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April 17, 2008
Heritage on Religious Freedom
Those in the DC area will be interested in this event on Diplomacy in an Age of Faith at the Heritage Foundation tomorrow Friday, April 18 at noon. The speaker will be Thomas Farr, Visiting Professor of Religion and Foreign Affairs at Georgetown University. From the publicity:
While Americans are a highly religious people, U.S. foreign policy practitioners have not taken religion very seriously, argues Tom Farr in a recent Foreign Affairs article. The problem is rooted in a kind of secularism that fails to understand religion's continued relevance in America's constitutional order and the relationship between religion and liberty abroad. Rather than being inimical to the advance of freedom, religious ideas and actors can promote and strengthen ordered liberty. The U.S. foreign policy community, supported by civil society resources, must overcome a lack of vocabulary and imagination to fashion remedies that recognize the significant role of religion. U.S. policy must continue to advance religious liberty as a universal, fundamental freedom. It must also present a positive vision for religion's contribution to a liberal order, addressing the balance between the overlapping authorities of religion and state, and in particular how religiously grounded norms can legitimately influence public policy.
In a very similar vein, William Saunders of the Family Research Center in DC has the cover story in the April issue of Touchstone on Religious Liberty as the First Freedom.
Posted by James M. Kushiner at 10:44 AM | Permalink
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Comments
An additional problem with U.S. foreign policy is the overwhelmingly dominant secular mindset among the foreign service and diplomatic corps, which means that they have little interest in religion, view it as a private matter, have no conception of how religion motivates people in other parts of the world, and promotes the most caricatured portrait of people of faith--any faith--that is entirely consonant with that inadvertently let out of the bag by Barry O in San Francisco. Since most of the people in foreign governments with whom these foreign policy professionals interact are also secularists to the bone, there is a remarkable congruence of worldviews which very often misses what is going on in the popular culture right under their collective noses.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Apr 17, 2008 3:14:58 PM
Here's an example of this mindset, in an article by Ken Timmerman, Iraqi Christians Stuck in Jordan. Last fall a delegation of Christians from the U.S. visited the Christian refugees in Jordan and found that the UN was blocking their path to refugee status. The U.S. embassy staff was uninterested in their plight until the delegation kicked up a fuss.
Raymond [the local Chaldean priest] says some things have changed since the delegation led by former South Carolina Gov. David Beasely, Keith Roderick of Christian Solidarity International, and William Murray of the Religious Freedom Coalition met with U.S. embassy officials last October.“One month later, Ambassador David Hale came here to our church along with his staff,” Raymond told Newsmax in an interview in his church on Thursday. “Before your trip here in October, we never had anyone from the staff of the U.S. embassy come visit us in this church,” he added. “Never.”
An embassy official handling refugee issues told the delegation it “wasn’t my job” to go to churches, even though that’s where the Christian refugees go for help.
The State Department pays very little attention to the religion of Iraqi refugees, though the Iraqi Christians are in more desperate straits than any of the Muslims because they are attacked by all sides in Iraq and have no safe neighborhoods to return to. There are no Christian militias, as some of them have pointed out. The State Department's attitude extends to all groups. They have brought into this country a number of Burmese Karen people who are Christians, and then settled Burmese Muslims of the Rohingya group, a people ferociously hostile to Christians, in the same apartment buildings as the Karens. I'm sure all this is due to what Stuart pointed out. To them, Burmese are Burmese and Iraqis are Iraqis, and they might as well dump them all in the same place together. It's stunningly obvious that we ought to be bringing in almost solely Christian Iraqis and resettling the others back in Iraq, but that would never occur to the government officials in charge of these things.
Posted by: Judy K. Warner | Apr 17, 2008 8:29:36 PM
And on the same subject, Robert Spencer reported in December 2006:
Meanwhile, “officials at the State Department and the United Nations said they understand the danger facing Iraqi Christians but said they don’t want to give the impression that they would favor Christians over Muslims in a resettlement program.”
Is our government totally insane? As Spencer continued,
The UN is one thing, but there is absolutely no reason why the State Department should not favor Christians over Muslims in a resettlement program. This is an overwhelmingly Christian country, and the Constitution and Bill of Rights are rooted in Judeo-Christian assumptions. This is part of our national character, and no one should be apologetic about it.
Posted by: Judy K. Warner | Apr 17, 2008 8:41:58 PM
Sorry, turning off the boldface.
Posted by: Judy K. Warner | Apr 17, 2008 8:43:09 PM
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