Diplomacy in an Age of Faith

Religious Freedom and National Security

Thomas F. Farr

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008

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Summary:  The United States has failed to understand the global resurgence of religiosity. Washington should put the promotion of religious freedom at the center of U.S. foreign policy -- recognizing that it is vital not only to liberty and stability abroad but also to U.S. national security.

THOMAS F. FARR is Visiting Professor of Religion and Foreign Affairs at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and the author of World of Faith and Freedom: Why Religious Liberty Is Vital to American National Security in the Twenty-first Century. He was the first Director of the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom.

The United States is a religious nation, but neither scholars of U.S. foreign policy nor its practitioners have taken religion very seriously. From the inception of international relations as a discrete discipline, its approach has been defined by the seventeenth-century Westphalian subordination of religion to the state. Consequently, as the international relations scholar Daniel Philpott has observed, most in the field have simply "assumed the absence of religion among the factors that influence states."

But the world today is, as the sociologist Peter Berger puts it, "as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever." Berger was one of the first scholars to challenge "secularization theory," which holds that religion will wither as modernity advances. In fact, over the past several decades, the opposite has happened. Faith, far from exiting the world's stage, has played a growing role in human affairs, even as modernization has proceeded apace. Iran's Shiite revolution in 1979, the Catholic Church's role in the "third wave" of democratization, the 9/11 attacks -- all illustrated just how important a global force religion has become. For the most part, however, analysts and policymakers have remained either ignorant or baffled. Scholars are now scrambling to reexamine the question of faith in international affairs -- its "return from exile," as one study puts it. Unfortunately, policymakers are lagging even further behind, and the implications for U.S. national interests are troubling.

To the extent that U.S. analysts and policymakers have registered the resurgence of religiosity at all, they have viewed it as a problem for U.S. foreign policy. Such concern is misguided. The United States should not see global desecularization in strictly defensive terms; it is as much an opportunity as it is a threat. Rather than being inimical to the advance of freedom, as many secularists assume, religious ideas and actors can buttress and expand ordered liberty. For much of the world, the religious quest lies at the heart of human dignity. History, moreover, suggests that protecting religious freedom and harnessing it for the common good are vital if democracy is to endure. Social science data show strong correlations between religious freedom and social, economic, and political goods.

Accordingly, U.S. diplomacy should move resolutely to make the defense and expansion of religious freedom a core component of U.S. foreign policy. Doing so would give the United States a powerful new tool for advancing ordered liberty and for undermining religion-based extremism at a time when other strategies have proved inadequate. One week before the presidential election in November, the landmark International Religious Freedom Act will have its tenth anniversary. That law mandated that the promotion of religious liberty be a central element of U.S. foreign policy. But neither Democratic nor Republican administrations, nor the U.S. State Department, have seen the IRF Act as a broad policy tool -- indeed, as anything more than a narrow humanitarian measure unrelated to broader U.S. interests. A new policy on religious freedom can begin by tapping the law's ...

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