I’ve long admired Canon Andrew White, aka the Vicar of Baghdad. He’s an Anglican priest who’s been on the ground in Baghdad working for reconciliation for quite a few years now. Read The Independent’s excellent story on him.
China Says It Is Ending Its One-Child Policy: Welcome News?
The government of China has announced that it is ending the one-child policy. Good news, right? A couple of recent pieces offset the supposed progress with some sobering insights (here and here).
Here are my own versions of the criticisms.
One is that the language of “policy shift” obscures the vast cruelty and horror that the policy has involved. It is estimated that over 300 million abortions have taken place under the policy since it was instituted in 1980. For those who affirm, as I do, the humanity of the unborn child, this is over 300 million deaths of innocent, voiceless human beings. Even those who look upon the abortion issue in terms of “reproductive rights,” however, ought to share in the horror of this policy, for a large proportion of these abortions were forced upon women through brutal coercion and an even larger proportion through strong incentives, including the fear of such coercion. What could be further removed from reproductive freedom? Add to this the “sex selection” dimension of massive abortion, which has left tens of millions of men without a corresponding mate and has encouraged prostitution, sex trafficking and the “importing” of women from other countries. If China’s policy is abating, then, this is welcome news, but we should not refrain from remembering the cruelty, honoring the dead, and demanding some kind of acknowledgment if not accountability from this regime.
Second, it is not clear that the policy of coerced abortion and sharp control over reproductive decisions is really ending. The government says that it is now pursuing a two-child policy – one that is likely to remain brutal on a large scale.
Third, the government looks upon the policy decision as just that – one that it made for economic and demographic reasons. The government of China shows no inclination to acknowledge the massive human rights violation that the policy has involved.
Celebrations of this news must be muted.
Responses to Oppression Sometimes Stop Me in My Tracks
These days I and my colleagues at Notre Dame and at Georgetown are busily preparing for a major international conference in Rome on December 10-12 on Christian responses to persecution. It arises from a research project that is sending fourteen leading scholars of global Christianity out to over 30 countries to look at these responses. I anticipate that responses will be highly varied, ranging among heroic resistance; fleeing for life; diplomatic accommodation to repressive regimes; forgiveness; taking up arms; interreligious peacebuilding; and martyrdom. We want to be careful and even-handed even though — well, in fact, because — we also work out of moral concern and a desire for solidarity.
Sometime, though, I come across a response to persecution that stops me in my tracks and I stand in awe. That is what happened when I read about the Archbishop of Saigon, Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, who was imprisoned in 1975 and held there for 13 years, nine of these in solitary confinement. Here is his story.
Religion and World Order
Take note of a fascinating symposium on religion and world order now presented online by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.
From Berkley’s website: “In advance of a workshop on religion and world order held at the Berkley Center on September 18, 2015, Center director Tom Banchoff circulated a discussion paper that served as a starting point for debate. His main argument is excerpted below, along with a range of responses. The workshop, cosponsored by the Chumir Ethics Foundation, was convened in the run up to the Congress of Vienna 2015, a gathering of global thought leaders to discuss and develop principles for a stable and just world.”
Here is my own response. I take issue with Tom’s argument that international norms have become secularized and argue that they are more religious than they at first appear.
Here’s the excerpt of Banchoff’s piece:
“In the name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity…”
So began the General Treaty of the Congress of Vienna two centuries ago.
The role of religion in world order has changed markedly since. The forces that dominate international affairs today—nation-states, market economies, and international institutions—interact outside of any religious frame. The recent 109-page nuclear accord with the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, is free of religious language.
It does not follow that religion plays no role in world politics. In fact its domestic salience has grown over the past several decades. Examples include the Religious Right in the United States and Israel, Hindu and Buddhist nationalism in Asia, and political Islam across parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Even in Europe, a bastion of secularism, a growing religious pluralism is impacting the political scene.
Nevertheless, religion’s influence continues to be felt within an international system that remains strikingly secular.
For most of human history political legitimacy has rested on some sacred foundation. The Mandate of Heaven in China, the caliphate within Islam, the Divine Right of Kings in the West—all are examples of rule legitimated in terms of some supernatural, transcendent, or timeless foundation. This religious frame also applied to external affairs. Relations among empires, kingdoms, and principalities—the closest analog to today’s international relations—unfolded within a higher, cosmic or sacred order. For most of recorded history it was routine to invoke God, or gods, in both the conduct of war and the negotiation of peace. The Congress of Vienna participated to a considerable degree in this age-old tradition.
By 1815, however, the religious frame was beginning to fade. The emergence of states out of the ruins of the Holy Roman Empire, the waning of ecclesial power and the Reformation, and the end of the religious wars in the Peace of Westphalia (1648) were critical milestones. The democratic and nationalist ideologies advanced by the American and French revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century reinforced the secularizing trend. Against this backdrop the Holy Alliance that followed on the Congress of Vienna appears as a failed effort to revive the idea of Christendom—to forge a Europe of God-fearing rulers committed to “justice, love and peace.”
The world order that eventually emerged after two cataclysmic world wars, the onset of the Cold War, and decolonization was deeply secular in its foundations. The United Nations system has been built upon the principles of national sovereignty, national self-determination, and non-interference in the affairs of other states. It does not invoke God, gods, or any particular religious tradition. Today interstate diplomacy, transnational trade and finance, and international law have largely remained a realm of material interests and secular rules and norms.
This is not, of course, to argue that the institutions, rules, and norms that constitute the international system have nothing to do with religion. As recent scholarship has shown, principles of sovereignty and norms of human rights and humanitarianism have a considerable historical debt to religious ideas and practices. It does not follow, however, that those institutions are religious today in any meaningful sense. International leaders in politics, business, and civil society, are able to think, talk, and act across a range of transnational issues without reference to God or any particular religious tradition. That represents a significant historical break, the outcome of a centuries-long evolution.
There is no guarantee that this configuration will persist into the future. One can imagine a transformative turn in globalization—long awaited by many—that will take us beyond the nation-state to a global civil society, in which religious and other social and political forces can somehow forge a world polity. A more global civil society and emergent global polity would certainly allow more of a role for religion in the (re)construction of world order. Whether the result would ultimately be more harmony or more conflict is a matter for speculation.
Another, opposed set of changes to the international system would also allow a potentially transformative role for religion—not the formation and integration of a global polity but varieties of global disintegration. One can envision a range of transregional catastrophes, ranging from wars and pandemics to ecological disaster, that might have the double effect of unraveling the existing international system and generating large-scale religious awakenings. It is not hard to imagine that the intolerant and violent currents within those traditions would flourish in such apocalyptic scenarios.
The specter of such disasters, perhaps more real than often acknowledged, is reason enough to encourage a positive role for religion in the reform of world order today and in decades to come. The overlapping ethical principles of peace, justice, and solidarity articulated across major religious traditions will always be in some tension with norms of state sovereignty and economic self-interest that now ground the international system. Given that tension, one can imagine the emergence of a powerful, transnational coalition of religious and secular forces mobilized around ethical principles that works through governments, markets, and international organizations to advance basic civil, political, economic, and social rights, and peace on a global level. Such a development might gradually transform our existing world order from within—and for the better.
Rescue Them! The Case for Coming to the Help of Religious Minorities in the Middle East
Over the past few days, a couple of good pieces have appeared making the case for rescuing Christians – and, I would echo the point here — other religious minorities who are victims of ISIS.
Chloe Valdary at the Wall Street Journal makes an analogy of Christians in the Middle East to the Vietnamese “boat people” whom the U.S. rescued in 1975. See here. Here is her opening:
In 1975, as desperate Vietnamese sought to escape Communist rule, the U.S. embarked on what remains one of the greatest humanitarian rescue missions in history. Over the span of several weeks, Operation Frequent Wind, Operation Babylift and other missions by air or on sea saved and resettled tens of thousands of Vietnamese in the U.S., where they would become thriving American citizens.
Now another desperate population needs rescuing: persecuted Christians in the Middle East. Could there be an Operation Frequent Wind for them?
Then in The Weekly Standard, Elliott Abrams makes a similar case. For him, the Jews are the right analogy:
The rescue of threatened Jewish communities has been a central public purpose of Jews living in safety. American Jews pressed their government to push back against repression in Morocco in the 19th century and in czarist Russia in the early 20th. They failed to get the doors open for many Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, but they tried—despite rampant antisemitism, not least in the State Department. They succeeded in opening the doors of Soviet Russia, whence a million Jews fled to Israel.
It is in that context that the failure of the United States and the countries of Western Europe—all of which have overwhelming Christian majorities in their populations—to protect or to accept as refugees many Middle Eastern Christians (and other minorities, such as the Yazidis and Baha’i) is worth exploring. To be sure, Jews have been an oppressed and endangered minority for a couple of thousand years, so the habits of rescue are deeply ingrained in liturgy and in communal life. Christians have had two pretty good millennia, and the idea that there are Christian communities being destroyed, and Christians being enslaved, raped, and murdered because of their faith, may be hard for many Christians in the year 2015 to understand.
I’m persuaded.
Umbrella Revolution Christian?
Almost exactly a year ago I posted a couple of pieces on the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong and its Christian, especially Catholic, influence. Several pieces came out around that time with similar themes. See here and here.
My colleague here in the political science department at Notre Dame, Victoria Hui, dissents. See her interesting piece here.
Religious Freedom Over There: Can It Span the Atlantic?
Seventeen years ago, in 1998, the U.S. Congress mandated religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy through the International Religious Freedom Act. In recent years, Canada, Britain, Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Norway have adopted foreign policies of religious freedom in one way or another. Might these democracies cooperate in their religious freedom policies?
This coming Thursday and Friday, October 8th and 9th, 2015, a policy dialogue will be held at Georgetown University to explore the potential for transatlantic cooperation in religious freedom policy. The first day will feature a keynote address by Peter Berger, the famous sociologist of Boston University, with comments by David Brooks of The New York Times and Walter Russell Mead, a prominent commentator on foreign affairs and professor at Bard College. Then, a succession of panels will explore issues surrounding cooperation across the Atlantic. The day will close with a keynote address by U.S. Ambassador for Religious Freedom David Saperstein. The second day will focus on how religious freedom plays in regions of the world, including the Middle East, India and the Far East, and Eastern Europe and the Orthodox world. If you’re in the area and want to come, please RSVP here.
Cooperation across the Atlantic, in my view, would be a good thing. Although I am a strong supporter of the U.S. promoting religious freedom around the world, the policy has had its flaws. Perhaps the best fruit of it is the annual reports on religious freedom around the world put out by the Office of International Religious Freedom at the State Department and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. These reports give exposure to the violation of this precious human right and provide a critical commodity for policymakers, activists, and scholars — namely, good information on what is happening on the ground around the world.
A more difficult question, though, is: How much more religiously free is the world today because of U.S. foreign policy? Is a single country more religiously free than it otherwise would be because of this policy? Maybe so; I would welcome positive examples. I doubt there are many, though.
I do not at all wish that religious freedom policy would fade. I want there to be more religious freedom and less religious repression in the world and I want the U.S. to be a force for freedom. I propose, though, that religious freedom policy would be much more effective were it multilateral — coordinated in a common front of western democracies. Together, they could wield more hard power — economic sanctions, for instance — as well as more soft power — diplomatic and institutional influence — for religious freedom.
The proposal is not without its difficulties. Would multilateral cooperation water down the pursuit of religious freedom so as to make it meaningless? Would there be fractiousness over strategy? Would there be all talk and little action?
Deeper differences will arise over different religious profiles among western democracies. Populations of Western Europe, Canada, and the European Union tend to be more secularized than that of the United States. They do not offer the same level of popular support for religious freedom (in the U.S., IRFA was passed with strong popular support and grassroots mobilization, as detailed here). Will there be resulting differences in how religious freedom is promoted? The European Union and some western European democracies often use the term Freedom of Religion and Belief (FORB) which is wider in its content, and arguably more watered down, than religious freedom. Western European countries have far more statist approaches to religion, often having government bureaucracies that manage religion as well as state churches, whereas the United States practices a more robust institutional separation between church and state. Would this difference affect what sort of laws and regimes western countries seek elsewhere? Western European states like Britain, France, and Germany host more distinct and less assimilated Muslim communities than the United States, where Muslims are more integrated. Will this affect cooperation in promoting religious freedom towards Muslim majority countries?
Still another challenge comes from a group of intellectuals, mostly American, arguing that religious freedom is a western invention and confined to western history and should not be spread to other countries. (See previous ArcU pieces here and here.) Even if one does not agree and sees religious freedom as a universal principle, as I do, we are still left to ask how a united western religious freedom policy will be received around the world. Will it foment a schism between the West and the Rest? Or are there factions favorable to religious freedom that can be secured as allies in India, Indonesia, and Russia?
One of the most interesting aspects of the conference is its formidable coalition of sponsors. These can be understood as the confluence of two streams. The policy dialogue on transatlantic religious freedom policy is the brainchild of an international relations professor at Sussex University in the UK, Fabio Petito, who has long been a leader in the study of religion and international relations. He managed to secure a “Bridging Voices” grant from the British Council, which seeks to promote transatlantic dialogue on policy issues. The Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame teamed up with him on the grant and they took on as additional partners the European University Institute and the University of Milan. This will be the second of two policy dialogues on transatlantic religious freedom policy, the first having been organized by Petito and taken place at Wilton Park, United Kingdom in February 2015. Generously co-sponsoring the dialogues are the International Center for Law and Religion Studies (BYU) and McGill University’s Birks Forum on the World’s Religions. All of these constitute the first stream of sponsors.
If that is not enough for you, this entire coalition joins a second stream of sponsors led by the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University, who is hosting the event. RFP is taking on the event as the first in a year-long series of events on policy associated with the International Religious Freedom Act, which will produce a revised edition of The Future of U.S. International Religious Freedom Policy. RFP sponsors this series together with its partner, the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University, and is also teaming up with The Review of Faith & International Affairs at the Institute for Global Engagement, and the Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs at Boston University.
Got all that? Wait, there is more. Selected presentations will appear in the Review of Faith and International Affairs. The dialogue is also part of a semester-long exploration of the Global Future of Governance, under the auspices of Georgetown University’s Global Futures Initiative.
Whew! The sponsors themselves are a transatlantic coalition, and their ability to cooperate to bring about this promising event bodes well for the ability of governments to cooperate on religious freedom policy!
Yara Sallam released!
Here at ArcU, we’ve been following the case of Egyptian human rights activist Yara Sallam, a former student of the Center for Civil and Human Rights here at Notre Dame. After being held in jail since June 2014 by the regime of el-Sissi, she has just been released. We celebrate this joyful news. See here for the story.
Forgiveness in Politics? Surprising Findings From Uganda
On the eve of Pope Francis’s visit to the United States, we might pose the question: Does his favorite theme of mercy have relevance for politics? A report that I recently completed in partnership with the Refugee Law Project (RLP) in Uganda looks at forgiveness, one dimension of mercy, and asks whether people practice it in the wake of armed conflict.
I was motivated to write the report after one reviewer of my book, Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, Barry Gewen, writing for The New Republic, cautioned that the forgiveness that I was advocating is something that only rare saints exercise and could be dangerous if advocated widely.
So I decided to investigate: Is forgiveness truly rare or are there places where it is practiced commonly among a population? With funding from The Fetzer Institute, I traveled to Uganda. I also wanted to know, in the case that people do practice forgiveness, what forgiveness entails, why they practice it, who practices it, and with what effect. The staff of RLP and I chose five districts, surveyed 640 people, conducted ten day-long focus groups, and interviewed 27 “exemplars” of forgiveness.
The results were striking. Over 590 of the 640 survey respondents had experienced actual violence or some serious form of related trauma. Yet they reported favor for forgiveness and the actual practice of forgiveness in high numbers. 68.3% of the victims said they forgave the perpetrator of violence against them. 60.94% said they would forgive members of rebel groups when presented with forgiveness among a number of options. 53.91% said they would forgive members of the Ugandan military. 85.97% said they “agreed” that “it is good for victims to practice forgiveness in the wake of armed violence.”
When I have presented these results to western audiences, they shake their heads in disbelief. Westerners are skeptical of forgiveness for several reasons. They believe that it foregoes justice. What people really want is revenge and punishment. Some think that it short-circuits resentment, an allegedly far healthier response. They also believe that forgiveness retraumatizes victims and that when it is advocated too strongly, it violates their autonomy. Some worry that forgiveness is practiced disproportionately by women, who thereby yield themselves to those who have disempowered them radically. And many think that forgiveness is just too psychologically difficult in the wake of armed violence.
Ugandans, however, find the results plausible. This is not to deny that they debate forgiveness, even vigorously, but only that they don’t find it hard to believe that their fellow citizens forgive even the worst sorts of crimes imaginable. Before I carried out the research, I conducted numerous conversations with a wide variety of Ugandans to see if they thought forgiveness plausible and common. They did. And the conversations in the focus groups and interviews corroborated the survey results.
Why do Ugandans forgive? The strongest correlate is their faith, their Christian faith. Muslims in the northwestern Yumbe district also forgave in similarly high numbers and were influenced by their faith. Others cited the psychological benefits of getting beyond the anger. Other reasons included tribal traditions, family tradition, a desire for peace in the community, and, sometimes, a judgment about the complexity of perpetrators’ motives – victims may believe that perpetrators were under duress when he committed violence, for instance.
Ugandans do not forgive wihthout demanding justice. They demand trials, compensation, the airing of truth about injustices, confession, apologies, and other forms of justice. Remarkably, however, they are willing to forgive even when these other forms of justice are absent.
Only a tiny portion of Ugandans reported being pressured to forgive by a religious, political, or tribal leader. Numerous demographic factors had little impact on forgiveness attitudes and practice, including gender. A high percentage thought that forgiveness can be a potent tool for peacebuilding in the wake of armed conflict.
This last point is the most important of the study – that forgiveness can help to build a lasting peace in places that have suffered war, genocide, and dictatorship. Western ngos, governments around the world, diplomats in international organizations, and religious leaders everywhere ought to accord forgiveness much more of an active role on peacebuilding than they have heretofore. This is not to say that forgiveness can be programmed. It is practiced most healthily and authentically when it is practiced freely, meaning that victims are not pressured or scripted into forgiveness. Still, leaders who hold moral prestige among their populations can commend forgiveness to their people and practice it through example. Nelson Mandela of South Africa is a famous exemplar. Remembering him and following the inspiration of Pope Francis, others might follow suit.
Can It Any Longer Be Denied that ISIS and Its Cruelties are Religious?
Last week, The New York Times published a long article by Rukmini Callimachi on ISIS and the systematic cruelty that the group has imposed upon Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority, including the sexual enslavement and rape of women and girls and the massacre of men and boys. The article is excellent reportage, giving front-page attention to the similar findings of human rights groups, and deepens the world’s understanding of ISIS and the atrocities that it has been perpetrating.
The story also buttresses some running arguments that we have been making here at ArcU. First, political theology matters. ISIS’ atrocities stem from its members’ religious beliefs. One of the piece’s central themes is that ISIS’ atrocities flow from very specific theological justifications. The title of the article is indeed, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape.” Theology explains why ISIS has singled out the Yazidis for particularly harsh treatment: the Yazidis’ beliefs are especially heretical. ISIS has pursued no similar campaign towards the women of other religious minorities. Theology explains the kind of treatment to which ISIS has subjected the Yazidis and how it has gone about administering this treatment. ISIS uses its theology to recruit young men whose own beliefs makes them sympathetic to join. It is for reasons of theology that ISIS has abducted 5,270 Yazidis and continues to hold 3144 of them.
It is an important finding in light of an intense debate running among academics, journalists, and other analysts over whether theology explains ISIS’s motivations. Such a debate took place after the publication of Graeme Wood’s piece on ISIS this past February in The Atlantic. And it has taken place in episode after episode involving Islam at least as far back as the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Is it theology that explains the behavior of the attackers or is it economic dislocation, resentment over colonialism and present-day imperialism, weak states, the desire for adventure, and other alternative causes? Of course, most who think that religious beliefs play a strong and independent role, as I do, also believe that these myriad factors are commingled and contributory. It is also the case that members of ISIS will hold their beliefs with greater and lesser intensity. Some are very bad Muslims. But the behavior and tactics of the group cannot be explained apart from the theology that governs it and is promulgated within it. This is what is denied by a striking number of analysts writing today. See only the reaction to Wood’s piece. The critics are dismissive of religion altogether and hold that theology is almost entirely a rationalization, not a driver or a motive.
Some of the critics take to task views like Wood’s and mine for “essentializing” Islam and holding that Islam is the cause of behavior like that of ISIS. That is not my view. With respect to Islam as a whole, ISIS is a tiny sect whose theology is highly particular, not shared, and indeed condemned by most Muslims. Still, it is a theology and it motivates the behavior of its members. Those who deny this, I ask them to read Callimachi’s NYT piece – and let’s have a conversation.
The second argument has to do with religious freedom. Is it a western value, derived from western experience, unlikely to be accepted outside the West, and one that should not be imposed through western power? Or is it a universal principle, attendant upon human dignity, as the international human rights conventions would suggest? Previous ArcU pieces (see here and here) have engaged a group of scholars who are highly critical of religious freedom, which they believe is a product of power and culture that emerged contingently in the West. They published a set of pieces at Immanent Frame (the vast majority, but not all, of which took this point of view) that the University of Chicago has just printed as a book.
One of the things that struck me about ISIS’ behavior as reported by the New York Times piece is that it involves what are obviously and straightforwardly human rights violations – cruelties that anyone from anywhere can recognize as a cruelty without difficulty. They are violations of bodily integrity, sexual integrity, the dignity of women, the right not to be enslaved, and the like.
These cruelties are also quite obviously and straightforwardly violations of religious freedom. Acting on its theology, ISIS is perpetrating horrible deeds upon the Yazidis because of their theology. It is because of what Yazidis believe and how they practice their faith that ISIS enslaves and rapes their women and girls and massacres their men. Why, then, would religious freedom, not be a part of the set of principles and the dimensions of human dignity that are violated by ISIS’ behavior? Why could not anyone affirm that, whatever may be right or wrong about what Yazidis believe, there is not even remote warrant for them to be treated as they are because of what they believe?
Do those who think that religious freedom is a western value also think that the principles and the dignity that are violated when Yazidis are raped, enslaved, and massacred are also culturally contingent? I doubt it, but if they do, then I recommend the NYT piece to them. If they would agree that prohibitions of slavery and rape are properly universal values, then why would they not also agree that religious freedom is a universal value? That Yazidis are violated because they are Yazidis is part and parcel of the cruelty being inflicted upon them. Is it not wrong everywhere that people should be treated as ISIS does the Yazidis on account of their religious beliefs? On what grounds ought we to stress the cruelty of rape, slavery, and massacre – as we should vociferously – but leave out the religious dimension of human dignity?