Peace & Piety
World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty Is Vital
to American National Security
by Thomas F. Farr
Oxford University Press, 2008
(384 pages, $29.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Keith Pavlischek
Thomas Farr served as a Foreign Service officer for twenty-one years before retiring to become a Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. In his last assignment, from 1999 to 2003, he served as the first Director of the Office of International Religious Freedom, which Congress created when it passed the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) in 1998.
As Farr explains in detail, Congress stipulated that the office would be led by an Ambassador at Large for Religious Freedom. But the State Department bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom had other ideas, and they quickly buried the ambassador and his office within the existing human rights bureaucracy, making the ambassador subordinate to State Department officials, with “authority substantially below that normally accorded an ambassador at large.”
You might think this would have evoked howls of protest from several quarters, but, as Farr says, despite this demotion, “scarcely a complaint” was heard from Congress, the faith-based community that had agitated so long for IRFA, or the newly empowered United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.
This latter organization, which was in effect a high-profile, government-funded, bi-partisan watchdog organization, “had the unfortunate effect of diverting attention from the failures of the State Department, in particular its bureaucratic isolation of the office responsible for carrying out the mandates of the law.” Consequently, Farr declares, “the widely trumpeted (and widely feared) International Religious Freedom Act has so far had little long-term effect.”
Wasted Promise
Farr argues that the “enormous promise” of the IRFA has been squandered. His chief complaint is that that the laudatory goal of “promoting religious freedom” around the world has been reduced to a focus on “denouncing persecutors and achieving prisoner releases” on an ad hoc basis. This is not to say, of course, that these efforts are not an important part of what the office and the ambassador should be doing; they are indispensable to any robust defense of religious liberty. But the office could have been doing much more.
There are two principal reasons why it hasn’t been. First, the average official at the State Department just can’t understand the importance of religious belief and obligation as a motive for behavior in world affairs. Second, much of the campaign to pass IRFA was perceived to have focused on the more narrow issue of religious persecution, and the persecution of Christians in particular (and hence as merely another lobbying effort by special interests, i.e., the Christian right). And so, writes Farr, the office has paid little “systematic attention to the structures of persecution” or to “the whole range of issues associated with ‘religious freedom’ in its cultural and political sense, especially relationships between religion and state and between religious norms and public policies.”
Farr thoroughly exposes the ideological resistance both he and his successor met as the first two Ambassadors at Large for Religious Freedom. His personal attempts to persuade agency bureaucrats that religion, for better or worse, ought to be taken seriously as an explanation for the behavior of state and non-state actors alike (especially in the Arab-Islamic world) were dismissed and ridiculed. Farr describes all these things in depressing detail.
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