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Beyond Religious Freedom

The New Global Politics of Religion

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Introduction

In January 2014 an arsonist attacked the historic Maktabat al-Sa'eh (The Pilgrim's Bookshop) library in the old Serail neighborhood of Tripoli, Lebanon. The library burned to the ground, and seventy-five thousand books were destroyed. The motives of the perpetrators remain mysterious. Rumors had circulated that Father Ibrahim Srouj, the owner of the library and a Greek orthodox priest, had written an online article, or perhaps had a pamphlet in a book in his library, insulting Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Others suggested that a real estate dispute between Srouj and his landlord had led to tensions. Prominent members of local civil society condemned the arson and emphasized long-standing, crosscutting connections between various parts of the Tripoli community. A representative of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, a local MP, a local Salafi sheikh, and a former prime minister rushed to Srouj's defense, insisting that those seeking to incite intercommunal strife and violence would be shunned or imprisoned. In an interview stressing the relevance of the Syrian proxy war to the attack, Sheikh Salem al-Rafei told the Daily Star that "the Syrian regime seeks to show that Muslims in Tripoli are extremists and don't accept other people and that it [the Damascus regime] can [alone] protect minorities." Civil society groups gathered outside the library, a former Ottoman police barracks, to collect donations to rebuild. Supporters created a Facebook page to collect books. Photos that circulated in the media showed ordinary people wearing face masks digging through the rubble attempting to salvage damaged books.

International religious freedom advocates responded differently to the library arson. Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom and longtime activist, proclaimed that "flames of a violent hysteria against all perceived threats to Islam are spreading rapidly through the Muslim world today." Robert George, vice chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), lamented that "the really bad news is that this is not out of the ordinary" and called for the promotion of religious freedom as a means of preventing future attacks. While local residents rejected both the arson and representations of it as a harbinger of deepening religious divisions, Shea and George interpreted it as evidence of the coming apart of a community, region, and, perhaps, the world, along religious lines. Importantly, Shea and George also insisted on the equivalence between the Tripoli event and other episodes elsewhere in the world, all of which, in their view, could be reduced to episodes of religious violence and attributed to a lack of religious freedom.

These contrasting responses suggest a larger story waiting to be told about the politics of religious freedom. The responses of Shea and George are part of a powerful narrative circulating in global politics attributing acts of violence to religion or religious persecution and calling for the promotion of religious freedom in response. This book explores the politics of singling out religion as a basis from which to make foreign policy, international public policy, and conduct human rights advocacy. It historicizes the intense policy interest in religion that has taken hold in North American and European international public policy circles over the past two decades. Exploring the channels through which religion has been, and continues to be, "appropriated by worldly power holders," it draws to the surface and explores the tensions that emerge between the forms of religion that are produced and governed through these projects, and the broader fields of religious practice that they aspire to regulate and transform. What are the consequences when the category of religion becomes an object of international law and international public policy? What are the effects, on both religious and political practices, when religions are "granted intentionality and importance" and become "shadow players" in global politics? What are the implications of construing religion as an isolable entity and causal powerhouse in international relations? How do these political interests and investments shape how individuals and groups live out and practice their religion? As Pamela Slotte asks of human rights law, how does this approach "regulate the space in which people are given the opportunity to live out their faith"? Are there alternatives?

Though present in some form since the United States emerged as a global superpower in the mid-twentieth century, the current drive to "operationalize" religion through the promotion of religious freedom, interfaith understanding, toleration, and rights accelerated and became fully institutionalized after 9/11. The United States and key allies such as the United Kingdom and Canada have rallied around the notion that the flourishing of free and tolerant religion, increased dialogue between faith communities, and the legalization of minority rights are required to emancipate societies from intercommunal strife, economic deprivation, and gender and other forms of discrimination. A 2007 report by the center-right think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, titled "Mixed Blessings: U.S. Government Engagement with Religion in Conflict-Prone Settings," registers the shift: "Parts of the intelligence community address religion as a transnational concern; the military services are increasingly developing doctrine and training on approaching religious leaders and communities in stability operations; USAID works with faith-based organizations and incorporates religious sensitivities into some development programming; and State Department officials promote international religious freedom and are focused on improving relations with the Muslim world." The same report concludes that "the armed services are still determining how such knowledge should be used in practice. Much of the strategic implementation of religious knowledge today is occurring at the Joint Intelligence Operations Centers and the regionally focused Combatant Commands." Coupled with the right forms of governance achieved through the "strategic implementation of religious knowledge," moderate religion is said to be capable of pushing back against, and ultimately triumphing over, its rivals. The right kind of religion, recognized and engaged by states and other public international authorities, has emancipatory potential. Moderate religion has the capacity to treat a variety of social ills, such as gender-based oppression and the exclusion of minorities, associated with retrograde forms of religion, fragile or failed states, and a lack of development. Tolerant religion, in this view, catalyzes democratization and political pluralism. It takes the wind out of the sails of extremist movements by offering a viable alternative to radicalization.

Of course state efforts to intervene in religious fields are not new, and various earlier moments could also be considered. Noah Salomon discusses similar machinations in early twentieth-century British attempts to stamp out "Islamic fanaticism," whose main theater was Sudan, through an attempt to promote moderate scholastic Islam. In an interesting reversal of contemporary practice, at that time the categories of "fanatical" and "moderate" were mapped onto Sufism and "scholastic Islam," respectively. Nandini Chatterjee has shown how religion was produced as a legal category in colonial India through a distinctly modern approach toward religious toleration that arbitrated between, rather than ignoring, religious difference. This engendered a novel species of political competition that consisted of collective claims asserted to be "religious" and accepted as such by the state: "Through the very fact of declaring a policy of religious 'neutrality' [the colonial state] committed itself to the identification of religious 'rights' borne by entities known as religious communities." Going back further, Napoleon's efforts to integrate the Jewish population of France shaped and changed the practice of Judaism considerably. As Michael Goldfarb observes, "the practice of Judaism today would be unrecognizable to the recently emancipated Jews of Napoleon's time."

Focusing on a contemporary international moment, the projects discussed in this book can be situated in this longer history of state efforts to define and shape forms of religiosity that are understood to be conducive to particular regimes of governance. This book does not trace these mechanisms of religious governance back to a single origin point but rather examines particular moments in which these forms of governance have become especially visible and influential in global politics. Today, spearheaded by the United States, the commitment to religious freedom and moderation has become global in scope, encompassing individual European states, the European Union, Canada, the United Nations, and many international and nongovernmental organizations, public and private. Leaders and decision makers have identified the cultivation of tolerant religion as a critical ingredient in addressing the ills that plague collective life in the early twenty-first century. Religion needs to be understood and it needs to be engaged. In the words of the US President's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, "We simply cannot understand our Nation or our world without understanding religion." In Tony Blair's words, "the purpose should be to change the policy of governments, to start to treat this issue of religious extremism as an issue that is about religion as well as politics, to go to the roots of where a false view of religion is being promulgated and to make it a major item on the agenda of world leaders to combine effectively to combat it." President Obama echoed these themes at the 2014 National Prayer Breakfast, stressing the connection between religious freedom and national security: "History shows that nations that uphold the rights of their people, including the freedom of religion, are ultimately more just and more peaceful and more successful. Nations that do not uphold these rights sow the bitter seeds of instability and violence and extremism. So freedom of religion matters to our national security."

While there are rich histories to be mined in the context of the American project for global religious freedom, today these political forms for managing religion are being adopted and adapted globally. Their reach is impressive, and the American experience is far from exhaustive. Religious lives and possibilities are being legally tailored by a bevy of increasingly professionalized national and transnational actors to meet the global demand for tolerant religious subjects who enjoy freedom under law. With the United States leading the charge, and others following suit, advocacy for religious freedom, tolerance, and protections for the rights of religious minorities has "gone viral." As a result, while being attentive to US foreign religious policy and programming, it is also important to consider how these political discourses materialize to shape legal and political fields in places such as Turkey absent explicit US religious interventionism. These discourses are being privileged in policy formulation in Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, and the European Union, with the United States often cited as a model, yet without direct US political pressure. International organizations, state foreign policy establishments, nongovernmental organizations, development assistance agencies, and military establishments, to varying degrees and in different platforms, all have signed on to the project of promoting tolerant religion and moderate religious subjects. Communities around the world are increasingly understood as in need of varying degrees of social and religious engineering, ranging from a minor touch-up to an extreme makeover. Reformers seek to create the conditions in which secular states and their religious subjects become tolerant, believing or nonbelieving consumers of free religion and practitioners of faith-based solutions to collective problems. Religiously free states and subjects are said to naturally oppose terrorism, to support the free market, and to be inclined toward democracy. States marshal financial resources, gather information about religions, and train bureaucrats in departments and ministries on how to guarantee religious freedom, cultivate tolerant religious subjects, and protect religious minorities. New partnerships between state and international authorities and private actors are being created in pursuit of these objectives. This goes beyond the American foreign policy establishment. Religious freedom, tolerance, and rights have become what Gerd Bauman describes as dominant discourses, in that each is "conceptually simple, enjoys a communicative monopoly, offers enormous flexibility of application, encompasses great ideological plasticity, and is serviceable for established institutional purposes."

This book offers a focused discussion that brings together several questions and concerns that have not been considered together before to develop three related arguments about these political projects and the fields in which they are deployed. First, it shows how particular constructs of religious freedom, religious tolerance, and the rights of religious minorities are being packaged into political projects and delivered around the world by states and others. Second, it contributes to the literature on religion and international relations by historicizing and politicizing the attempt over the past two decades to incorporate a concern for religion into the study and practice of global politics. Much of this discourse treats religion as a self-evident category that motivates a host of actions, both good and bad. This book challenges such an approach. Religion is too unstable a category to be treated as an isolable entity, whether the objective is to attempt to separate religion from law and politics or design a political response to "it." Third, the book embeds the study of religion and politics in a series of broader social and interpretive fields by exploring the relation between these international projects and the social, religious, and political contexts in which they are deployed. Specifically, it focuses on the gaps created between the forms of religion that are sanctioned by expert knowledge and promoted through international advocacy for freedom, tolerance, and rights, and a diverse, shifting, and multiform field of lived religious practice. There is of course no strict dichotomy or sharp line to be drawn between these two categories. What I refer to as expert, official, and lived or everyday religions are all inextricably bound up with each other and with institutional religion. These distinctions are always to some extent arbitrary and porous and are themselves the product of law and governance. The challenge, then, is to signal an interest in a category, religion, which is legible to many, while also arguing for a different understanding of it.

To this end, this book draws together and amplifies the findings of a broad and recent body of scholarship that pushes back in different ways against the received wisdom surrounding religious freedom. It draws on a combination of my own primary research — government reports, meeting proceedings, legal decisions, media reports — and secondary research across several academic disciplines to propose a theoretical and conceptual step forward in the study of religion and world politics. Distinguishing between religion and religious freedom as authorized by experts and governments and the broader fields in which these constructs are deployed reveals new possibilities for thinking about religion, law, and global politics. It opens new lines of sight onto political histories, struggles, and forms of religiosity that escape, defy, or are indifferent to efforts to govern religion "from above." New interpretive possibilities emerge as a result of thinking differently about religion, of complicating and disaggregating the category. What if religion cannot be collapsed into a force for good or evil (or both)? What if it cannot simply stand in for whatever is considered to fall outside the secular? Religion does not stand outside or prior to other histories and institutions. Religious practices unfold amid and are entangled in all domains of human life, forms of belonging, work, play, governance, violence, and exchange. Religion cannot be singled out from these other aspects of human experience, and yet also cannot simply be identified with these either. In exploring what this understanding of religion entails for the study of global politics, this book works to "release the space of the political from the grasp of the secularization doctrine." It is intended, in part, as a thought experiment that provides a glimpse of what the world would look like after religion is dethroned as a stable, coherent legal and policy category.

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Excerpted from Beyond Religious Freedom by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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