Religious Freedom: The Best Weapon Against Terrorism

Behind religious terrorism are . . . restrictions on religious freedom.  Thus argue Nilay Saiya and Anthony Scime of the State University of New York – Brockport.  Here writes Saiya:

What is the relationship between religious liberty and faith-based terrorism? Some argue that restrictions on religion, though morally problematic, are at times justified in order to prevent or curtail religious violence. This logic gained increased traction in certain circles following the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001 and then again in the tumult associated with the so-called “Arab Spring.” In the Middle East, many secular dictators have long defended their repressive policies on the grounds that they were at least able to keep to forces of religious extremism at bay.

In a forthcoming article in Conflict Management and Peace Science, my coauthor, Anthony Scime and I argue that this line of thinking is incorrect. On the contrary, restrictions on religion actually work to generate religious terrorism by radicalizing religious actors, weakening moderates, and increasing the support of extremists. Often embattled religious communities, perceiving their faith to be under attack, subscribe to a ubiquitous narrative of communal disillusionment, sometimes leading to violence against those perceived to be responsible for their marginalized and suppressed status. When religious groups find themselves ostracized through laws or violent suppression, they are more likely to pursue their aims through violence as well. In short, regimes that hinder the knowledge or pursuit of the supernatural play with fie when they interfere with peoples’ innate aspiration for transcendent and eternal truth.

Using classification analysis, we find that government regulation of religion is by far the most significant variable predicting the onset of religious terrorism—more than twice as important as any other variable included in our model. Generally, religious terrorism increases dramatically as the level of restrictions also increase. Religious repression becomes especially problematic in countries with large populations and unstable political regimes. We also find that when governmental restrictions on religion are low, religious attacks seldom occur and that the values of other variables have no effect in explaining the absence of religious terrorism.

Our findings suggest certain policy recommendations. The inclusion of religious groups and individuals in political processes and the protection of their religious rights serve to negate the claims of extremists that violence is necessary to challenge the status quo. The findings also buttress the accumulating evidence that the relaxation of religious restrictions and protection of religious liberty nurtures peaceful competition of religious groups in society, thus contributing to a wide array of positive externalities that come from widespread freedom. It is time for policymakers around the world to take religious freedom seriously, if not for moral reasons, then at least for the sake of peace and stability.

A Born Again Public Sphere in Nigeria

Elizabeth Sperber, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University and one of the most creative young scholars today in the study of religion and politics, posts on the political dynamics created by Born Again Christians in Nigeria:

When western journalists cover religion and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, they tend to focus on politicized Islam. News about Boko Haram’s violence in northern Nigeria, for instance, has dominated recent reporting on religion and politics in the region. Yet, in Nigeria as in other sub-Saharan countries, Christians and adherents of African traditional religions are also engaged in dynamic and increasingly politically relevant movements. In fact, the region’s fastest growing religious groups are born again Christian (see an influential Pew Forum study). These movements are increasingly visible in the public sphere.

Moreover, in many parts of Nigeria, religious conflict has arisen not as a result of conservative Muslim movements, but rather due to the aggressive evangelization of Muslim areas by ‘militant’ Nigerian born again Christians. Siyan Oyeweso (Osun State University) presented an important paper on this topic at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association last weekend. He was joined by Insa Nolte (University of Birmingham) and Olukoya Joseph Ogen (Osun State University), who presented preliminary findings from a joint, five-year study of religious encounter in southwest Nigeria. Nolte and Ogen’s findings explore the infuence of local Pentecostal movements on “traditional” religionists in the region. Taken together, these papers underscore the complexity, dynamism, and political significance of religion in Nigeria, even in areas far from the headline news of Boko Haram.

Religious Freedom: The Indispensable Work of Brian Grim

Some of the most important arguments for religious freedom come from the work of scholar Brian Grim and his collaborators.  Grim teamed up with sociologist Roger Finke to write The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.  One of the most interesting arguments there is that religious freedom is correlated with a whole range of other good things.  They make a strong argument, for instance, that the restriction of religious freedom is correlated with violence.  Now, Grim is making the case that religious freedom is good for business — and hence for economic growth, which in turns encourages stability and peace in a virtuous cycle. He has founded the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation to promote the idea.  Explore the links here to see what he is up to.

Forgiveness Really Does Take Place in Politics: Ask the Ugandans

Forgiveness in politics?  Forgiveness can surely be extended to a skeptic for doubting it.  In the West, forgiveness had played little role in the history of political thought and is seldom voiced in contemporary politics.

A couple of years ago I published a book on reconciliation in global politics whose last chapter argued for the possibility of forgiveness in the wake of civil war, dictatorship, and even genocide.  Barry Gewen, reviewing the book in the New Republic, offered a broadly favorable assessment but questioned forgiveness.  Admitting to a “frisson of doubt,” he worried that exemplars of forgiveness are rare saints, should not be imitated, and manifest a zeal that undermines a politics of compromise.  Other skeptics of forgiveness – most prevalent in the West – take the practice to task for violating victims’ autonomy, for being religious (and hence not having a place in politics), being pressured on victims, undermining just punishment, and being just too difficult.

I wanted to prove otherwise.  But it could only be done empirically.  I had to go to a country, talk to ordinary victims of violence, and then assess how common forgiveness is.  With financial support from the Fetzer Institute, I traveled to Uganda over this past year and carried out a survey of 640 respondents, 10 focus groups, and 27 interviews with individuals.  The Refugee Law Project was my able partner and organized the project logistically.  We conducted the research in five different districts were war has taken place. 

The initial results are startling.  First, I looked at attitudes.  61% of respondents would forgive rebels; 54% would forgive members of the Ugandan military.  Neither number approaches unanimity but both are far higher than the “rare saint” account would suggest. 86% said that “it is good for victims to practice forgiveness in the aftermath of armed violence.”  They did not only advocate forgiveness and also gave heavy support for trials, accountability, and apology.  They did not think forgiveness and punishment were contradictory,

I then looked at the practice of forgiveness among those who had experienced violence, who turned out to be some 90% of the respondents.  68% said that they had forgiven their perpetrator.  Things got a bit more complex in that only 28% of practitioners of forgiveness had forgiven through words; others forgave “from the heart,” meaning that their perpetrator was no longer around to be forgiven face to face.

Despite this complexity, though, Ugandans support forgiveness in attitude and practice for more commonly than the “rare saint” model would predict.  Why do Ugandans forgive?  82% pointed to their religious beliefs, in contrast to 45% tribal traditions and 22% political beliefs.  Other questions showed Ugandans to be a very religious people.  They also cited psychological benefits such as making them less anxious and angry.   Interestingly, 58% said that they forgave because it would help the perpetrator to heal.

While some 70% said that they were encouraged to forgive by a religious leader, very few (less than 7%) said that they felt pressured to forgive by anyone – one of the key charges of the skeptics – whether it be a friend or family member or a religious or political leader.

I have only begun to analyze the results.  I would like to argue, though, that they point to much greater potential for forgiveness in political life than is ordinarily allowed in the West.

Beth Hurd Responds

I invited Beth Hurd to respond to my post of yesterday on her post of Monday morning in Religion Dispatches.  She graciously took up my offer.

I would like to respond to Daniel Philpott’s reaction to my piece on the politics of promoting religious freedom in the Middle East by situating my argument in the two broader research projects from which it emerged. My intention in doing so is to offer interested readers and critics an opportunity to understand how my RD intervention fits into a broader attempt in my current work to understand how and with what consequences the category of “religion” has been taken up nationally and internationally as an object of law and other forms of collective governance. I’ll say a few words about my collaborative research project, and then offer a brief introduction to the argument of my forthcoming book.

Over the past several years I have co-organized the Politics of Religious Freedom project, a collaborative research effort funded by the Luce Foundation to study the discourses of religious freedom in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. These efforts are now bearing fruit, and in 2015 our project team will publish a volume, Politics of Religious Freedom, with the University of Chicago Press. This volume brings together a collection of essays that emerged out of an edited set of blog posts on the SSRC’s online discussion forum The Immanent Frame. Together, the essays collected in that series, the PoRF volume, and other publications, including a special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly and a recently published symposium “Re-thinking Religious Freedom” in the Journal of Law and Religion, work to unsettle in significant ways the assumption that is so ubiquitous in many academic and policy circles—and that is reflected in Dan’s response to my RD essay—that religious freedom is a singular achievement, an easily understood state of affairs, and that the problem lies in its incomplete realization. Our collaborative project has sought to understand the different conceptions of religious freedom at play in the world today, their different social and political contexts, and their varied histories.

Neither my work nor our project takes a position for or against religious freedom. To assume that it does is a misunderstanding of what is in fact a much broader and more encompassing set of research aims and objectives. We are interested in laying out the kind of work advocacy for religious freedom has done, and continues to do, in various societies, and in exploring the political and legal worlds created by and through religious freedom. Our basic assumption is that, before either championing religious freedom or rejecting it, we need to understand the complex social and legal lives of this concept.

In engaging in this work, and learning from our colleagues and exploring these complex histories over a number of years, we have found that religious liberty is not a single, stable principle existing outside of history, as it is often depicted (particularly in policy circles in North America and Europe and by many academics invested in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differing political orders. This realization has led us to pose a number of crucial questions to those engaged in the promotion of religious freedom as a stable and singular human right. These questions, explored in detail in the PoRF volume and our other publications, and underlying my own public interventions on these issues, include: What happens when religious freedom is imagined only through the lexicon of liberal rights as a set of discrete freedoms claimed by individuals or groups from an assumedly neutral state? What claims can and cannot be made regarding religion, personhood, and freedom? What modes of religiosity, notions of religious difference (or non-difference), and idioms of social order and harmony are rendered unintelligible or incoherent?

My forthcoming book, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion, also opens onto a broader set of questions involving the politics of religion in international relations. The book is a study of recent state-sponsored efforts to promote religious freedom, religious engagement, and the rights of religious minorities. It brings together the study of contemporary religion and global politics in a new way, charting the lives of these projects in specific contexts and developing a critique of their consequences. Uncovering and exploring the gap between the religion that is promoted through these efforts and the rest of the world’s religion leads me to challenge the prevailing assumption that the legalization of freedom of religion, engagement with faith communities, and protections for religious minorities are the keys to emancipating society from persecution and discrimination. Instead I argue that these efforts generate social tensions by making religious difference a matter of law, enacting a divide between the religion of those in power and the religion of those without it. This leads to a politics defined by religious difference, favors forms of religion authorized by those in power, and excludes other ways of being and belonging.

While Dan starts with the assumption that “in a country with robust religious freedom, everyone’s religion is protected,” I would encourage him to think further about what exactly is meant by this, and to understand that my book begins from a different premise. I suggest that when governments take up “religious freedom” in the sense that Dan advocates, this requires that they decide which “religions” are “protected” and how, and which individuals and communities have which “religious” “rights” enshrined in law. This places states and the religious freedom advocates who seek to mobilize them in the position of determining what counts as a legitimate “religious” practice, right, or community, granting the latter special status above the others. It thus gives governments more tools for disempowering those whom it dislikes, disagrees with, or refuses to recognize, creating political spaces and institutions in which state-sponsored religious distinctions are not only inevitable but also publically and politically salient. My book creates a space in which to explore these kinds of questions by charting the blurred boundaries and dizzying power dynamics that characterize relations between “official religion,” “governed religion,” and “lived religion.” In the process, it uncovers a different story about the politics of religion. This story is in many ways continuous with the argument of my first book, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, which argued that religion never left public life but has assumed different forms and occupied different spaces under modern regimes of governance, many of which are described as secular.

My forthcoming book also discusses the political economy of the “religionization” of global politics, which I’ll mention by way of conclusion. Today many scholars and practitioners interested in these topics in Europe, North America, and elsewhere see no way forward but to take their place in the burgeoning international infrastructure of religion and development, religion and humanitarianism, religion and legal reform, interfaith understanding, religious rights protections, and so on. There is pressure to sign on to these projects, and, in many cases, strong financial incentives. The field has become an important source of grants, institutional support, career stability, and prestige in an era of neoliberal reform in the academy, increased donor scrutiny and control often informed by strong normative agendas, and faltering support for secure academic positions that provide the opportunity for long-range critical and scholarly reflection. I think it is important to think carefully about the political economy of the new global politics of religion.

I welcome other perspectives on these important issues, and look forward to continuing the conversation.

 

Religious Freedom Advocates Resemble ISIS? Really?

This past weekend a group of about 30 parliamentarians from around the world came together to sign a “Charter for Freedom of Religion or Belief.”  The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom played a key role in organizing the effort.

How much will such a charter matter?  It’s hard to know.  It can’t be a bad thing, though, to build an international coalition of parliamentarians for religious freedom.  It was the U.S. Congress that passed the International Religious Freedom Act, which was championed by key legislators.  Legislatures in other countries can mobilize their foreign policy makers to advocate for religious freedom around the world.

Beth Hurd, though, is not happy with the Charter.  Hurd is a fellow political scientist at Northwestern University who did much to pioneer the study of religion in international relations through her crackerjack book, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations.  But Hurd and I disagree over religious freedom, or at least over the wisdom of promoting it through foreign policy.

Monday, she published a piece in Religion Dispatches saying that the Charter will only embolden ISIS.   She continues an argument against religious freedom policy that she has been carrying on in collaboration with colleagues like Saba Mahmood, an anthropologist at UC Berkeley, Indiana University’s Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and Maryland Law School’s Peter Danchin.  The four of them have been conducting a project on (or against) religious freedom funded by the Luce Foundation.  From Hurd’s website, it looks like she is set to publish a couple of books next year with Princeton Press and Chicago Press presenting her arguments on religious freedom in extended form.  While I am impressed with Hurd’s productivity, I’ll be ready to argue with her.

In yesterday’s piece, Hurd does not mince words.  The “international religious freedom lobby,” as she calls it, “sought to capitalize on the moral panic surrounding ISIS to advance their agenda.”  She then wonders “whether it would be possible to imagine a more effective ISIS-recruitment tool than the image of a group of global parliamentarians, led by the US and the UK, poised to lead the way to civilization by instructing citizens of the Middle East on how to be religiously free.”

Hurd believes that religious freedom advocates are guilty of espousing and seeking to impose a Manichean worldview that resembles that of ISIS itself.  She pulls back from the brink: “Let’s be clear: ISIS and the IRF [International Religious Freedom] lobby cannot be equated.”  But then she goes on to say how similar the two are.  Both seek to impose a simplistic worldview that divides the world up between “us/good” and “them/bad.”  Much like the colonialists of yesteryear, religious freedom advocates carries on a “mission civilisatrice” that aims to export religious freedom to parts of the world who just don’t think in the same terms.  (In a previous post Hurd compared religious freedom advocacy to the Inquisition.)  Religious freedom advocates focus blindly on religion to the exclusion of other causes of conflict and end up reinforcing religious divisions.  Better to respect diversity and allow the rest of the world to do religion and state as it pleases.

What to make of all this?  It is worth remembering that the cause that Hurd believes to resemble that of ISIS is one that is enshrined in . . . the texts of a religion?  No.  The screeds of a fundamentalist?  No.  Try the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  And numerous international law documents.  And the United Nations, which has a rapporteur for religious freedom.  And now the foreign policies of the United States, Canada, Italy, Britain, Norway, and Germany.  The basis for these efforts is the belief that religious freedom is a universal principle that safeguards the dignity of the human person with respect to his or her religious beliefs and pursuits.

But why advocate – or “lobby for,” as Hurd says – this cause now?  Quite simply, because religious freedom is violated on a vast scale in the world today.  76% of the world’s population, according to the Pew Forum, lives in a country in which religious freedom is seriously violated.  Are there many other human rights that are violated today?  Of course.  Numerous other groups of victims also have strong “lobbies” – ngos, governments, the UN – working on their behalf.  Consider the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, or the outcry against torture during the administration of George W. Bush, or the network of groups fighting human trafficking.  Today’s advocates of religious freedom believe that for too long, religious freedom was ignored and so they are trying to create an architecture for this cause, too.

Does religious freedom involve a western colonialist imposition of power?  I wonder what the Bahai’s in Iran would think.  Or the Muslims in Gujurat who were massacred under the eyes of then-governor, now-prime minster of India, Narendra Modi.  Or the Ahmadi sect of Islam in Pakistan or Indonesia.  Or Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian who is now on death row for allegedly insulting Islam.  Or Christians or Uighur Muslims in China.  Or – yes – the many Yazidis and Christians who were victims of ISIS, and the thousands more who would have been had not the Obama Administration intervened with bombs.  And yes, it was their religion per se that drew ISIS’s ire.  So religious freedom advocates resemble ISIS?  Really?  In almost all instances, religious freedom violations are committed against those who are manifestly disempowered – usually small minorities, and on some occasions, majorities such as the Orthodox Russians who were massacred in the millions by the Soviet government in the 1920s. Disempowerment can look like anything from murder to torture to having one’s place of worship destroyed to being imprisoned in metal shipping crates for months in the blistering Eritrean desert.  Like most human rights causes, the religious freedom movement is aimed at defending people against this sort of treatment.

Does religious freedom suppress diversity?  The whole point of religious freedom is to preserve diversity.  The right of religious freedom means that all persons and religious communities have a just claim against being coerced or interfered with in the expression and practice of their religion.  In a country with robust religious freedom, everyone’s religion is protected.  And this necessarily means all minorities as well as every individual who decides not to practice a faith at all.  Religious freedom is only justly curtailed when religious people violate other human rights; obviously there are some things that one cannot do in the name of religion.  It is hard to imagine something more conducive to diversity than religious freedom.

Are religious freedom advocates one-dimensional?  I have not met one to date who believes that violations of religious freedom are the only source of conflict or that other sources of conflict are not equally worthy of attention by foreign policy makers.  Most of us fight hard to get religious freedom on the agenda because we believe that religion and religious freedom alike were muted in American foreign policy (and that of other Western powers) for several decades during and after the Cold War.  We consider it a victory when American (or western) foreign policy makers incorporate religion into their analysis in a serious way at all or make religious freedom even one of many goals of foreign policy.

Funny, Hurd’s (again, very fine) book on secularism makes the same argument – that religion was long squeezed out by secularism in international relations, including in American foreign policy.  She argued, for instance, that a myopic secularism led the U.S. to support the Shah of Iran and helped to breed the Iranian revolution, fueled by forces that U.S. policy makers thought were fading out of history.  Exactly!  Religion matters.  And it was precisely religious freedom that was lacking in the Shah’s Iran.  And precisely his brutal secularism that gave rise to Ayatollah Khomeini.

Yet, now that people are advocating for bringing religious freedom into foreign policy, Hurd labels them Manichean zealots – resembling ISIS, no less.  Again, far from dominating the foreign policy agenda and crowding other causes and dimensions of conflict, most religious freedom advocates yearn for their cause to be anything more than one forgotten in a corner of the State Department.  Consider that even the George W. Bush administration, whose ideology one might think to have been the most conducive among recent Presidents to religious freedom, utterly subordinated this principle to the desire for stability and the war on terrorism.  When U.S. military forces occupied Afghanistan and Iraq – that is, when they exercised power in its rawest form – in both cases the U.S. begged off from insisting on religious freedom in each country’s constitution.  In other words, in those moments when U.S. policy did most resemble colonialist domination (to grant Hurd and company their argument), religious freedom was imperceptibly low on the U.S. agenda.

Does religious freedom advocacy cause division and reinforce the religious dimension of conflict?  Where is the evidence?  Can Hurd name a single place where advocacy for religious freedom has reinforced religious conflict?  Scholars like Brian Grim and Roger Finke have provided evidence for just the contrary – that it is the denial of religious freedom leads to religious violence.  My coauthors Monica Toft, Tim Shah, and I argued much the same in God’s Century.  Is there any doubt that decades of jailing thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood has led to instability and violence in Egypt – and still fuels it?  Or that father and son Asad’s religiously repressive policies in Syria bred Sunni hatred against the regime there?  Or that Saddam’s brutal suppression of Shiites in Iraq stirred up passions for revenge that, once unbottled, led to civil war and the very sectarian governance of Iraq of which ISIS now takes advantage?  Was the denial of religious freedom the only cause of conflict in these countries? Of course not; nobody has ever said that.  But religion is far more important than the traditional — and still standard — secular analysis allows.

Or maybe Hurd thinks that religious freedom is divisive in that it is opposed by, well, all those who do not accept religious freedom in other parts of the world.  But this is hardly an argument against a human rights policy.  Would she say the same for advocacy against torture or human trafficking – namely, that it should not be pursued because it stirs up the ire of the torturers or the traffickers?  Doubtless religious freedom does not conform to the values of many.  But those same many are the ones at whose hands repressed minorities yearn for diversity.

In an earlier post in Arc of the Universe, Tim Shah, developing an argument of his Georgetown colleague, Jacques Berlinerblau, presented Hurd and her colleagues with a contradiction in their thinking.  At the core of Hurd et. al.’s analysis appears to be the view that people should not impose their values on others – imposition and intolerance of diversity is the besetting sin of western advocates of religious freedom.  But if people have a just claim not to have others impose upon them and to be respected in their diversity, does this not start to look like a defense of autonomy?  Of rights to conscience?  Of freedom to practice one’s own way of life?  Of values that emerged at a great price and through great struggle in the West?  If so, then do not these core values start to look an awful lot like liberalism?  Like religious freedom?  Is not religious freedom also about protecting people against imposition, coercion, and domination?  At the heart of things, are not Hurd and colleagues presupposing exactly what they are arguing against?  On the other hand, if they want to deny this, then are they not coming awfully close to relativism with all of its familiar attendant problems?

How might Hurd and her colleagues respond to these criticisms?  A response is in order.

New Report on Religious Freedom

A report on religious freedom around the world has just been published by Aid to the Church in Need.  It covers a wide array of religions and spans 196 countries.  I have only begun to look at it, but it looks like it will be an excellent resource.  It confirms the findings of the Pew Forum that religious freedom violations are massive and widespread in the world today.