THE FUTILE ATTEMPT TO SEPARATE RELIGION AND LIBERTY:

First Freedom: Religious liberty and national security: a review of World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty is Vital to American National Security by Thomas F. Farr (Allen D. Hertzke, August 10, 2009, Books & Culture)

Farr argues that promoting religious freedom must be a "central element of a refurbished American engagement with the world." This bold assertion is buttressed by three contentions. First, for the foreseeable future religion will have a huge global impact on norms, politics, and transnational movements; thus we cannot ignore it. Second, the foreign policy establishment is ill equipped to address a world of pervasive religious faith. Indeed, secular assumptions so profoundly shape the diplomatic worldview that Foreign Service officers need training to see religion as something other than a problem. Third, the United States has potent statutory vehicles to address current deficiencies. Vigorously enforced, the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) could be the catalyst for recalibrated and integrated initiatives throughout the foreign policy apparatus.

In making his case Farr marshals cutting-edge scholarship on the positive correlation between religious freedom and civil liberties, democratic consolidation, economic development, women's status, and peace. Thus the success of a myriad of foreign policy aims hinges in part on how well we advance the "first freedom."

The book is divided into three parts. The first part catalogues the vast intellectual infrastructure that underpins the "religion deficit" among foreign policy élites. If religion is viewed as irrational and conflict-prone, then progress means secularization, privatization, and strict separation. The only way a polity is safe from fanaticism, in this view, is if religious people refrain from asserting comprehensive truth claims in the public square. Farr turns this Rawlsian argument on its head. In a pervasively religious world, he argues, the only hope for some modicum of peace lies in regimes that grant religious groups the right to contend in the democratic forum.

To make this competition healthy, religious groups must forswear violence or coercion. Here Farr offers a kind of bargain to religious communities: abandon the claim on the coercive powers of the state; in return, gain full citizenship rights to promote your religious values in public policy. But this bargain can only work if the United States stops peddling a form of strict separationism that would banish religion from the public square, which religionists abroad rightly see as an attempt to secularize their society. [...]

What makes Farr's work so timely is its broader point: that fostering religious freedom is not just a humanitarian aim but is crucial to the national interest. Thus it should not be the object of a single office in the State Department but instead woven into the highest levels of America's global engagement.

To develop this argument Farr devotes the third part of the book to chapters that show how the promotion of religious freedom would advance our strategic interests on two major fronts: the Islamic world and China. With respect to Islam, Farr stresses that extending greater freedom to religious minorities and Muslim dissenters is essential to draining the swamps of militancy that give rise to terrorism. He shows how apostasy and blasphemy laws crush the kind of free inquiry necessary for moderate voices to be heard. Thus when American policy makers ignored religious liberty concerns in such places as Afghanistan, they unwittingly enabled Islamic militants to intimidate and silence Muslim reformers, human rights proponents, and women.

The picture is perhaps more hopeful in China, where Farr believes the United States can make a strong case to authorities that free religious communities can help build a modern China. Recent back channel meetings between communist officials and house church representatives suggest that China's rulers might be amenable to such arguments.

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Church-State Relations in America and Europe: Robert Kraynak on America's Civil Religion (25 MARCH 2005, ZENIT)

Alexis de Tocqueville admired the way Americans were able to combine the spirit of religion with the spirit of liberty in the 1830s.

Robert Kraynak, professor of political science at Colgate University and author of "Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World" (Notre Dame), explains in the first part of this three-part interview how civil religion prevented a totally secular democracy from arising in America for nearly 200 years, and how it might be a good model for other nations.

This is the first of a three-part interview.

Q: Recently, Cardinal Ratzinger described the American model of church-state relations as more hospitable to religious truth and institutions than European models. What features of the American model might be more hospitable to religion?

Kraynak: The American model of church-state relations was best described by Alexis de Tocqueville in "Democracy in America" more than 150 years ago. He expressed his admiration, much like Cardinal Ratzinger today, for the way Americans were able to combine the spirit of religion with the spirit of liberty.

The crucial point for Tocqueville was the distinction between laws and customs. By law, Americans separated church and state; but in their customs or mores, Americans insisted on a prominent role for religion in public and private life. This meant Americans rejected the model of Great Britain, which established a national Church of England, and the practice of regional princes in Germany, who gave legal support to their own denominations.

By rejecting state establishment, Americans never experienced the problems of clerical power and were able to develop a robust pluralism where the various Christian churches pursued religious orthodoxy as voluntary associations on roughly equal terms, although reformed Protestant churches had a historical advantage.

While favoring voluntary worship, Americans also believed that religion had a public role in promoting republican virtue. Hence, they developed a nondenominational civil religion that was expressed in the Declaration of Independence's doctrine of God-given natural rights — the belief that liberty derived from "the laws of Nature and Nature's God" and that inalienable rights were endowments of the Creator.

This republican religion was later expressed in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which said that "this nation under God" will enjoy a new birth of freedom — a sentiment also echoed in the Pledge of Allegiance and in countless public statements connecting the blessings of American freedom with God's providence and judgment.

For nearly 200 years, this civil religion prevented a totally secular democracy from arising in America, while allowing and even protecting a deeper piety based on the revealed truths of Christian faith in the many Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches of America.

American piety is thus a special blend of three elements: the disestablishment of religion, a republican civil religion of God-given natural rights, and pluralism in the pursuit of Christian orthodoxy.