A recent piece by Austin Ivereigh looks back at recent violence wrought by Muslims and the surrounding debate about Islam. He strikes all the right balances on my view.
Bridging Mars and Venus for Religious Freedom
Robert Kagan once wrote a book called Americans are from Mars, Europeans from Venus. In the past few years, the United States as well as several European countries, the European Union, and Canada have developed policies promoting religious freedom (though Canada has recently reversed course and closed its Office of Religious Freedom). Does this development show a turn towards cooperation and emphasis on common priorities?
Perhaps, but Mars-and-Venus-like differences have persisted. Europeans stress “religious engagement” and “Freedom of Religion or Belief” while the U.S. is more likely to trumpet religious freedom. Europeans are prone to a multilateral approach while the United States finds it natural to go at it alone. Western European states host more secular populations than the United States.
Seeing hope for cooperation among the U.S. and its European allies over a critically important principle but also realizing the need for bridging differences, the British Council awarded one of its “Bridging Voices” grants to the University of Sussex and the University of Notre Dame to pursue a pair of policy dialogues on “Freedom of Religion or Belief and Foreign Policy,” both of which were held in 2015 at Wilton Park in England and Georgetown University in the United States. The results are summarized in a policy brief that presents recommendations for a unified foreign policy of promoting global religious freedom.
The Culture War Over Religious Freedom Goes Global
The afterglow of 4th of July fireworks is a good moment to reflect on religious freedom. It used to be that Americans saw this principle as part of their common heritage, a constitutional principle that we teach to children in schools and that all take pride in. Now we are starting to see religious freedom become one side in a culture war, even placed in scare quotes in the contemporary media.
Americans have also believed that their experiment in religious freedom was worth exporting. President Roosevelt declared religious freedom as one of the “four freedoms” that made up U.S. aims in World War II. After the war, the U.S. was instrumental in including religious freedom in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Then, after the Cold War, in 1998, the U.S. Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act , institutionalizing the promotion of religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy.
A recent group of critics is calling into question this global promotion. We’ve engaged them in debate previously here at ArcU (see here, here, and here). In the past year, the two leading voices, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Saba Mahmood, have published books with Princeton University Press that look critically at religious freedom. I review these two books in a piece that Lawfare published last week. I take issue with their critique and seek to defend religious freedom.