First Freedom

This landmark book can be read on many levels. It is an account of the politics behind U.S. international religious freedom policy. It is an indictment of the secular blinders that keep American diplomats from treating religion as a serious force in global affairs. It is a penetrating exploration of the value of religious liberty to human flourishing. Finally, it is an argument for why religious liberty is vital to our national security and thus should be promoted by the full instrumentalities of foreign policy.

The sweep of the book touches on matters of urgency: expanding democratization, fighting the war on terrorism, shaping the fate of the Islamic world, and altering the trajectory of China. To Farr, unless we get religion right, and defend it, our foreign policy aims will fall short.

Farr writes from a unique vantage point. A career foreign service officer, he served as the first director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom and bridged its first two ambassadors. He listened to religious sufferers, pressed persecuting governments, and experienced bureaucratic resistance to promoting religious liberty inside a State Department with “religion avoidance syndrome.” He is also a devout believer, a Catholic with a core theological conviction that all people—made in the image and likeness of God—are imbued with a surpassing dignity and should be free to fulfill transcendent duties and spiritual quests.

Farr argues that promoting religious freedom must be a “central element of a refurbished American engagement with the world.” This bold assertion is buttressed by three contentions. First, for the foreseeable future religion will have a huge global impact on norms, politics, and transnational movements; thus we cannot ignore it. Second, the foreign policy establishment is ill equipped to address a world of pervasive religious faith. Indeed, secular assumptions so profoundly shape the diplomatic worldview that Foreign Service officers need training to see religion as something other than a problem. Third, the United States has potent statutory vehicles to address current deficiencies. Vigorously enforced, the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) could be the catalyst for recalibrated and integrated initiatives throughout the foreign policy apparatus.

In making his case Farr marshals cutting-edge scholarship on the positive correlation between religious freedom and civil liberties, democratic consolidation, economic development, women’s status, and peace. Thus the success of a myriad of foreign policy aims hinges in part on how well we advance the “first freedom.”

The book is divided into three parts. The first part catalogues the vast intellectual infrastructure that underpins the “religion deficit” among foreign policy élites. If religion is viewed as irrational and conflict-prone, then progress means secularization, privatization, and strict separation. The only way a polity is safe from fanaticism, in this view, is if religious people refrain from asserting comprehensive truth claims in the public square. Farr turns this Rawlsian argument on its head. In a pervasively religious world, he argues, the only hope for some modicum of peace lies in regimes that grant religious groups the right to contend in the democratic forum.

To make this competition healthy, religious groups must forswear violence or coercion. Here Farr offers a kind of bargain to religious communities: abandon the claim on the coercive powers of the state; in return, gain full citizenship rights to promote your religious values in public policy. But this bargain can only work if the United States stops peddling a form of strict separationism that would banish religion from the public square, which religionists abroad rightly see as an attempt to secularize their society.

In the second part of the book, Farr provides a history of the politics behind IRFA and an insider’s account of its flawed implementation. He revisits the debates between partisans who emphasized fighting persecution and those who stressed promotion of religious freedom. He believes that a focus on persecution led the State Department to overly emphasize the release of religious prisoners, which recalcitrant nations could grudgingly grant but later replace with others.

His critique of this “case management” approach paints a sober picture—a decade of religious freedom policy that largely failed to produce fundamental change—but it is not clear that a focus on persecution is the real culprit. More convincing is his vivid depiction of bureaucratic intransigence by a State Department culture hostile to religion, which effectively “quarantined” religious freedom policy from economic or strategic thrusts of U.S. foreign engagement. But Farr may be too pessimistic on this point: IRFA’s vast global reporting enterprise increasingly spotlights abuses and puts our diplomats in touch with vulnerable religious communities. Moreover, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has highlighted crucial problems, like the Saudi export of virulent literature that has fed jihadi ideology around the globe.

What makes Farr’s work so timely is its broader point: that fostering religious freedom is not just a humanitarian aim but is crucial to the national interest. Thus it should not be the object of a single office in the State Department but instead woven into the highest levels of America’s global engagement.

To develop this argument Farr devotes the third part of the book to chapters that show how the promotion of religious freedom would advance our strategic interests on two major fronts: the Islamic world and China. With respect to Islam, Farr stresses that extending greater freedom to religious minorities and Muslim dissenters is essential to draining the swamps of militancy that give rise to terrorism. He shows how apostasy and blasphemy laws crush the kind of free inquiry necessary for moderate voices to be heard. Thus when American policy makers ignored religious liberty concerns in such places as Afghanistan, they unwittingly enabled Islamic militants to intimidate and silence Muslim reformers, human rights proponents, and women.

The picture is perhaps more hopeful in China, where Farr believes the United States can make a strong case to authorities that free religious communities can help build a modern China. Recent back channel meetings between communist officials and house church representatives suggest that China’s rulers might be amenable to such arguments.

While persuasive on so many fronts, there is ambiguity in Farr’s celebration of religious liberty along with his admonition to engage groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which would likely restrict minority rights if they came to power. Engagement still might make sense by identifying interlocutors who are amenable to American influence, but that may not necessarily advance religious liberty.

In critiquing the religious freedom movement, Farr seems to discount the importance of constituent pressure in elevating religious freedom in halls of power. But the deep institutional changes he favors cannot be achieved without heightened public pressure. During the 1998 campaign for IRFA, churches and religious groups across the theological spectrum mobilized their grassroots constituencies, and political &eacutelites paid attention. Those energies have since dissipated—or been channeled into other fights. Congressional representatives are not hearing much from the churches on the issue. This is an indictment of the evangelical community, which enjoys the richest networks available for generating lay groundswells.

Religious freedom is foundational to faith-based endeavor. Thus the myriad religious communities that thrive under the American constitutional umbrella ought to renew their commitment to defend the first freedom against threats Farr so compellingly catalogues. In doing so, they will serve their country’s national interest, lighting candles in a troubled world.

Allen D. Hertzke is Presidential Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Rowman & Littlefield).