Standing Up For Religious Liberty
“We were cursing the darkness, trying to oppose religious persecution but not doing enough to prevent it,” according to Thomas Farr, who served as the first director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom after it was established in 1998. “This was an important issue,” he told the Templeton Report, “and after four years I became convinced we weren’t doing it well.”
A foreign-service officer for more than two decades, Farr left his post at the State Department to write World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty Is Vital to American National Security (Oxford University Press, 2008). The thesis of the book is straightforward: that the promotion of religious freedom is not just the right thing for the U.S. to do but also a vital tool in protecting American interests. As Farr emphasizes, it is a “foreign-policy argument, not a religious argument.”
Farr is now a visiting professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University, where (with the support of a grant from the Templeton Foundation) he has found ways to spread his ideas more widely. Farr has just published a new pamphlet called The Future of U.S. International Religious Freedom Policy: Recommendations for the Obama Administration. He and his co-author, Dennis Hoover, the vice president for research and publications at the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE), outline a range of policy changes that would give higher priority to the issue and integrate it into U.S. national security strategy, from the appointment of an experienced ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom to improved training and coordination among U.S. missions abroad. The report argues that American foreign policy “has for too long been hampered by a sense that religion and religious freedom are too difficult and too divisive.”
The Templeton Foundation also co-sponsored a symposium series in 2008 at Georgetown, directed by Farr under the auspices of the IGE and Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, where he is a senior fellow. The discussions included experts from a wide range of political, academic, and religious backgrounds, covering such topics as “Religious Freedom as Understood and Practiced in America,” “Religious Freedom in the Muslim World,” “U.S. International Religious Freedom Policy and Religious Extremism,” and “The Importance of International Laws and Norms.” The Berkley Center has published excerpts from the symposia in a booklet available online.
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Farr argues that it is impossible to have “stable democracies without religious freedom, broadly understood.” It is not simply that religious minorities must be protected from persecution, he told the Templeton Report, but that even members of the religious majority must feel free to offer dissenting opinions about their own faith. “We think it is vital to create a space for Muslims to speak openly about their own religion in order to get the religion-state balance right.”
Farr worries that the U.S. usually gets involved in issues of religious freedom abroad only reactively, as with its intervention in the case of Abdul Rahman, an Afghan citizen who was arrested in 2006 for converting to Christianity. Rahman was eventually freed after much pressure from the U.S. and Britain, but, as Farr emphasizes, the U.S. did not see the trial as a sign of deeper cultural and political problems that must be resolved if Afghan democracy is to endure.
Farr acknowledges that promoting religious freedom and democracy has come to be “associated with American cultural imperialism” and is sometimes seen as “a front for American missionaries.” But he does not believe this has to be the case. In promoting religious liberty, America needs to emphasize its own struggles with the problem, he says. “We are by no means perfect, but we do have some lessons to share. And we need to improve our ability to persuade others that religious freedom is in their interests. If we can do that, we will add to our own security as well.”
The Legacy of Descartes
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Russell Shorto, the author of Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason, was the guest at a Templeton Book Forum event on May 21 at the Harvard Club in New York City. He was interviewed by Gary Rosen, the chief external affairs officer of the Templeton Foundation, and a video of their discussion is now available on JTF’s YouTube channel. Rosen had previously reviewed the book for the New York Times Book Review:
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For Shorto, the pivot upon which the old world yielded to the new was the genius of Descartes, the philosopher who gave us the doubting, analytical, newly independent modern self. The Frenchman’s most famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” may strike our own ears as a coffee-mug cliché, but in the 17th century it was a revolutionary declaration. Shorto’s achievement is to complicate this picture, and with it our understanding of modernity, by also describing the religious context of the philosopher’s ideas.
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Religious Liberty in Comparative Perspective
Where is religious freedom most endangered today? How do different constitutional models affect religious life? What resources exist in the Islamic world for protecting religious freedom and human rights? These were among the questions that engaged the delegates at Constituting the Future: A Symposium on Religious Liberty, Law, and Flourishing Societies, held in Istanbul at the end of April and supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
The symposium, which was organized by Allen Hertzke, Presidential Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma, brought together distinguished scholars from around the world. Cole Durham of Brigham Young University presented a sweeping overview of emerging issues in the legal arena, particularly challenges to religious autonomy in a number of countries. Sociologist Brian Grim of the Pew Forum and Penn State University discussed how restrictions on religion tend to produce strife and violence, while religious freedom is associated with civil peace, economic growth, women’s advancement, and democratic expansion. The political scientist Anthony Gill of the University of Washington offered a “market theory” of the vitality that results from free competition in the religious sphere.
Other participants in the symposium probed the status and challenges of religious life in particular parts of the world. Sociologist Fenggang Yang of Purdue University and Liu Peng of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences discussed how the authorities in China are grappling with the explosive growth of religion there. Abdelwahab El-Affendi of the University of Westminster and Abdullah Saeed of the University of Melbourne showed how attempts to enforce Islamic doctrine by law have led to the abuse of state power and the distortion of authentic faith. And diverse voices from Turkey, including the sociologist Recep Senturk of Fatih University and the political scientist Binnaz Toprak of Bahcesehir University, provided insight into the contentious religious debates occurring in their own country. The renowned sociologist Peter Berger of Boston University concluded the symposium with a presentation on the relationship between global processes of modernization and the rise of religious pluralism.
Galileo at the Franklin Institute
The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, with major support from the Templeton Foundation, will host a three-day symposium, starting June 18, titled The Legacy of Galileo. The conference will draw on recent scholarship to explore Galileo’s profound effect on the culture of his day as well as his modern legacy. Featuring a range of well-known authors and scholars, the event is part of a series of programs surrounding the Franklin Institute's critically acclaimed exhibition Galileo, the Medici, and the Age of Astronomy.
"The symposium will bring in the world's leading scholars to examine the always-present tension between belief in established knowledge and acceptance of novel scientific claims—a tension that can be explored in the multiple contexts of religious beliefs, cultural practices, social structures, and institutional frameworks,” said Dennis Wint, president and CEO of the Franklin Institute. Information about the symposium can be found at www.fi.edu.
