I have just written a blog post for the site, God’s Servant First, run by the U.S. Catholic Bishops, on the new book by Nilay Saiya, Weapon of Peace: How Religious Liberty Combats Terrorism, just published by Cambridge University Press, which I recently noted in an ArcU post here.
From the latest post:
Religious freedom advocates face this predicament: We fervently believe that our cause fosters justice and human dignity yet find that these qualities alone do little to persuade officials in the State Department, Defense Department, National Security Council, or the White House to make promoting religious freedom a high priority. In Washington, only the national interest talks.
Well, a formidable case that religious freedom affects our interests now emerges in a book by political scientist Nilay Saiya, Weapon of Peace: How Religious Liberty Combats Terrorism, published this year by Cambridge University Press. (Full disclosure: I was the adviser of Saiya’s doctoral dissertation, on which the book is based). Saiya’s thesis is simple: when governments violate the religious freedom of their citizens, they foment religious terrorism.