Religious Freedom: Behind the Headlines
By Rod Dreher – Director of Publications
The deadly bombing outside a Coptic church in Egypt. The slaughter of Iraqi Catholics at mass in Baghdad. The assassination of a top Pakistani Muslim politician for defending the religious liberty of non-Muslim countrymen. These high-profile attacks on religious freedom recently made international headlines drawing attention to the oppressive conditions many religious believers around the world live—and die—with every day. Georgetown University scholar Thomas Farr calls the current situation “a humanitarian crisis of stunning proportions, a threat to international peace, and a danger to national security.”
When people can face serious persecution for exercising religious freedom—as do 70 percent of the world’s population, according to a 2009 Pew study—it’s easy to see why Farr labels it a humanitarian crisis. But should this be of concern to non-humanitarians—that is, to policymakers and academics who certainly don’t wish the faithful ill, but who see what happens to believers as peripheral to their own work? Absolutely, says Farr, a former U.S. diplomat who, as director of The Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, devotes himself to helping governmental and scholarly elites grasp the connection between religious persecution and broader social trends—including those affecting international security and stability.
The John Templeton Foundation has dedicated over $2 million in grant support of Farr’s religious liberty work (see TR, June 10, 2009), and recently approved more funding to expand the project’s reach to Oxford University and beyond. “Our goal,” Farr says, “is to begin the process of establishing religious freedom as a legitimate field of study across scholarly disciplines, and a policy issue of global concern.”
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| Thomas Farr |
The link between progress in general and religious freedom was clear to the late Sir John Templeton, who made studying and advancing religious liberty a central task of his Foundation. Kent Hill, vice president for character development at the Foundation, elaborates: “In the domain of religious culture—and human flourishing more broadly—Sir John believed that progress could only be achieved when human beings have the freedom to choose their spiritual allegiances, without interference from the state or other actors.”
Far from being ancillary to social and economic progress, religious liberty is a key to it. So why aren’t government, economic, and academic elites more engaged with the issue, especially when religious conflict is obviously at the heart of so many urgent contemporary foreign crises? Farr does not believe it’s an expression of hard-heartedness, but rather “a failure of policy imagination.”
Farr cites recent studies, such as the forthcoming God's Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics, co-authored by Religious Freedom Project scholars Timothy Samuel Shah, Daniel Philpott, and Monica Duffy Toft, as empirical evidence linking the expansion of religious freedom to economic, social, and political development. Though nations where religious freedom is most restricted tend to be among the world’s poorer, Farr warns that people living in rich Western democracies face mounting threats to religious liberty.
European nations increasingly follow the French model of formally excluding religious views from public discourse (one reason why European Muslims are not well-assimilated, Farr contends). The American approach has historically seen religion and religion-based morality as vital to a healthy democracy—but this conviction may be wavering.
“Religious organizations are being required either to abandon their most fundamental teachings or stop providing social services such as the placing of orphans,” Farr says. “Catholic hospitals are at risk of being forced under the new health care law to perform abortions. Freedom of conscience is no longer a bedrock value of American politics.”
Might the future of religious liberty in America rest on a foundation of sand? In their widely-praised recent book American Grace, social scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell report that large numbers of young Americans profess no allegiance to an established church or particular religious tradition. (See TR, October 6, 2010).
“It may be the case that ‘believing without belonging’ is enough to sustain the laws and policies necessary to religious freedom. I certainly hope so,” Farr says. “My fear is that a more subjective approach to religion may erode the broad support for America's robust system of religious liberty, which is increasingly at risk of being seen as a second class right, trumped by other, non-traditional rights claims.”
No Religious Liberty, No Peace?
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Cambridge University Press recently released The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the 21st Century, by Brian J. Grim and Roger Finke. In the book, Grim, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, and Penn State sociologist Finke present a comprehensive statistical survey of religious liberty around the globe, and argue that violence tends to be greater in societies where religious practice is suppressed. This is a dramatic counter to the argument, often made by authoritarian governments, that curtailing religious freedom is necessary to preserve social order. Political scientist Allen Hertzke, a leading authority on religion and politics, calls The Price of Freedom Denied “a true global landmark,” and praises it as “one of the most important contributions to the struggle for religious freedom and international peace since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The John Templeton Foundation provided grant support for Grim and Finke’s work on the volume.
Cutting-Edge Science Made Simple
Two of the world’s top scientists have new books out. University of Vienna quantum physicist and Foundation advisor Anton Zeilinger, the 2010 Wolf Prize winner and the first scientist to achieve quantum teleportation, explores the bizarre world of cutting-edge physics in Dance of the Photons: From Einstein To Quantum Teleportation. A reviewer in Science raves that “those seeking an accessible popular account of this fascinating field will find their search over.” Echoing this praise, 2003 Nobel laureate in physics Anthony Leggett cheers on “this delightful little book” for explaining the latest advances in quantum mechanics “in a way that should be accessible even to readers with no physics background.”
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Popular science gets another big boost later this month when Columbia University cosmologist and Foundation grantee Brian Greene, co-founder of the World Science Festival, publishes his newest book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. Citing the volume as a January 2011 Best Book of the Month, Amazon.com editors praise the best-selling author’s latest journey into deep space as “that rare accomplishment in science writing for a popular audience: a volume that explains the science and its consequences while stimulating the imagination of even the uninitiated.”
In Afghanistan, The Seed of Something Good
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| Freyer (right) during a June 2009 visit to Afghanistan. |
The November 18 issue of the Templeton Report featured the 2010 winners of the Purpose Prize, an annual awards program (supported by a grant from the Foundation) recognizing innovative social entrepreneurship programs devised by people over 60. Last December, the Wall Street Journal revealed what Dana Freyer, one of the five $50,000 winners, did with her award: donated it towards a $60,000 matching donation to Global Partnership for Afghanistan, a development non-profit organization she co-founded in 2004. The money will be used to help Afghan farmers rebuild and replant agricultural plots destroyed by armed conflict.
“We found that 80% of Afghans live off the land,” the retired lawyer told the Journal. “Without income from the land, education would be of little value and jobs would be unsustainable.”
Freyer believes she and her husband are helping to combat terrorism by peaceful means. She told the Journal, "We kept thinking, how can we help Afghanistan move from being an incubator of terrorists to a responsible nation with the viable farming economy of its past?"
