arcoftheuniverse

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.

 

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!

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.

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 11^th, 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?

John Allen has published a typically excellent column on remembering Christians and Yazidis who were massacred one year ago by ISIS and offering reflections on American involvement there.  He writes:

[August 6] marks the one-year anniversary of one of the greatest calamities to fall upon Christians anywhere on the planet in the early 21st century — an ISIS offensive in the Plains of Nineveh in northern Iraq that broke out on Aug. 6-7, 2014, and left thousands of Christians and Yazidis dead.

It also drove an estimated 120,000 Christians into exile either inside the country, in places such as Kirkuk and Erbil, or outside in refugee camps in nations such as Turkey and Jordan.

During the assault, churches and monasteries were destroyed, centuries-old Christian manuscripts were burned, and scores of Christians were killed, often in staggeringly brutal fashion: flogged to death, beheaded, and, in at least a few cases, reportedly crucified. They often died cheek-by-jowl with Yazidis, who practice an ancient syncretistic form of monotheism, in a grim reminder that it’s not just Christians at risk.

He makes a case for the U.S. coming to their aid:

First of all, coming to the aid of Iraqi Christians and other minorities is not merely a humanitarian or confessional imperative. There’s also a clear strategic logic for doing so.

To begin with, if Iraq and Syria are emptied of their Christian populations, then any lingering hope for democracy and development will likely go with them. Two of the premier hotspots on the planet would become even more dangerous.

Not only do Christians operate the most significant private networks of schools, hospitals, and social service centers across the Middle East, but their higher-than-average educational and occupational levels generally make them a force for stability. They also serve as a natural bridge between the Muslim world and the West.

If you want peace in the Middle East, in other words, then make sure Christians have a home there.

In addition, the makeshift camps in which Christian exiles are now crowded have the potential to become breeding grounds for both political resentments and criminal enterprises, to some extent like what happened in Palestinian refugee camps after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Granted, Christians generally stand a much better shot at eventually resettling in the West, but that’s not true of all. The potential for mayhem increases the longer people are forced to remain in the camps, despairing of ever returning home.

Given what’s at stake, one hardly needs to be a Christian, a Yazidi, or even a humanitarian activist to grasp that doing something for these refugees deserves to be an urgent geopolitical priority.

He also points out that what is happening now is a direct consequence of the U.S. war in Iraq in 2003:

For Americans, the one-year anniversary of the assault in the Plains of Nineveh also invites an examination of conscience.

Whatever one makes of the moral legitimacy of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, it’s empirically undeniable that the war ripped the lid off pre-existing sectarian tensions and created a context in which the country’s minority groups, above all its Christians, today find themselves in the firing line.

St. John Paul II’s political prescience was never clearer than when he dispatched the late Cardinal Pio Laghi to meet with US President George W. Bush in a vain effort to head off the invasion, telling Laghi to warn the Americans that Iraq’s minorities, beginning with its Christians, would be its first victims.

Perhaps the whole world has something to gain from making it possible for those 600,000 Iraqi Christians, along with the Yazidis and others, to go home and to live in peace and security. Americans, however, also carry a moral responsibility to work for that outcome, quite apart from matters of self-interest.

In December 2013, Patriarch Louis Sako of Iraq’s Chaldean Catholic Church articulated what his people were feeling at that point, sentiments that can only have intensified after last year’s disaster.

“We feel forgotten and isolated,” Sako said.

“We sometimes wonder, if they kill us all, what would be the reaction of Christians in the West? Would they do something then?”

That’s a question well worth pondering today, perhaps especially in the United States.

 

 

 

 

 

Not to be missed is journalist Eliza Griswold’s landmark piece in The New York Times Magazine on the fate of Christians in Iraq and Syria.  The fact that it appeared in the NYTM itself is news, for it helps to establish that the persecution of Christians is not a special interest or parochial issue.  Griswold combines riveting stories with factual and policy analysis in a compelling read.

Here is one strong passage:

The Arab Spring only made things worse. As dictators like Mubarak in Egypt and Qaddafi in Libya were toppled, their longstanding protection of minorities also ended. Now, ISIS is looking to eradicate Christians and other minorities altogether. The group twists the early history of Christians in the region — their subjugation by the sword — to legitimize its millenarian enterprise. Recently, ISIS posted videos delineating the second-class status of Christians in the caliphate. Those unwilling to pay the jizya tax or to convert would be destroyed, the narrator warned, as the videos culminated in the now-­infamous scenes of Egyptian and Ethiopian Christians in Libya being marched onto the beach and beheaded, their blood running into the surf.

The future of Christianity in the region of its birth is now uncertain. ‘‘How much longer can we flee before we and other minorities become a story in a history book?’’ says Nuri Kino, a journalist and founder of the advocacy group Demand for Action. According to a Pew study, more Christians are now faced with religious persecution than at any time since their early history. ‘‘ISIL has put a spotlight on the issue,’’ says Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, whose parents are from the region and who advocates on behalf of Eastern Christians. ‘‘Christianity is under an existential threat.’’

Moving into the policy discussion, she writes:

This spring the U.N. Security Council met to discuss the plight of Iraq’s religious minorities. ‘‘If we attend to minority rights only after slaughter has begun, then we have already failed,’’ Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the high commissioner for Human Rights, said. After the conference ended, there was mounting anger at American inaction. Although the airstrikes were effective, since October 2013, the United States has given just $416 million in humanitarian aid, which falls far short of what is needed. ‘‘Americans and the West were telling us they came to bring democracy, freedom and prosperity,’’ Louis Sako, the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Babylon who addressed the Security Council, wrote to me in a recent email. ‘‘What we are living is anarchy, war, death and the plight of three million refugees.’’

Of the 3.1 million displaced Iraqis, 85 percent are Sunnis. No one has suffered more at the hands of ISIS than fellow Muslims. Other religious minorities have been affected as well and in large numbers: the Yazidis, who were trapped on Mount Sinjar in Northern Iraq last summer, as ISIS threatened them with genocide; as well as Shia Turkmen; Shabak; Kaka’i; and the Mandeans, who follow John the Baptist. ‘‘Everyone has seen the forced conversions, crucifixions and beheadings,’’ David Saperstein, the United States ambassador at large for religious freedom, said. ‘‘To see these communities, primarily Christians, but also the Yazidis and others, persecuted in such large numbers is deeply alarming.’’

On U.S. policy, she has this to say, quoting two ArcU contributors, Tim Shah and myself:

It has been nearly impossible for two U.S. presidents — Bush, a conservative evangelical; and Obama, a progressive liberal — to address the plight of Christians explicitly for fear of appearing to play into the crusader and ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ narratives the West is accused of embracing. In 2007, when Al Qaeda was kidnapping and killing priests in Mosul, Nina Shea, who was then a U.S. commissioner for religious freedom, says she approached the secretary of state at the time, Condoleezza Rice, who told her the United States didn’t intervene in ‘‘sectarian’’ issues. Rice now says that protecting religious freedom in Iraq was a priority both for her and for the Bush administration. But the targeted violence and mass Christian exodus remained unaddressed. ‘‘One of the blind spots of the Bush administration was the inability to grapple with this as a direct byproduct of the invasion,’’ says Timothy Shah, the associate director of Georgetown University’s Religious Freedom Project.

More recently, the White House has been criticized for eschewing the term ‘‘Christian’’ altogether. The issue of Christian persecution is politically charged; the Christian right has long used the idea that Christianity is imperiled to rally its base. When ISIS massacred Egyptian Copts in Libya this winter, the State Department came under fire for referring to the victims merely as ‘‘Egyptian citizens.’’ Daniel Philpott, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, says, ‘‘When ISIS is no longer said to have religious motivations nor the minorities it attacks to have religious identities, the Obama administration’s caution about religion becomes excessive.’’

Last fall, Obama did refer to Christians and other religious minorities by name in a speech, saying, ‘‘we cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient homelands.’’ When ISIS threatened to eradicate the Yazidis, ‘‘it was the United States that stepped in to beat back the militants,’’ Alistair Baskey, a spokesman for the National Security Council, says. In northeastern Syria, where ISIS is still launching attacks against Assyrian Christian villages, the U.S. military recently come to their aid, Baskey added. Refugees are a thornier issue. Of the more than 122,000 Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States, nearly 40 percent already belong to oppressed minorities. Admitting more would be difficult. ‘‘There are limits to what the international community can do,’’ Saperstein said.

Eshoo, the Democratic congresswoman, is working to establish priority refugee status for minorities who want to leave Iraq. ‘‘It’s a hair ball,’’ she says. ‘‘The average time for admittance to the United States is more than 16 months, and that’s too long. Many will die.’’ But it can be difficult to rally widespread support. The Middle East’s Christians often favor Palestine over Israel. And because support of Israel is central to the Christian Right — Israel must be occupied by the Jews before Jesus can return — this stance distances Eastern Christians from a powerful lobby that might otherwise champion their cause. Recently, Ted Cruz admonished an audience of Middle Eastern Christians at an In Defense of Christians event in Washington, telling them that Christians ‘‘have no better ally than the Jewish state.’’ Cruz was booed.

On old ArcU theme has been the plight of Christians in India.  The Boston Globe‘s John Allen has just written a column on this at Crux very worth reading.

I just published a piece at “The Monkey Cage” at The Washington Post titled, “Are Muslim Countries Really Unreceptive to Religious Freedom?”  It draws from the research for a book that I am writing on Islam and religious freedom.

The title question of the WaPo piece wades into a culture war:

The West’s cultural war over Islam has entered an intense new phase since the rise of the Islamic State. The debates are familiar: Is Islam inherently violent and intolerant, or is it peaceful, diverse and often the victim of Western domination? A good criterion for answering the question is religious freedom – the civic right of persons and religious communities to practice, express, change, renounce and spread their religion. Whether the adherents of one religion can respect the beliefs and practices of another, or whether they respond to this otherness by violence or discrimination, is at the heart of these debates.

A global view looks grim:

An aggregate, satellite view does indeed show a dearth of religious freedom in Islam. A comparison between the world’s 47 or so Muslim-majority countries and the rest of the world – derived from measurements developed by sociologists Brian Grim and Roger Finke and undergirding the Pew Forum’s rankings on religious freedom – shows that Islam clearly has considerably lower levels of religious freedom than the rest of the world and Christian-majority countries. In their 2011 book published on the same data – “The Price of Religious Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century” – Grim and Finke show that 78 percent of Muslim-majority countries have high levels of government restrictions on religious freedom, compared with 43 percent of all other countries and 10 percent of Christian countries.

But a closer look reveals more complexity – and hope:

Do these aggregate scores prove that Islam is indeed generally inhospitable to religious freedom, then? No. Zooming in from a satellite view to a more fine-grained view reveals far greater diversity. First, it shows that 12 out of 47 Muslim-majority states fall into the category of “low restrictions on religious freedom,” meaning that they are essentially religiously free. Even among the other 35 Muslim-majority states, which have moderate, high or very high levels of restriction, there are significantly different patterns of repression, which yield different conclusions about Islam. There are two patterns in particular, namely “Islamist,” which represent 21 of these countries, and “secular repressive,” which represent 14 of these countries.

The piece comes out of a workshop on Islam and International Order hosted by the Project on Middle East Political Science.  For the other short pieces to come out of the workshop, see here.

Ace reporter of global Catholicism John Allen wrote an insightful column last week on the U.S. State Department’s recently released annual report on human rights.  He takes the department to task for ignoring the plight of Egypt’s persecuted Christians.

The document cites only one instance of a Christian suffering discrimination, involving a man charged under anti-blasphemy laws for “liking” a Facebook page critical of Islam. Yet Christians are the largest and most embattled minority in Egypt, forming 10 percent of a population of 83 million, and any account of the human rights situation that fails to feature their hardships is seriously incomplete.

In general, religion is undervalued throughout the State Department report. It lists seven categories of human rights problems, treating religious freedom as a mere sub-heading under “respect for civil liberties.”

Granted, the State Department is correct to be concerned about all threats to personal freedoms and civil rights. Granted, too, a special American focus on Christians might simply make things worse, feeding suspicions that the Western powers are leading a 21st century crusade against other faiths.

In fairness, the report does give prominence to anti-Christian persecution in a few other nations, including threats from ISIS in Iraq.

Still, if the suffering of Egyptian [Christians] . . . isn’t worthy of serious American concern — especially since it comes in a country that’s the second-largest recipient of US military and economic aid in the world — then it’s hard to know what such an outrage might look like.

Things have gotten worse, not better, since the fall of the Morsi government, and they don’t look likely to improve any time soon:

Far from better days after the fall of a Muslim Brotherhood government in July 2013, Botros says that today things are “ten times worse” in Egypt than they were, for instance, under former ruler Hosni Mubarak just a few years ago.

“We thought the police would start a new era with the people,” he said, “but it hasn’t happened.”

Ibrahim, the human rights expert, echoes that impression. He identifies five broad categories of threats faced by Christians in Egypt:

• Physical assaults on churches and other Christian properties
• Difficulties in obtaining permits to build or repair churches
• Kidnappings for ransom
• Selective enforcement of anti-blasphemy laws
• Forced displacements, especially from rural villages

Only the first, Ibrahim said, has improved under Sisi. Statistically speaking, he said, incidents in other categories are actually on the rise.

Further spikes in violence could be on the near-term horizon. Last month, an Egyptian court sentenced Morsi to death for his alleged involvement in a prison break, and just two weeks ago the sentence was confirmed.

Mina Thabet, another human rights observer with the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, believes that if those sentences are actually carried out, it could spark another wave of anti-Christian rage.