Signs of Momentum in Religious Freedom Policy

Last week, the U.S. State Department issued its annual International Religious Freedom Report, covering religious freedom around the world during 2017, as mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. Two factors accompanying the issuance of the report serve as encouraging signs for a strong religious freedom policy under the current president.

First, the report was announced through a press conference involving the Secretary of State himself, Mike Pompeo, along with the Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback. Second, Pompeo announced the first ministerial meeting on religious freedom, in which the U.S. will host ministers from other countries who promote religious freedom in order to develop cooperation and solidarity. This is a proactive, forward step that indicates real interest in a religious freedom policy, which, without support from the top, is liable to become marginalized in the corners of the State Department bureaucracy.

An article in Crux summarizes some of the report’s key findings:

– The plight of the Rohingya and the Kachin people in Myanmar. Brownback noted that he visited several of the refugee camps in Bangladesh about a month ago. “The situation is dire. We must do more to help them, as they continue to be targeted for their faith.”

– In North Korea, up to 120,000 political prisoners in “horrific conditions” in camps across the country, some have been imprisoned for religious reasons. The report said there were 1,304 cases of alleged religious freedom violations in the country last year.

– In Eritrea, the government “reportedly killed, arrested, and tortured religious adherents and coerced individuals into renouncing their faith.”

– Tajikistan continues to prohibit minors from even participating in any religious activities.

– Saudi Arabia does not recognize the right of non-Muslims to practice their religion in public and imprisons, lashes, and fines individuals for apostasy, blasphemy, and insulting the state’s interpretation of Islam.

– In Turkmenistan, individuals who gather for worship without registering with the government face arrest, detention, and harassment.

-In China Falun Gong adherents, Uighur Muslims and members of other religious minorities continue to be imprisoned; with many of them dying in custody.

Many of these trends only became worse during 2017.

Everyone Matters

This past Sunday, Notre Dame awarded its 2018 Laetare Medal to Sr. Norma Pimentel, M.J., a religious sister who lives on the U.S.-Mexican border and serves immigrants in the Rio Grande Valley. Sojourners magazine covers the issue well here and includes a video of her short acceptance address. Notre Dame awards the Laetare Medal every year to an American Catholic “whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church and enriched the heritage of humanity” and has been awarding it every year since 1883.

The award — and Sister Pimentel’s emotional address — came shortly after President Donald Trump once again referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals,” a dehumanizing description that he has deployed many times since he announced his presidential candidacy. Some are criminals, no doubt, but they are still human and retain their inviolable dignity. As Pope John Paul II wrote in his encyclical on the dignity of life, Evangelium Vitae, in the context of calling into question the death penalty, “[n]ot even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this.”

Friday, I published this piece taking issue with the decision by the major of my city to veto the zoning request of a pregnancy resources center that wished to locate next to the property of a prospective abortion clinic — also, I maintain, an instance of indifference to the humanity of the poor.

How much do we need, and how far we are, from a politics that upholds the dignity of everyone, no exceptions.

The Christian Response to Persecution of Archbishop Bashar Warda

In the aftermath of the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, what is the future of the Christian church there? Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the population of Christians in Iraq has plummeted from 1.6 million to just under 400,000 in 2016 (estimates vary). Will they continue to exit? Return? Rebuild as a smaller church?

One of the leaders in answering these questions and shepherding the church in Iraq is Archbishop Bashar Warda of the Chaldean Church, based in Irbil, Iraq. Warda has been an international voice for the church, has provided pastoral care and facilitated relief services for 20,000 people, supported refugees, promoted inter-religious dialogue, and inaugurated a Catholic university in 2015.

Earlier this semester, the Under Caesar’s Sword project here at Notre Dame hosted Archbishop Warda with the support and sponsorship of the Center for Ethics and Culture. Warda spoke in several venues in the United States, including Georgetown University, where he was hosted by the Religious Freedom Research Project, partner in Under Caesar’s Sword. Warda exemplifies what Under Caesar’s Sword is all about: the response of Christians to persecution. He exemplifies one of the most salient findings of the project, namely that Christians respond to persecution even under the most difficult of circumstances through constructive efforts to build ties with other communities and contribute to the common good, thereby strengthening their freedom and position in society. Outsiders who understand this response can better assist Christians living under persecution.

Warda’s talk at Notre Dame was well attended and well received. Several students afterwards asked how they could be involved in helping persecuted Christians. One student, Zach Pearson, wrote up the talk in Notre Dame’s renowned student publication, The Irish Rover. As Pearson describes, Warda’s first point was a challenge to Muslims:

He stated that “if there is to be any future for Christians and other religious minorities … in the Middle East, there must be a change and correction within Islam.”

He was predominantly concerned with the ideology of political Islam, including the enshrining of sharia as state law, which causes non-Muslims to effectively become second class citizens.  He called it a “ruling system that preaches inequality and justified persecution,” which therefore needs to be stopped in order for Christians to survive.  This realization has been made by leading Muslim minds in Asia, but has not yet found its way to the Middle East, the archbishop noted.

In reference to ISIS, the archbishop said that “while the fighting force of Daesh [ISIS] may have been defeated … the idea of the reestablishment of the caliphate has been firmly implanted in many minds throughout the Muslim world.”  He made the point that it is a change in ideology along with a prevention of violence that is key to saving the Christian presence in the Middle East.

His second point was about how the West could help Christians survive in Iraq:

He highlighted a few main points:  the importance of prayer; efforts from Western leaders to support equality for minorities in countries where persecution is taking place; and material and intellectual support focused on helping create sustainable Christian communities, specifically in the realms of education and healthcare. Additionally, the archbishop cited the importance of not allowing a sense of “historical relativism” to cloud the reality of persecution.

When asked what college students can do to actively contribute to helping persecuted Christians, he said that “praying for us is important.”  He spoke to the importance of social media to raise awareness for persecuted Christians, who, he reminded the audience, are “the most persecuted religion today.”  He referred to students who have come to help teach in schools and volunteer in these communities for anywhere from a one month to a whole year.  Finally, he called students to speak out publicly on campus, asking rhetorically, “when the next wave of violence begins to hit us, will anyone on your campus here hold demonstrations and carry signs that [say] ‘We are all Christians’?”

To me, one of the most remarkable of Warda’s points was a response to persecution that he recounted Christians in Iraq exercising: forgiveness. Christians have forgiven and continue to forgive their persecutors. This does not preclude at all their efforts to secure help, bolster their position, or defeat ISIS decisively. It is one response of Christians, though, that amounts to a distinctly Christian response.

 

Religious Freedom: The Muslim Question

Today the Religious Freedom Institute launches its Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team in Washington, D.C. As a Senior Associate Scholar at RFI, I’ve seen first hand the Institute’s unfolding of a vision since its founding in 2016, one of the most impressive dimensions of which is the establishment of action teams of activists and scholars to promote religious freedom in various spheres – a South and South Asia team, and ones for the Middle East, the United States, International Religious Freedom Policy . . . and now Islam. Heading up the Islam team is Jennifer Bryson, an ArcU contributor, no less.

Here at Arc of the Universe, much attention is given to the persecution of Christians around the world. It is critical to stress that religious freedom is a human right for all human beings and to shine the spotlight as well on other religions, regions, and contexts in which widespread and egregious violations of religious freedom take place. One is Islam. Muslims number 1.8 billion adherents and are 24% of the population (that’s from the Pew Research Center in 2015), form a majority of the population in 47 countries (give or take a few depending on how you count) and have large populations elsewhere (consider India, where Muslims are 14% of the population and number 172 million – nearly 10% of the world’s population of Muslims!).

Most importantly, religious freedom issues are rife among Muslim populations. A piece in The Spectator dated this past Saturday, March 31, expresses valence of these issues in its title, “When Will the West Take A Stand on the Persecution of Muslims?” Critics in the West routinely tar Muslims as violators of religious freedom, overlooking that they are, in large numbers, among the violated.

The piece opens:

Anti-Christian persecution, for so long a great untold story, has started to gain the world’s attention. But the suffering of Christian communities, from Syria to Nigeria to China, is part of an even broader phenomenon. Religious conflict is on the rise across the globe, with ancient tensions being raised by new political methods. And in many countries — Sri Lanka, India, the Central African Republic and elsewhere — it’s Muslims who have the most reason to fear violence. In Burma, they may even have been victims of genocide.

That, at any rate, is what UN officials are trying to investigate after a wave of brutality which has forced 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee the coastal region of Rakhine State since last August. Burmese soldiers, police and armed civilians carried out a campaign of diabolical violence, in which hundreds of villages were burned to the ground and helpless civilians were machine-gunned and dumped in mass graves.

There were warning signs — in 2012, 200 Rohingyas were killed and more than 100,000 displaced — but Western observers missed them. Sanctions were lifted, foreign investment surged, Aung San Suu Kyi was hailed as her country’s saviour. As the human rights campaigner Benedict Rogers observes, the international community was ‘too quick to embrace positive signs. It was almost inconvenient to be confronted with what was happening to the Rohingyas and others’.

The scene in India is eye-opening, too:

In India, too, ancient tensions have been emphasised by new movements, in this case Hindu ones. The RSS, a volunteer network of millions, sees India as a ‘Hindu nation’ and runs programmes to convert Christians and Muslims. This tradition has its extremists — some of whom are close to power.

Officials from the ruling BJP party, an offshoot of the RSS, have rewritten school textbooks to bring them closer to the nationalist story. (For example, the fact that Gandhi’s killer was a Hindu fanatic goes unmentioned in some classrooms.) One of the party’s star campaigners is the firebrand Hindu priest Yogi Adityanath, who once told an audience: ‘If they kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men.’

Every few months someone is killed by a lynch mob on suspicion of possessing beef. Hindi has recently gained a new word, gautankwad, which literally translates as ‘cow terrorism’. A spokesman for Minority Rights Group International tells me that there are ‘degrees of state complicity’ in these incidents. And when the authorities tighten legislation against cow slaughter and on ‘forced conversions’, it can ‘provide a cloak of legitimacy to anti-minority violence and discrimination’. Yet, the plight of India’s Muslims — four million of them in the province of Kashmir, where the Indian army stands accused of countless human rights abuses — goes un-remarked by western leaders uncomfortably aware of India’s economic clout.

Of course, “the Muslim Question” also must be asked of Muslim countries, factions, and schools of thought that are unfriendly to religious freedom. Mustafa Akyol, who writes regularly for The New York Times, is a pioneer for religious freedom in Islam, and is a dissident who has suffered for his stands, including being detained in Malaysia last year, penned a piece in the Times a week ago Sunday arguing that religious repression causes Muslims to leave the faith — and, conversely, that a regime and atmosphere of freedom promotes a vital faith:

As a Muslim who is not happy to see my coreligionists leave the faith, I have a great idea to share with the Iranian authorities:

If they want to avert more apostasy from Islam, they should consider oppressing their people less, rather than more, for their very oppression is itself the source of the escape from Islam.

That truth is clear in stories told by former Muslims, some of which I have heard personally over the years. Of course, as in every human affair, motivations for losing faith in Islam are complex and vary from individual to individual. But suffering from the oppression or violence perpetrated in the name of religion is cited very often.

A final plug: My interest in the Muslim Question is strong, having just completed a book manuscript on the issue that Oxford University Press will be publishing, tentatively titled, Religious Freedom in Islam? Intervening in a Public Controversy. I wrote the book under the auspices of what has now become the Religious Freedom Institute. More to come on this.

Today, my congratulations and best wishes go to Jennifer Bryson and the new Islam & Religious Freedom Action Team at RFI.

Walk the Way of the Cross with Today’s Christian Martyrs

This week is Holy Week for Christians and a good occasion to remember today’s Christian martyrs. The Community of Sant’Egidio , which journalist John Allen recently dubbed “The Pope’s Favorite Movement,” does just that through its annual prayer for martyrs — in which the names of recent ones are read out — in the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome that takes place Tuesday of every Holy Week. Local Sant’Egidio communities, including ours here in South Bend, Indiana (where I am a member), follow suit with their own annual prayer of remembrance.

This year the prayer is more urgent that ever. Aid to the Church in Need’s 2017 report, Persecuted and Forgotten? reports that the persecution of Christians, already widespread, has only become worse in the last couple of years. The Under Caesar’s Sword project studies and reports Christian responses.

An article in yesterday’s Washington Times, details one site of this persecution that is surprising to many — India. The country’s Hindu nationalist government, and many state governments, use trumped-up charges of induced and forced conversion as a pretext to pass anti-conversion laws that serve to repress the country’s minority Christian community (2.3% of the population). Christians are also harassed and attacked by Hindu nationalist groups.

India is one of many sites — add China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and many others — where Christians are denied their religious freedom harshly. Solidarity means remembering their Way of the Cross as we walk ours, and working for their religious freedom as we undertake our own participation in the resurrection.

 

 

 

How the Democrats Left Catholics

In previous posts I have lamented the decline of the pro-life Democrats. Skeptics have told me that you can fit them in a telephone booth. Now, I fear, they’re being actively driven out of the party. Abortion rights activists sought to oust Representative Dan Lipinski, a Chicago-area congressman, who is one of the few pro-life Democrats left. He barely survived a challenge in the Illinois Democratic primary last week.

Fittingly, also last week, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York dissected and lamented the Democrats’ failure to support life as well as Catholic education, which benefits the poor and minorities.

Wrotes Dolan on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal on March 23:

[T]he dignity and sanctity of human life, the importance of Catholic schools, the defense of a baby’s civil rights . . . were, and still are, widely embraced by Catholics. This often led Catholics to become loyal Democrats. I remember my own grandmother whispering to me, “We Catholics don’t trust those Republicans.”

I can hear my grandmother, a life-long Democrat, saying the same.

Such is no longer the case, a cause of sadness to many Catholics, me included. [These] two causes . . .  the needs of poor and middle-class children in Catholic schools, and the right to life of the baby in the womb . . . largely have been rejected by the party of our youth . . .. Last year, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez insisted that pro-life candidates have no place in the modern Democratic Party.

He concludes:

The “big tent” of the Democratic Party now seems a pup tent. Annafi Wahed, a former staffer to Hillary Clinton, recently wrote in this newspaper about her experience attending the Conservative Political Action Conference. She complimented the conservative attendees pointing out that most made her feel welcome at their meeting. They listened attentively to her views—a courtesy, she had to admit, that would not be given to them at a meeting of political liberals.

I’m a pastor, not a politician, and I’ve certainly had spats and disappointments with politicians from both of America’s leading parties. But it saddens me, and weakens the democracy millions of Americans cherish, when the party that once embraced Catholics now slams the door on us.

If the Democratic Party cannot be persuaded to shift their views in principle, it seems that the Hindenburg of November 2016 might have taught them that their radical exclusion of life and support for Catholic education are bad politics. The states where Hillary Clinton critical lost — Midwest Rust Belt states and Florida – are ones where Catholic voters exist in large numbers, are willing to vote for either party, and would be persuaded by an economic progressive who is pro-life — or at least not radically pro-abortion rights, as Hillary was — and favors support for religious schools that are on the side of the little guy. But the Democrats can no longer claim to be the party of the little guy.

To American Catholics: Under Caesar’s Sword is the Solution to Not Doing Enough About Persecuted Christians

In a piece at Crux, Journalist John Allen discusses a new survey conducted by Aid to the Church in Need on a topic of great interest here at Arc of the Universe, the persecution of Christians around the world. The survey assesses the attitudes of American Catholics towards this persecution and shows that they are aware of it but that they don’t think bishops are doing enough to address it.

American Catholics get it, he says:

[P]resented with a list of sixteen nations and asked to rank the severity of anti-Christian persecution in those places, American Catholics more or less nailed it, identifying North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan as the worst offenders

And yet:

[T]he results also reveal a relatively low level of urgency among American Catholics about coming to the aid of persecuted Christians. Asked to choose in terms of level of concern among five issues – human trafficking, poverty, climate change, the refugee crisis, and anti-Christian persecution – the persecution of Christians finished last.

And they don’t think their church is doing enough:

34 percent of American Catholics . . . believe their bishop isn’t doing anything on anti-Christian persecution, or, if he is, they don’t know about it, and 35 percent [believe] the same thing is true about their parish – in both cases, above one-third of the total Catholic population.

What can increase the sense of urgency and lead Catholics to urge their bishops and their parishioners to do more? The Under Caesar’s Sword project! Based on the fieldwork of 17 leading scholars of global Christianity, the project offers ready-to-use curricula for schools and parishes, a 26-minute documentary and guide for showing it to audiences, a public report that summarizes the findings, and much else. The project’s very purpose is to raise awareness and motivate action on behalf of Christians where they are most persecuted. Explore here.

The project works closely with Aid to the Church in Need and is based at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture and the Religious Freedom Institute.

Goodbye Germain Grisez

I just saw news that the theologian Germain Grisez died today. I am sure that tributes will flow soon from those who worked closely with him. I enjoyed the blessing of meeting him a couple of times and his thought has influenced mine a lot. A couple of years ago, I carefully worked through his The Way of the Lord Jesus, all 900 pages of it, which I would have undertaken and persisted in only were I convinced that I was walking through an intellectual gold mine. Over some six decades, Grisez fashioned a moral theology that was astonishingly creative yet profoundly faithful to the Catholic magisterial tradition. More than all but a few moral theologians, he answered the Second Vatican Council’s call to account for why and how the Church’s moral norms embody well-being, happiness, and fulfillment.

What I admire most about Grisez was his uncompromising integrity and his unwavering commitment to truth. I have known few other scholars less concerned about lining up with a particular camp, faction, committee, or promotional pathway — apart from that of the Church and of the narrow road that leads to life. In the 1960s, he wrote a defining work defending the Catholic Church’s prohibition on contraception and one of the earliest and still most compelling books on the injustice of abortion. Part of the conservative camp? Well, consider his searing critique of nuclear deterrence written with John Finnis and Joseph Boyle in the mid 1980s. I have been reading ethics and international affairs for 30 years and consider this the best book I’ve ever read in the field. Even though it deals with Cold War dilemmas, I still assign it to my students as a model of ethical reasoning (and I’m convinced it still has much to say to us in a day when our president threatens “fire and fury” against North Korea). The final chapter, on how faithfulness in this life connects with eternal life, is alone worth reading and rereading.

Speaking of heaven, one of Grisez’s important theological innovations was a way of imagining heaven. If I understand it — and sorry, this rough, Grisez experts! — the idea is that heaven is more than just the beatific vision of contemplating God but is also a dynamic condition of enjoying the wide range of human goods perfected in a celestial community with many others — an eternal city of knowledge, play, health, and beauty. It is beautiful to think that now he inhabits what he described.

Debating Forgiveness: In Warm Appreciation of Colleen Murphy’s Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice

I delivered the following remarks at a panel launching philosopher Colleen Murphy’s outstanding new book, The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice at the University of Illinois-Urbana on Monday, October 23rd, 2017.

It is such an honor to comment on Colleen Murphy’s new book on transitional justice, which I believe is an outstanding success and deserves to be regarded as one of the leading accounts of transitional justice. Colleen succeeds both in showing that transitional justice is a distinct circumstance, or context, of justice, and how transitional justice can be a compelling substantive concept of justice. It is out of deep sympathy and admiration for the aims and achievements of Colleen’s book that I would like to pay it the tribute of engaged critique, focusing on her second task, the substantive content of transitional justice.

What I would like to argue is that Colleen’s substantive concept of transitional justice is one and the same as the concept widely known as restorative justice. Were Colleen to accept this argument, it would in no way negate her intricate and well-defended claims, but it would serve the cause of unity and conceptual progress in the global conversation about transitional justice and would fortify a widely recognized school of thought.

Restorative justice is a concept of justice that has arisen within stable western democracies to address crime within communities, especially that involving juveniles. Several theorists, though, have sought to expand restorative justice to entire societies addressing past injustices. Restorative justice articulates all of the major core features of Colleen’s concept of transitional justice, indeed the very features that, in my view, make it so compelling: a central stress on relationship; a holistic and interdependent approach to harms and restorative practices; the participation of relevant stakeholders; the retributivist insight that justice must address wrong and guilt; and a conception of crime and its redress that is broadened to the wide web of victims, harms, and perpetrators. Restorative justice, in my view, is virtually synonymous with another concept familiar to political transitions, reconciliation, which is the holistic restoration of right relationship. Reconciliation was the central concept that Colleen defended in her last book, A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation, and on p. 120 of the present book she notes the close link between reconciliation and her rendering of transitional justice. If reconciliation and restorative justice are also one and the same, then Colleen herself points to the resonance of her thinking with restorative justice.

Now, early in the present book, Colleen explicitly considers restorative justice but declines its invitation. Her reason? Restorative justice centers upon forgiveness, which she explains does not properly belong in the justice of societal transitions. In fact, though, the restorative justice literature itself does not center forgiveness as she believes it does. True, some theorists of political restorative justice include forgiveness. I am one of them, as is, far more prominently, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, whose book, No Future Without Forgiveness, weaves forgiveness tightly into the fabric of restorative justice. But the broad literature on restorative justice, including some of its most distinguished theorists like John Braithwaite and Howard Zehr, does not integrate forgiveness into restorative justice. So, Colleen could well render her theory restorative justice while maintaining her skepticism of forgiveness.

I wish to argue further, however, that forgiveness ought to be included in restorative justice and reconciliation in collective, political, transitional contexts and to enter a dialogue with Colleen about her reasons for rejecting it, which she spells out on pages 23 and 24, echoing her previous book’s position. She makes clear that she has no objection to forgiveness in interpersonal contexts where basic background conditions like reciprocity and respect are in place. But, she argues, when these background conditions are not in place, as is the case with war and dictatorship, forgiveness is a no-go. It is a passive, submissive response that can serve to maintain conditions of oppression or injustice and fails to recognize the value of anger or resentment, which can be critical to the self-worth and self-respect of victims, she maintains.

I want to argue for a different way of thinking about forgiveness, though, and to show, if briefly, how it can help construct right relationships in transitional political orders. I draw not only upon arguments about what forgiveness is but also upon an empirical investigation of forgiveness in the wake of armed conflict that I conducted in Uganda, a country whose experience Colleen reflects upon towards the end of her book. Through a nationwide survey of 640 inhabitants of five regions where armed violence took place, ten focus groups, and twenty-seven in-depth interviews, I investigated the frequency and character of forgiveness in fraught political contexts.

Forgiveness is not foreign to countries facing gargantuan violent pasts. A discourse of forgiveness could be found in South Africa, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Guatemala, Chile, Northern Ireland, Germany, Timor Leste, and numerous other transitional countries of the past generation. Global leaders, most notably Tutu and Pope John Paul II, advocated it as well. Discourse does not mean just practice, of course, but it does establish that forgiveness is not merely the brainchild of scholars sitting in offices in western universities.

Defense begins with definition. Colleen says that forgiveness is a matter of overcoming anger and resentment, which it is in part, but I hold that forgiveness involves another dimension, a will to construct right relationship. The forgiver wills to construe a perpetrator as one against whom he no longer holds an offense and to treat the perpetrator accordingly. This critical component of forgiveness helps to reframe forgiveness as something other than a passive acquiescence to injustice, which it might be were it merely a matter of relinquishment. Now, the forgiver is an active, constructive agent who seeks to build peace, both with respect to the perpetrator but also, in contexts of political injustice, in the society that badly needs to address its past injustices. In becoming an active constructor, the forgiver arguably regains agency rather than reinforces her passive position.

Importantly, forgiveness does not condone, but rather presupposes, a full identification and condemnation of injustices. It shares this construal with resentment and, like resentment, seeks to overcome or defeat this injustice, albeit in a different manner. Indeed, in contributing to restoring relationship, forgivers arguably enact the transitional justice of restored relationships.

Consider Angelina Atyam, a Ugandan mother of a girl whom the Lord’s Resistance Army abducted from a girls school along with 130 other girls in 1996. Meeting with other parents of abducted daughters in a local church, Atyam sensed a call to forgive, which she followed. She even sought out the mother of the LRA soldier who held her daughter in captivity and, through her, forgave the soldier along with his entire clan. When the soldier later died in the conflict, Atyam sought her out and wept with her. Atyam became a public advocate for forgiveness, which she believed could contribute greatly to peace.

Other prominent cases of forgivers who actively constructed better social worlds might be mentioned, too –Nelson Mandela, for instance. Both Mandela and Atyam also illustrate that forgiveness is compatible with other kinds of efforts to build justice. Mandela actively sought the demise of apartheid and spent 26 years in prison for it. Atyam and the other parents formed an association to advocate for the girls’ release. When Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, felt threatened by the international exposure that these efforts elicited, he approached Atyam and offered to release her daughter if she and the other parents would cease their efforts. Atyam refused: She would only cease if all the girls were released. No passive acquiescence to injustice can be found here.

I have argued in my book, Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, that there are theoretical reasons why forgiveness is compatible with judicial punishment, reparations, the telling of truth, and public apologies on the part of perpetrators, all of which provide compensation or vindication to victims. Ugandans agree. The survey showed victims being widely sympathetic towards all of these measures but also, interestingly, willing to practice forgiveness even when these measures were absent, as they by and large were in Uganda.

Are Atyam and Mandela rare saints? Here is where the survey is telling. It revealed that 68% of Ugandans who suffered violence in contexts of war exercised forgiveness. 86% agreed with the statement that it is good to forgive in the aftermath of armed violence. These startlingly high numbers were corroborated in the focus groups, where participants offered thoughtful reflections on forgiveness, including some of its liabilities, but in no case argued that forgiveness was beyond the pale or the preserve of the rare saint. Broadly, Ugandans living in the aftermath of violence agree that forgiveness is in principle an appropriate action and have undertaken it frequently.

One of the standard charges against forgiveness, reflecting the worry about victims becoming more victimized, is that it is, but should not be, pressured upon victims. The criticism is right. Forgiveness, which depends uniquely upon the inward will of victims, ought not to be pressured. The problem, though, is the pressure, and not the forgiveness. 94% of the Ugandans who forgave reported that they were not pressured to forgive, showing that pressure is not endemic to the practice of forgiveness in political settings.

Contributing to the plausibility of forgiveness in Uganda is a dimension that it is critical to its performance: religion. Ugandans are predominantly Christian and rank high in measures of religiosity. 82% of those who forgave reported having done so on account of their religious beliefs. Forgiveness was equally religiously motivated in one region that was predominantly Muslim. This reflects a trend that applies to transitional justice globally, which has taken place predominantly, though not exclusively, among majority Christian populations in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and East Asia. It should not be surprising that religious leaders have been major voices in transitional justice debates and are often advocates of reconciliation and forgiveness. Such was true in Uganda, where 70% of victims who forgave reported that a religious leader encouraged them to do so.

The place of religious warrants in transitional justice, of course is a debate all of its own. A case could be made that religion reframes the concepts of burden, agency, resentment, construction, and right relationship that are at stake in debates about forgiveness. This would require a foray into theology. What is important here is that forgiveness can be understood to be a practice that constructs right relationship and thus arguably has a place in Colleen’s formidable theory of transitional justice.

Mustafa Akyol’s Courageous Muslim Witness for Religious Freedom

Just over a week, ago, a remarkable op-ed appeared in The New York Times written by Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish writer with a regular column in The Times. This column was different. Only a few days earlier, he describes, he was in jail in Malaysia for speaking out for religious freedom and for the rationalist tradition in Islam. In the column, he decried the government’s actions and called for religious freedom in Malaysia: there shall be no compulsion in religion, it says in the Quran.

Akyol’s courage should not be lost on any reader. He is one of Islam’s leading voices for religious freedom and freedom in general and has suffered at the hands not only of Malaysia but of several governments for his dissidence and his witness.