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This landmark book can be read on many levels. It is an account of the politics behind U.S. international religious freedom policy. It is an indictment of the secular blinders that keep American diplomats from treating religion as a serious force in global affairs. It is a penetrating exploration of the value of religious liberty to human flourishing. Finally, it is an argument for why religious liberty is vital to our national security and thus should be promoted by the full instrumentalities of foreign policy.
The sweep of the book touches on matters of urgency: expanding democratization, fighting the war on terrorism, shaping the fate of the Islamic world, and altering the trajectory of China. To Farr, unless we get religion right, and defend it, our foreign policy aims will fall short.
Farr writes from a unique vantage point. A career foreign service officer, he served as the first director of the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom and bridged its first two ambassadors. He listened to religious sufferers, pressed persecuting governments, and experienced bureaucratic resistance to promoting religious liberty inside a State Department with "religion avoidance syndrome." He is also a devout believer, a Catholic with a core theological conviction that all people—made in the image and likeness of God—are imbued with a surpassing dignity and should be free to fulfill transcendent duties and spiritual quests.
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.
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