First, as the entries by Noah Salomon, Mathijs Pelkmans, and Robert Hefner, among others, show, it is useful to step back from the US, and even from Western Europe, to consider alternative ways of organizing diversity. In northwest Madagascar, where I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork sporadically over a couple of decades, there has been religious freedom in the sense that the boundaries between practicing Christians and Muslims are fairly open and, even more, insofar as it has been perfectly acceptable to be neither Christian nor Muslim, without thereby being designated as immoral or ‘primitive’ or subjected to undue missionary activity. As I’ve written elsewhere, some families might gently direct one of their children toward Islam, another toward Christianity, and a third to ‘ancestral practices,’ which are simply referred to as “non-congregating” (tsy mivavaka) rather than by any substantive definition. Some people engage in combinations of each. Although I would not advocate a causal explanation, the pattern fits nicely with the logic of bilateral kinship and wide exogamy. Most people can recognize at least four grandparents and probably eight great-grandparents (and beyond), each of whom may have a distinctive identity with respect to social, political, religious, and geographical affiliation. From among these senior living or deceased relatives people make choices of stronger or weaker identification, influenced by such factors as which grandparent one is sent to stay with on vacations as a child and ending with in whose tomb and which mode of burial one finds oneself.

This enables an open society with a good deal of mutual understanding and respect, in which no single identification or institution behind it is absolutized. In some respects one could say the individual has a good deal of freedom of choice. However many Malagasy do not experience things in quite this way. In explaining why they live in one place rather than another or carry out a particular set of ‘religious’ or ‘ancestral’ practices they would say they had been called to it by a particular ancestor, who by showing them signs, notably manifest as illness or troubling dreams, subjects them to prohibitions which align them more firmly with that ancestor rather than others. Servants at the ancestral shrines were forced some generations ago to work there. Today those who remain as their successors cite the wrath of their own ancestors as the reasons for staying on.

In all this there is also a logic of the negative. People are defined and define themselves in the first instance by what they don’t practice, by the kinds of praying they don’t do, the foods they cannot eat, the days they cannot work, or the kinds of work or acts of deference they cannot perform, rather than by positive attributions. This is a kind of freedom by restriction; in clarifying the boundaries of what you cannot do, it leaves wide open what you can do.

My second general comment is that however we want to define religion (and perhaps we could take a leaf from northern Madagascar and leave it open, specifying only what it is not), one of the general features, as the Malagasy ethnography also suggests, is a kind of submission to something conceived as larger, higher, or more powerful than oneself. Durkheim called it society; Maurice Bloch calls it deference to authority or to other persons; Roy Rappaport describes it as one of the entailments of engaging in ritual performance. In participating in a ritual, whatever one’s state of mind or ‘belief’ at the time, and irrespective of the semiotic ideology that Webb Keane rightly and compellingly points to, one is accepting the outcome (assuming that the felicity conditions of the performative event are met) and moreover accepting the meta-performativity, i.e. that acts and utterances of this kind, felicitously produced, have the consequences that they do. To perform a ritual is, in the end, to accept a certain liturgical order of which it is part (irrespective of whether this also entails deference to specific officials, like priests). In other words, the freedom to carry out certain kinds of acts is premised on subjection to an order that defines what such acts are, that puts things under a definition and regulates the changes in definition. As I elaborate elsewhere, the process is one of the instauration of ethical criteria and it is intrinsic to human speech acts. Insofar as what we refer to as specifically ‘religious’ includes the most formal and consequential kinds of performative acts (baptized or not, etc.) one might say that what religion is not is freedom.

Hence the very idea of freedom of religion is paradoxical; it is the freedom to be unfree in a particular kind of way. Judicial and legislative bodies need to take this point, call it the relativity of freedom or unfreedom, or the deconstruction of freedom, into account. They need to notice Sullivan when she points to “the reinstatement of the rights of religious authority by political authority—in the name of religious freedom.” They then need to make informed decisions about which versions of unfreedom to support—and we should all, as Saba Mahmood emphasizes, pay attention to the politics and ideologies that underpin such decisions (a skepticism I share with Lori Beaman, concerning federal government initiatives at the present time in, of all places, Canada). If Muslims were the ones taking the lead in the US courts asking for certain rights and freedoms, surely the self-same justices would have argued another way.

This is certainly not to say let everyone be free to do as they please. Not only is such freedom impossible in the human condition, but there is the matter of whether my freedom impinges on yours. To emphasize a point in Mahmood’s account and mentioned in some of the other posts, the freedom of religion we demand elsewhere (though the point applies internally as well) too often means the freedom to missionize other people. The freedom to practice my religion impinges on the freedom to practice yours in peace.

We need to be careful here. I am not a historian but I imagine that religious freedom once meant freedom from oppression by the proponents of a stronger religion rather than freedom from interference by the state or the right given by the state for specific religions to interfere in other peoples’ business. Certain proponents of religious freedom in the US now seem to want to have it both ways: the state is criticized both for being secular and for promoting a ‘religion’ of its own. What is missing in such arguments is attention not to one’s own rights or freedoms but the obligation to enable the rights and freedoms of others.

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

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

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

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

In any event, the spirit blows where it wills.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

1) Theological Rationales

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every universalism is particularistic and irremediably so.

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

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

2) Legal-Juridical Rationales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) Socio-cultural Rationales

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

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

The very definition is based on three problematic presuppositions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.