The link between religious freedom and national security

Thomas F. Farr is director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. He’s also a visiting associate professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. A former American diplomat himself, he’s a leading authority on international religious freedom. He’s published widely, including a 2008 book, World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty is Vital to American National Security. We had this conversation at a conference on religious liberty in Naples, Fla., hosted by Alliance Defending Freedom.

I think we understand pretty clearly that religious liberty has an impact on churches and on people of faith, but you’ve had some interesting things to say about the relationship between our sovereignty and security. We did a two-year study on Christian contributions to freedom. We brought scholars to Rome for a big conference to give their findings. The keynote speaker was the Archbishop Patriarch of the Chaldeans. [The title of his speech was,] “What Happens to the Middle East if Christians Flee?” The answer was not only is harm done to the Christian community, but harm is done to those societies. … He’s from Iraq, but you could say this of virtually every country in the world, particularly the countries of the Middle East, where Christianity was born. What he was saying is that the purging of religious minorities, especially Christians, but others as well, harms these societies. It makes them less stable than they already are, less susceptible to becoming stable democracies. … It’s in our interest for these countries to be stable. If that isn’t clear to every American now, it never will be. … Stability is not possible for a country if it is going to have warring religious groups within it, violent religious extremism. One of the antidotes to that is military. I have no problem personally with the use of drones, for example, if they are used with care for non-combatants, never intending to harm any innocents. However, there’s another way to do this. It’s called religious freedom. If we could succeed in places like Iraq, or even a better example, Egypt, which says it is trying to develop a democracy—our message to them should be, it won’t work without religious freedom. If you can’t produce or move toward a full equality under the law for all of the citizens of your country, which is one definition of religious freedom, you’re not going to get what you want.

Does the current administration in the United States get that message? Do they understand that taking a leadership role in religious liberty is good for our sovereignty and good for our security? The answer, unfortunately, is no. In the world of international religious freedom, we have two problems: them and us. You’ve got to solve the “us” problem first because you cannot go to any country on the face of the earth, Muslim or otherwise, and talk to them about their religion from an American point of view unless you know what you’re doing. The first difficulty is that American foreign policy elites no longer believe in religious freedom. They don’t understand what it means. They’ve lost the notion that it’s the first freedom.

Can you be specific? Are you talking about our president? The president is the chief foreign policy official of the United States. The secretary of state is his appointed official. Yes, I'm talking about Secretary of State John Kerry; I’m talking about President Obama, but I’m talking about their predecessors as well. I'm sad to say as a conservative that President [George W.] Bush, who you would think would have had the perfect profile to do this, I think he had a heart for this, but there were no policy tentacles between his personal beliefs on the importance of religious freedom and its necessity in our foreign policy. … We’ve had for 16 years a statutory requirement that the United States advance religious freedom as part of its foreign policy. We have not done so. I don’t say it’s easy, but I say the stakes are so high that we should be trying.

You’re referring, of course, to the International Religious Freedom Act. Tell us about that law and why it’s important. In 1998, Congress passed unanimously the International Religious Freedom Act. … What that act said in 1998 was that the United States values religious freedom so much, not only for itself but for others, that it will promote it in its foreign policy. It created an ambassador-at-large for religious freedom at the State Department to head an Office of International Religious Freedom. An ambassador-at-large is a very senior diplomatic official. It’s like a three-star general in the military. If you get somebody with that kind of status and you give them authority and resources, they can probably do something. That position has been vacant for over half of the time under this administration. It's vacant now. What does that tell you?

What would you do if you were in charge of the State Department’s religious-liberty desk? The law that was passed in 1998 said, thou shalt train American diplomats. It was general enough that the State Department has basically ignored it, not just under this administration, but under Clinton and Bush. To say something kind about the Obama administration, they have begun to implement training on religion in foreign policy, but it’s not good on this issue. It’s confusing. I’ve taught at these courses; I’ve attended some of them. You can come out of them wondering. It’s like an academic seminar. People are saying the whole thing is unconstitutional. I don’t think that's what we should be telling our diplomats. We should be training them to carry out the law. What is it? Why is it in our interest? How do you do it? What’s the toolkit? There are answers to these questions, but we haven’t even asked them, let alone carried them out. The ambassador has got to do that. He’s got to train diplomats. He’s got to develop strategies. He can’t do this in 198 countries around the world; he’s got to choose a few.

What countries would you focus on? What message would you would want our diplomats to take to those countries? One of the first I would choose would be Egypt, for a couple of reasons. Egypt is the largest of the Arab Sunni countries of the world. Arguably it’s a lynchpin in that area of the world. If Egypt were to go into chaos, it would really harm our interests. I don’t know anybody on left or right who would disagree with that. … I would make the argument that Egypt is a good candidate for religious freedom because it has some civil society organization. It has some history of constitutionalism, unlike a place like Syria. It has a little bit of an independent judicial history. Plus, we’ve been pouring billions of dollars into this country for many, many years. There are a lot of things that give us some leverage in that country.

Because you were in the foreign service, I want to take this opportunity to ask you a little about the State Department and the culture there. I’ve often compared the State Department to a great aircraft carrier floating down a narrow river. People like you and myself are trying to reverse course. To do that, you’ve got to have everybody from the admiral to the captain to all the first mates down to the boiler room. Everybody’s got to be working together. That’s very hard [to create] from the president down to the lowest civil servant and the foreign service officer. I don’t mean literally every human being, but you do have a culture there that is going to frustrate unless you have some very effective leadership by a president, by a secretary of state, by all the political appointees, and by the kind of training that I’ve been talking about.

Foreign service officers, by and large, are just smart people who want to do a good job and get ahead. Many of them are on the left-of-center. They come out of some of our more liberal universities, and they are, by nature, suspicious of religion. This is why, when I go to the Foreign Service Institute to teach, I don’t talk about people’s religion. Indeed, I say to them, “I don't care what your religion is, whether you’re a lapsed Catholic or an atheist or whatever you are.” Many of them fall under these categories. “I want to talk to you about doing your job and doing it well.The world is religious. Whether you like it or I like it is irrelevant. You can’t do your job, which is defend American interests, unless you understand religion, and religious freedom is one very good way to do this. It’s not just freeing people to do what they want because their religion says they have to do it, such as suicide bombing or burning widows at the pyre. Religious freedom imposes limits. It is a way of organizing life that is just, and it can be extrapolated by every religion and every community.”