward safer shores, in a carefully navigated approach, “tailored so as not to overstep the bounds by intervening unwisely in theological disputes or, worse still, seeking to manipulate religion.”

I agree with the Task Force that the United States should not shy away from engaging the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, although the project of “discerning which elements of the Muslim Brotherhood are interested in moving away from extremism” is not an approach I would advocate. Is this process of “discernment” constitutional? Or is it an attempt on the part of the American government to assume the mantle of the global theologian of reform, separating the wheat from the chaff—turning water to wine?—as it acts “ in a way that is both decisive and prudent, developing the means to assist those whose ideas it supports without tainting them by association”? Is this an appropriate role for the United States government? Is it the role of the government to determine “which elements” of which religious groups or parties abroad “are interested in moving away from extremism”?  Or might we see this as part of what Mahmood has described as an “ambitious theological campaign” undertaken by the U.S. government in which, “secularism reveals itself in its civilizing and disciplinary aspects, rather than as a circumscription of religion or a prophylaxis that immunizes politics from religion within the context of the nation-state”?

I also agree with the report’s recommendation, in the section on international organizations, that “the United States also stands to learn from the experience of international organizations and their interactions with faith-based institutions in numerous fields.” The United States stands to learn from the experience of these, and many, many other actors—both “faith-based” and not.  We stand to learn from doing more listening and less promoting of “the message,”  not to mention “spearheading a new reformation,” in Sullivan’s words. The real challenge, understanding and engaging multiple modalities of being “religious” and being “free” in a globalizing world, still lies ahead.

There is an embarrassing giddiness in the religious studies world today. With our new mantra in hand—the new “salience” of religion—we, both scholars of religion and other self-appointed spokespersons for religion, feel licensed to instruct the world on the importance of religion. We are suddenly relevant again. Or so we think.

If there is an opportunity for religious studies today, and my own view is increasingly that this is an opportunity more for listening than for speaking, the Chicago Report suggests the likelihood that this opportunity will be misunderstood and misused. Religion today is an immensely complex phenomenon. And there are many who speak in its name. It is far from clear that there is any sense in which generalizing about religion is useful as a political matter—or, for that matter, that the United States government should be spearheading a new reformation.

The Chicago Report reflects both a particularly American take on religion, descriptively and normatively, and a particularly American style of imperialism. In service of the new “imperative”—the new “salience” of religion—the Task Force proclaims a usable history and account of religion that is often just plainly wrong, and sometimes grotesquely so.

The Report announces that: “Religion is now playing an increasingly influential role—both positive and negative—in the public sphere”; that “Extremist groups also use religion”; and that we should support “those doing good, while isolating those that invoke the sacred to sow violence and confusion.”  It recommends that the National Security Council initiate a new strategy in American foreign policy. The goal of this new strategy would be to promote American interests through engagement with constructive religious actors, engagement that would distinguish good people of faith from bad ones and deliberately marginalize religious extremists, all in the name of American security. The Report knows what is constructive and it knows how to divide the good guys from the bad guys—that is, vital, autonomous, authentic, credible, and legitimate religion, and genuine religious freedom, from that which is extreme, destructive, and not accepting of “pluralism, freedom, and democracy.”

The record is not very good in this respect. Religion is powerful, when it is, because it embraces the full spectrum of human activity. Distinguishing the good from the bad has often divided religious insiders, as well as outsiders. Furthermore, the United States government has long dealt with “religious actors” at home and abroad who do not embrace “pluralism, freedom, and democracy.” American governments have been active sponsors of proselytization in the name of civilization in the case, for example, of Native Americans and Mormons, as well as supporters of both regimes and rebels who are motivated by religious ideologies that do not support “pluralism, freedom, and democracy,” as, for example, Israel, or the mujahideen who resisted Soviet rule in Afghanistan. There is no reason to think that it will get better. Nor do we have any reason to believe that the ambitious and utopian program for the reform of religion proposed by the Chicago Report, and expressed in this astonishing prediction—“Over time, as religious communities play even greater roles in the positive transformation of their societies, the importance of vital and autonomous religious agency will become more visible, pronounced, and politically consequential”—can, or even should, be accomplished, or that the National Security Council is the man for the job.

Most importantly, perhaps, for a report about religion, there is not much religion in this report. One searches in vain for anything new about religion, beyond a now familiar post-9/11 account of religion being a force for good and ill, an account that is supported by examples that are so hackneyed as to be not much more than scapegoating. For example, in discussing the best and worst of religion—obviously seeking a non-Islamic example—the Report uses Haiti as an instance of  the “best and worst of faith-based efforts”:

A classic example of the wonders and ills was the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti in January 2010. Eighty-one U.S. charities, including faith-based organizations, raised or pledged $611 million for relief efforts within three weeks of the devastating quake, while legions of development personnel worked in the midst of great suffering to provide food, medicine, and shelter. Meanwhile, a Baptist group was implicated in the kidnapping of children, which raised local suspicions and tainted the immense, positive contribution of the faith-based development effort.

This is the best and worst of faith-based efforts in the world? Nowhere in the report is the massive sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church mentioned. Surely, that scandal reflects the worst far more than the misguided but well-intentioned efforts of a few would-be rescuers of children. But in this report, the Catholic Church is one of the good guys. As for women’s rights, they are deliberately relegated to second place.

This report is also oddly inconsistent about whether religion is an individual matter or a collective matter. At times, the word religion seems to refer to the familiar, modernist, progressive, American, protestant form that is now widely documented and described as the religion of the first amendment. But, curiously, a footnote defines religion for the purposes of the report in a quite un-American way:

We define religion as an established system of belief, practice, and ritual based in a collective affirmation of a transcendent or otherworldly reality that encompasses and gives ultimate meaning to earthly existence . . . we are particularly focused on multigenerational, transnational religions organized around institutions, leaders, and disciples or followers—adherents who normally number in the millions worldwide, but who are supremely local in their influence and impact.

It seems that disestablishment is good policy at home, but that establishment will be the policy abroad, because “an established system” of “multigenerational” institutions with “leaders” and “followers” is the way to control people and the NSC needs formal actors to engage with.

Interestingly, the question of established religion reveals a division among the Report’s authors. One of the major recommendations in the Report is the following:

Clarify the Applicability of the Establishment Clause. The Task Force calls upon the president of the United States, advised by executive offices and agencies who have studied the problem, to clarify that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment does not bar the United States from engaging religious communities abroad in the conduct of foreign policy, though it does impose constraints on the means that the United States may choose to pursue this engagement. Such clarification would serve as a major “next step” in the president’s post-Cairo follow-up.

A footnote to this recommendation refers the reader to a dissent and a response to the dissent appended to the report. The dissenters, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Farr, William Inboden, David Neff, and Timothy Samuel Shah, announce that they “believe that in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary (evidence which, as the report demonstrates, does not now exist), no administration should impose constraints on American foreign policy that are imagined to derive from the Establishment Clause.”

The responders, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Kent Greenawalt, Abner Mikva, George Rupp, and David Saperstein, while embracing the definition of religion in footnote 7, but perhaps concerned about the broader implications of any suggestion that the Constitution has no authority beyond the territorial borders of the U.S., apparently also felt constrained to announce categorically that “It is beyond question that all branches of the U.S. government must act in accordance with the Constitution when conducting American foreign policy,” and, further, that “There is no reason to believe that the Establishment Clause is an exception to this requirement.”

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” Since 1947, the Supreme Court has understood the Amendment to have been incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause, so that it is now applicable to state governments as well as to the federal government. It is broadly understood today to prohibit the privileging by the governments of the U.S. of one religion over another, and to prohibit government funding of religious worship and proselytization. As the report mentions, the U.S. Supreme Court has not expressly ruled on the applicability of the establishment clause to foreign policy. One could speculate on what this Court might do if asked, particularly after its decision in Hein v. FFRF; but when combined with the definition of religion announced in footnote 7, the view of the dissenters seems to be that those prohibitions should not guide American policy abroad. American policy abroad should discriminate among religions, and should fund and promote the religious activity that it finds good and in the best interests of the U.S.

While periodic, and not altogether successful, efforts at disestablishment have produced a distinctively American style of religious governance—one that is not widely shared throughout the world—it is difficult not to see the adoption of an explicitly establishmentarian position by American foreign policy makers as opportunistic and naïve. Established religion is, by definition, not accepting of “pluralism, freedom, and democracy.” The sacred and the secular are deployed in the report with a startling slipperiness. As Beth Hurd says in her companion piece [forthcoming at The Immanent Frame], a peculiarly toxic form of “American exceptionalism, and a particular notion of American religious freedom and American power, are sacralized in this report, such that they are, in the words of the report, lending ‘a sacred aura and intensity to disputes and campaigns that also have significant secular dimensions.’”

At the same time, “secular’ policies of the U.S. are exempt from responsibility for the creation of violence. With Beth Hurd, and with Rami Khouri, at The Daily Star, I believe this Report says more about “us” than it does about “them.” Khouri writes:

The Chicago report is an important sign of how sensible Americans continue to seek a more complete understanding of the world they live in, and try to forge better policies to navigate that world. But the process reflects the weaknesses in American government policies as a whole in that it exaggerates the role of religion as a distinct independent actor or force, and does not factor into the resurgence of religiosity the stimulus provided by American policies in the Arab-Asian region (and Israeli policies in the Middle East).

This report simply dresses up American political realism in a religious garb. It both misses the real story and shamelessly exploits the politics of fear to support American interests.

It is unquestionably the case that religion seems suddenly to be in everyone’s mouths. There are a number of causes for this, in my view, both historical and epistemological. In part, religion as the other of the enlightenment returns in philosophical circles as good to think. Religion returns as a useful label for a range of practices that exceed the individual—to describe communal and cultural ways of being in the world, as well as material and incarnational accounts of human life. Politically, too, religion is a useful catchall for resistance to various oppressive regimes, the state, the west, the market, science, globalization…. But these issues are beyond the scope of this piece—and beyond the imagination of the report.

First, it is worth emphasizing a point that might be lost in proposing such a “new” approach: civil society has autonomously done this for centuries. Beyond missionary groups’ traditional activities, both religious and secular NGOs have long engaged with overseas communities on political issues related to religion. Witness generations-old activism over foot-binding in China, female genital cutting in Kenya, and freedom of belief around the world.

What may be different today is that Appleby, the Chicago Council, and the Obama administration seem keen to make civil society a more explicit part of U.S. foreign policy in its dealings with religious communities. But this very effort seems destined to alienate overseas populations already rightly suspicious of U.S. government meddling. This is particularly true if the effort is directed, overtly or otherwise, by the National Security Council. The securitization of religion—like that of other supposed “threats” to national security, from ethnic conflict and hot zone diseases in the 1990s to terrorism and global warming today—may warm the hearts of military brass craving new budget lines and NGO leaders pining for recession-proof funding streams. But, in Appleby’s tellingly Pentagon-like formulation, viewing foreign religious actors as “asset[s] to be developed,” is unnecessary and counterproductive. Indeed, if the U.S. uses such an “indirect,” security-based approach, it will undermine the goal of “authentic engagement” with overseas communities, which the TFR rightly recognizes as critical to promoting the idea of religious freedom. At a minimum, the appearance of inauthenticity will loom over—and potentially poison—valuable interactions that already occur spontaneously.

Scholars of religion recognize a parallel dynamic when it comes to government involvement in religion at home. Many believe that one reason for declining religious observance in northern Europe is the presence of state-sponsored or privileged churches, with a concomitant reduction in competition among religious organizations. Yet, the TFR seems to be suggesting a greater government role in promoting, or at least engaging, overseas denominations, albeit through NGOs. Even if we believe that America’s “neutral” approach to church-state relations is optimal, due to our Constitutional balance of free exercise and non-establishment, other countries often do not see it this way. Nor are the many ways in which democracies deal with religious diversity necessarily inferior to our own—as the lengthy and generally successful experience of European democracies attests. Government-sponsored promotion of “religious freedom,” particularly by the U.S. government—whether overtly or covertly—seems likely to fail for reasons similar to those which its proponents believe doom government sponsorship of religion in domestic settings.

Beyond this strategic problem, the report suggests that religious freedom should be supported through networks and partnerships anchored by “American universities, businesses, and private relief and development organizations.” These privileged interlocutors seem to have been chosen for their supposedly apolitical character and consequent potential to uphold a consensus U.S. view on religious freedom. Even if these assumptions are true—a doubtful proposition—a host of other civic groups engage in overseas activism on religion-related issues. Today, even avowedly secular advocacy groups and lobbies often touch on religious issues or engage with believers (and nonbelievers) abroad. Many of these “political” groups also have close linkages to the report’s “apolitical” favorites.

Critically, for those who dream of a coherent U.S. approach to religious freedom, civil society groups constantly conflict with one another on these issues. This is true even within the narrow range of religiously based groups—as shown by longstanding differences between liberal religious organizations like the World Council of Churches and conservative ones like the World Congress of Families. TFR members themselves were riven on the meaning of religious freedom, and as to whether the U.S. should advance it abroad. Moreover, although most Americans undoubtedly agree on a broad, bedrock conception of the First Amendment’s religion clauses, there is also sharp and continuing disagreement over their application in any number of specific cases.

Such conflict is all the more pervasive if the full range of civil society organizations, both religious and not, is considered. For instance, many in what is often termed the “human rights movement” clash with religious conservatives (who increasingly call themselves human rights groups too) over issues such as women’s rights, gay rights, abortion, and definitions of the family. The clashes are deep-seated and bitter, with antagonists fighting, not just over policy outcomes, but also over who may participate in the debate—as well as the probity of evidence, the content of morality, and the integrity of foes.

Nor are such harsh disputes confined to religiously charged “culture clash” issues; they spill into debate over many others, as well. For example, a major debate about the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court pitted feminists against conservative religious groups over the framing of “forced pregnancy” as a war crime. An important aspect of the genetically modified foods controversy—especially for Catholic groups, but also for environmentalists—concerns threats to the “integrity of creation.” And debates over AIDS and other disease prevention issues, as well as over development policy more broadly, involve religiously oriented and nonreligious NGOs who differ over such fundamental matters as the scope of the problems and the best means of dealing with them. In short, our own third sector, on which Appleby and the TFR lavish such hopes of advancing a religious freedom agenda, is itself deeply divided by competing and conflicting worldviews.

Making it all the harder for the U.S. government to use civil society to spread such an agenda is the fact that many civil society groups already conduct their own “foreign policy.” Notwithstanding Appleby’s claim that, “for a religious nation such as ours, believers elsewhere have been seen as adversaries or obstacles, and not as partners,” close interactions have in fact been common. Numerous NGOs, whether religious or not, have supported or fostered overseas clients for decades. This is perhaps most striking among groups that believe their interests are not represented by American institutions or the U.S. government. The affiliation of traditionalist American Anglicans with like-minded African churches due to divisions over gays in the priesthood is a well-known recent example. Similarly, in 2000 a network of conservative women from the U.S., Canada and northern Europe approached African delegates at the Beijing +5 PrepCom: “‘Our own delegations . . . are promoting an agenda which is not true to our family and cultural traditions—in fact, radical women have been sent here in spite of our pleas to have a more balanced team of delegates. We look to nations such as yours to speak for us, to save us from the folly of our own governments!’”

Finally, conservative Christian groups active at the UN have forged a resilient “Baptist-burqa” coalition with delegations from Islamic states, successfully working together on various “family” issues. Nor is the coalition strictly instrumental. It is based on mutual respect, even admiration. As Austin Ruse, head of the Catholic & Family Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) has written, it is from the “potent alliance between Catholic and Muslim countries, . . . new in the world, new to history,” what “[o]ur enemies call . . . an un-holy alliance, . . . that our victory will come.”

Although the foregoing examples involve “conservative” groups, “liberal” ones create parallel alliances—and the rival networks duel with one another across state borders and within international institutions. Moreover, they often bring the results of these conflicts, both successes and failures, back into domestic political disputes. In recent months, for instance, American gay groups have not only opposed Uganda’s draconian “Anti Homosexuality Bill,” but have also bludgeoned the Christian Right at home over ties between the bill’s proponents and California’s Abiding Truth Ministries. For their part, conservative Christians follow similar tactics. Earlier in the decade, for instance, they transformed Sweden’s Pentecostal minister Ake Green into a global cause célèbre among religious traditionalists. A local court had convicted and sentenced Green to one month’s imprisonment on “hate speech” charges after he gave a Bible belting anti-gay sermon in 2004. But conservative Christian lawyers based in Scottsdale, Arizona played a key role in his successful appeal to Sweden’s Supreme Court, in the process turning him into a poster child for threats to religious freedom allegedly posed by gay rights and hate crimes legislation. Green’s makeover was topped by a cameo appearance in California’s Proposition 8 fight—a “religious dissident” tour during which he exhorted Californians to defend the family.

In short, the full panoply of American civil society at home and abroad is conflicted about religious freedom and its particular applications. Our civil society’s cacophonous and combative members have long exploited similar fault-lines in other societies—or reproduced conflicts through overseas alliances. To believe that the Obama administration, or any other, can somehow unify American NGOs—even around the abstract and seemingly anodyne concept of “religious freedom”—is unrealistic, More likely, this administration, whatever its now increasingly plaintive claims to transcend political differences, will, like others before it, work primarily with a set of favored civic groups to promote its own set of views.

As but one example with a clear religious linkage, consider the “Mexico City Policy”—which changes, and likely will continue to change, each time a different political party assumes the presidency. Within days of taking office, President Obama rescinded the Bush administration’s version of the policy, opening the door for NGOs receiving federal funds to again mention abortion in their overseas family planning activities. Of course, the President simultaneously pledged to open a “fresh conversation” to “end the politicization of this issue” by finding “areas of common ground to best meet the needs of women and families.” But the Vatican and other religious conservatives immediately condemned the rescission.

The TFR pays too little attention to such conflicts. At a minimum, U.S. policymakers must be aware of what American civil society is already fighting for and about overseas—not to use NGOs to do the government’s work, but to strategize with their presence and activism in mind. In addition, policymakers need to understand how the politicization of American civil society might affect “target” communities. In one way, such conflict holds real benefits for the U.S. The battles illustrate one of the unheralded strengths of America (and other democracies)—indeed, one frequently bemoaned by those who long for an end to wrangling and who believe, wrongly, that contemporary America is more discordant than ever: our capacity to include sharp and continuing conflict within a peaceful and democratic society.

But it is unlikely that “selling conflict” or promoting a broad ideological spectrum of civil society groups will be American policymakers’ top goal. More likely, the current and future administrations will favor their own partisans, perhaps under the guise of a “unified” American position—even as these claims are challenged by “rogue” NGOs. For this reason, it is doubtful that President Obama’s openness to deploying civil society will in fact be “welcomed by both parties,” as Appleby speculates.

Does all this mean that American civil society should not engage with religious groups overseas? Of course not. NGOs of myriad ideological stripes will and should continue to do so. In the process, they will promote their own conflicting views of “religious freedom” and its applications to concrete issues. But involving the U.S. government as more than listener and learner would be a mistake, undermining a chief virtue of civil society—the reality and perception that it is autonomous from the state, with the credibility, critical edge, and freedom that entails.

The tensions within the Task Force, which Scott Appleby recounts, actually illustrate the misconceptions that bedevil what, by law and interest, should be a central thrust of engagement: the promotion of religious freedom as a universal human right. As one who closely observed the process that produced the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, I can counter a number of such misconceptions.

The effort to pass the law was backed by a broad religious coalition animated by gross human rights abuses, and activists repeatedly adverted at the time to the principles enshrined in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. State Department reports have consistently declared that American initiatives such as the IRFA derive from the mandates of international covenants signed by virtually all nations. Rooted in our nation’s highest ideals, and not in hegemonic pretentions, the law sought to protect vulnerable people in dark corners of the world. It was not intended as a cover for aggressive missionaries or abusive proselytism, and very rarely has its implementation dealt with missionaries at all.

As Thomas Farr has written, the law was resisted in Foggy Bottom and has since been quarantined from the main currents of American foreign policy—this despite growing empirical evidence that restrictions on religious practice and freedom of conscience contribute powerfully to lagging democracy, societal strife that spills over borders, regional instability, and global terrorism.

I submit that misconceptions—or, more precisely, unexamined assumptions—underlie the failure of our foreign policy elite to deploy a tool that could promote our ideals and national interest simultaneously. These unexamined assumptions, or many of them, are part of the mental architecture of the academics who prepare our diplomatic personnel and the intellectuals who frame our foreign policy paradigms. The following is a sample:

• Enlightened people are secular.
• Fervent religious devotion is divisive, backward, antithetical to reason, dangerous, and a threat to the liberal project.
• Democracy requires a secular public square, and liberal progress depends on the separation of religion from public life.
• Political activism by churches is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
• American foreign policy—when engaging with religious institutions, communities, movements, or leaders abroad—is constrained by the Establishment Clause.
• Religiously grounded political arguments are antithetical to liberal norms and undermine democracy.
• Christians who promote religious freedom mainly want to protect the ability to send missionaries abroad.
• Christianity is primarily spread by Western missionaries who import an American way of life.
• Proselytism undermines indigenous cultures and commonly deploys promises of financial rewards, coercion, or deception.

One can imagine why holding even some of these assumptions would lead to lukewarm enthusiasm for promoting religious freedom abroad. I do not mean to imply that all such assumptions are false, just that they are often unexamined, and that little effort is made to test when or under what conditions they may be true.

Take proselytism as an example: the right to share one’s faith, to persuade others of the value or truth of one’s faith, and to change one’s faith, are all central components of the Universal Declaration. Proselytism, defined in the dictionary simply as the act of creating proselytes or the process of conversion, is thus an integral aspect of religious freedom as an internationally recognized human right. Yet, this fact is often concealed by the heavy negative baggage carried by the term, which conjures images of prosperity-gospel hucksters from the West preying on poor and illiterate people in the developing world. And, to be sure, there are just enough prominent examples to reinforce this image.

We need serious research to test the range of assumptions swirling around the proselytism controversy.  How widespread is proselytization by outsiders? Under what conditions is it abusive or deceptive? To what extent do poor people have agency in deciding whether to convert to a faith? How common is conversion by outside proselytization compared to indigenous sources? How do anti-conversion laws actually work? Do they really protect vulnerable people, or do they empower dominant groups?

On the latter question, international monitors indicate that such laws are commonly backed by dominant groups to maintain their monopoly or oligopoly. And preliminary quantitative research by Brian Grim suggests that anti-conversion laws, rather than protecting people, can actually inflame inter-religious tensions or invite mob violence against vulnerable minorities.

We see this clearly in the way Islamist regimes (or cynical dictators currying Islamist favor) enforce laws against conversion (apostasy) and defamation (blasphemy), which serve to suppress dissidents and Muslim reformers, to intimidate non-Muslims, or merely to settle scores. Consequently, the social or legal prohibition against conversion or defamation has a chilling effect on the free expression of ideas—by journalists, women, scholars, or rights activists—which is so central to the evolution of peaceful, thriving societies, which in turn undercut the appeal of terrorism.

Another vivid case that challenges assumptions about proselytism comes from the Indian context. The ongoing resurgence of militant Hindu nationalists has sparked widespread mob violence against Muslims, Christians, and those in lower castes attracted to other faiths. Attacks against such minorities serve both as a strategy of intimidation and as a pretext for passing laws against conversion, which produce further marginalization. In the recent Orissa violence, for example, the coordinated attacks against Christians were presented as evidence that the Christians had brought it upon themselves, suggesting that mob violence was justified and leading to calls from Hindutva groups and BJP leaders for stronger enforcement of anti-conversion laws.

Intriguingly, the right (or threat) of conversion serves the social and political aspirations of India’s Dalits, or “untouchables,” for whom embracing another faith can be a way to assert their agency and dignity in a religious, or traditional, culture that marginalizes them. This understanding goes back decades; B.R. Ambedkar, the author of the Indian constitution, not only converted to Buddhism himself but led thousands of fellow untouchables to the faith. As this case suggests, sensitivity to the motivations of those who convert, and those who try to stop them, can help us better understand and respond wisely to the diverse dynamics of societies around the world.

Even if our diplomatic personnel were to develop such literacy and sensitivity, however, the assumption that the Establishment Clause constrains our strategies remains a further impediment to effective engagement. The Chicago Council Task Force rightly took on this assumption by declaring that the Establishment Clause does not bar the United States from engaging religious communities abroad, as some diplomats mistakenly think.

The problem is that the Task Force left a camel’s nose in the tent, which could undermine the basic thrust of their recommendation. After its declaration that the Establishment Clause poses no obstacle to engagement, it declares that it “does impose constraints on the means that the United States may choose to pursue this engagement,” calling upon the President, advised by executive branch offices, to issue a clarification on this matter.

Here is the problem: we don’t agree in this country on the meaning of the Establishment Clause. Its implications are deeply contested, and some contend that the Court has interpreted the clause in ways that at times undermine the free exercise of religion, which is what, by law, the U.S. must promote. Establishment case law, as former circuit judge and Stanford Law professor Michael McConnell once wrote, “is a mess.” To expect that the President could come up with a definitive clarification of what the Establishment Clause allows and prohibits in foreign engagement is a fantasy.  What’s more, would James Madison have ever imagined that his carefully constructed language would come to apply to international relations? It is unlikely.

Oddly, the Task Force itself issues a definitive legal interpretation—that the Establishment Clause “does impose constraints” on the means available to American foreign policy—which the Supreme Court itself has not clearly adjudicated. This is particularly troubling because, even under the most expansive interpretation of the clause, a number of foreign policy initiatives of the past—such as staunching the spread of European communism in the chaotic aftermath of World War II with emergency support to Christian Democratic parties, or collaborating with John Paul II in undermining the Warsaw Pact—would have been prevented.

Promising strategies today would similarly be eschewed or held suspect under this interpretation. Could a U.S. military commander use federal dollars to build a village mosque in Afghanistan? Could USAID contract with “pervasively sectarian” Islamic Relief on development projects in Pakistan’s tribal areas? Could American diplomats translate into multiple languages and distribute major works by Islamic defenders of the freedom of conscience? Could the State Department expand its foreign visitor program to include delegations of religious leaders who come to learn about religious freedom and pluralism? Could the U.S. support a legal training program on religion and international law in the Arab world for lawyers, judges, and scholars? Could the U.S. provide a megaphone for clerics opposed to the Iranian regime? The ambiguity created by the Task Force will invite timidity by skittish diplomats when it is boldness and creativity that are required.

It would be better for the President to issue general instructions to agencies, highlighting that the Establishment Clause does not bar religious engagement and encouraging officials to exercise prudential judgments in determining what means make practical and ethical sense. Here is my recommendation for one prudential criterion: if the initiative is likely to expand genuine freedom of religion and conscience, do it.