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In 1996, evangelical Protestants awakened to the problems of religious persecution worldwide. To achieve results, they have learned to work with Jews, Catholics, Buddhists, Muslims, and secular human-rights activists. University of Oklahoma professor Allen D. Hertzke tracks these amazing developments in his new book, Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Rowman & Littlefield). CT editor David Neff interviewed Hertzke by telephone. Neff also reviewedFreeing God's Children.

How did the international religious freedom movement catch your attention? Why did you decide to chronicle it?

I've been poking around and writing about the religious-political world since 1982 when I started my graduate work at Wisconsin with explicit interest in studying religion and politics. In 1982, the Christian Right was all the rage, but I was interested in the full spectrum. I'd been involved in religious communities where political activities were a part of church life, so I felt like I had something to offer the political science community that it might not have.

In 1996 I read about the first conference that the National Association of Evangelicals held on religious persecution, so I was generally aware that this movement was percolating, but I didn't have any sense that it would be very big at all. I did some interviewing, and I thought it was an interesting phenomenon. And then I was asked to present a paper at an Ethics and Public Policy Center conference in January of 1998. It turns out a lot of the activists were there—Mike Horowitz and, I think, Nina Shea were there, and Paul Marshall.  Mike Horowitz came up to me afterwards and said, in effect, For a political scientist, you have a pretty good view of this stuff—which was sort of a backhanded compliment.But then he said, You really ought to try to chronicle this movement.

The campaign for the International Religious Freedom Act was so fascinating. It involved so many currents and crosscurrents. And then the movement blossomed, and I found myself on the ground floor of what I call the most important human-rights movement in our times. And it was faith-based, largely, in alliance with a number of other organizations, and it was diverse and ecumenical. It showed a certain maturity in the evangelical community to build alliances with people they sometimes fight with on domestic issues.

I'd say it was grace. I really feel blessed to have been given this opportunity. It represents a kind of culmination of my work as a scholar trying to understand the religious public witness in America. This drew me into much greater awareness of global developments, and I now teach a course on religion and global politics that this movement sparked my interest in.

This is a more of an ethnographic kind of research than I've ever done before. I've always soaked and poked—interviewed and observed—but I really immersed myself in the movement, and I became a participant-observer. I've been deeply grateful for that because I've met so many wonderful and fascinating people, and I've watched inspiring things. And I've been in awe of some of the heroic individuals abroad that I've met.

At some point, I felt the stewardship responsibility to get the story out. I felt like I just watched this extraordinary thing happen on Capitol Hill. I'm the one who was now given the responsibility of writing about it.

Why were the old-line human-rights groups so slow to pick up on religious persecution? And do you think they have caught up yet?

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October 2004, Vol. 48, No. 10