TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Lyn Boyd-Judson

The religious values held by George W. Bush have undoubtedly informed his foreign policy decisions. This simple fact should give every American voter pause.

For the past eight years, many like-minded Americans have rejoiced in the current president's conservative Christian worldview and its foreign policy consequences, rather than recognizing that this worldview is a profoundly disturbing element of his presidency. They take comfort in the belief that their president receives God's guidance in political matters, both domestic and foreign. Their logic is that if good and evil exist in our world, the tension between the two manifests in the political realm and plays out in our foreign policy.

In contrast, those Americans - both secularists and liberal Christians - who find the current president's claims of divine guidance profoundly disturbing argue that one of the key principles on which the U.S. was founded is freedom from religion in state institutions. They argue that the founding fathers were deists who advocated a natural religion based on human reason rather than divine revelation. They understand that one's religious beliefs or worldview can never truly be divorced from decision-making, but they also hold that these religious assumptions should constantly be re-evaluated by rational and factual criteria when applied to matters of state. So when it is reported that President Bush says he receives divine guidance on matters of U.S. foreign policy - for instance, that God told him to invade Iraq? - these Americans believe that all citizens, Christian or otherwise, should be profoundly disturbed, because an unjust war can never be a divine war.

This contrast between American Christian worldviews is starkly apparent in the recent media reports of controversial comments made by religious leaders connected to the current presidential candidates. Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has made inflammatory remarks about the U.S. government, suggesting that the U.S. is racist on the home front and that its foreign policy is unjust, aggressive and foments Islamic terrorist attacks on U.S. citizens. John McCain has close ties to pastors Rod Parsley and John Hagee. Parsley has claimed that Islam is a false religion that America should destroy, and John Hagee has called for bombing Iran to hasten the Christian apocalypse.

Several political pundits describe the current politico-cultural divide in the U.S. as a rift between God-fearing Christians and "secular" (read atheist) liberal intellectuals from (pick your coast). Of course, this distinction is inaccurate and misleading. The divide in American political culture over God is not so much about whether Americans believe in God as it is about how the 90 percent of Americans who believe in God? want to define his purpose in our political world. In this sense, the divide in American political culture over a presidential God is an argument between the politically left-leaning Christian who embraces a God of peace, inclusiveness, forgiveness and social justice, and the politically right-leaning Christian who embraces a God Almighty whose main attributes are judgment, the strength to vanquish enemies, and the righteous impulse to devalue - even destroy - all things not Christian. Again, which presidential God will shape the foreign policy decisions made in the Oval Office?

As Americans, regardless of our religious beliefs or political commitments, it is our duty as voters to reflect deeply on what we value in foreign policy initiatives, why we hold these values, and how we express them in the public sphere. We need reasonable voices speaking to reconcile the factions in the religio-political divide - a divide not over whether a candidate knows God, but over how Americans want to define the role of a candidate's God in a president's foreign policy. While religious values can certainly inform our moral impulses, the distinction between an exclusive or inclusive God is where war and peace often hang in the balance.

Labels: Americans, Barack Obama, Christianity, George Bush, John McCain, Lyn Boyd-Judson, politics, religion, war

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Monday, July 09, 2007

First Freedom

Preying on prayer.
By Paul Marshall

In his recent speech at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., President George W. Bush once again stressed the fundamental importance of religious freedom. It is “the very first protection offered in America’s Bill of Rights. It is a precious freedom. It is a basic compact under which people of faith agree not to impose their spiritual vision on others, and in return to practice their own beliefs as they see fit.”

Unfortunately, despite the presidential emphasis, these fine words seldom shape the foreign-policy bureaucracy. Promoting religious freedom is too often reduced to the noble task of helping those in prison, or occasionally treated as a sop to the president’s religious constituents.

It is seldom treated as an integral part of foreign affairs: Instead we find what Tom Farr calls in his forthcoming World of Faith and Freedom “a strong diplomatic distaste for understanding religion as a policy matter.” Yet there is a reason America’s Founding Fathers placed religious freedom as the very first freedom in the First Amendment: They viewed it as central, as a key to other rights. The Hudson Institute’s just-completed international survey of religious freedom shows they were right.

The president correctly tied religious freedom to the threat of radical Islam, to helping “the forces of moderation win the great struggle against extremism that is now playing out across the broader Middle East. We’ve seen the expansion of the concept of religious freedom and individual rights in every region of the world — except one.”

Our survey shows that the Muslim world, especially the greater Middle East, is the most religiously repressive region, and that that repression is expanding. One of the greatest barriers in this great struggle is that many Muslims who advocate interpretations of Islam that favor human freedom are silenced by threats from extremists, or charged by governments, with heresy, apostasy, or insulting Islam.

Nor is religious freedom merely a Western preoccupation: It is not confined to any area or continent. Despite the problems in the Islamic world, there are free Muslim countries such as Mali or Senegal. They, together with Japan, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa score better in this survey than do Belgium, France, Germany, or Greece. The most egregious persecuting states tend to be either Communist, such as North Korea and China, nationalist, such as Burma and Eritrea, or radical Islamist, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. They also tend to be those that act against U.S. interests. Conversely, those with good records are likely to be good U.S. allies.

While Western Europe is still one of the freest regions of the world, the situation is worsening and most countries score worse on religious freedom than they do for civil liberties in general. The reasons for this — continuing religious discrimination, increasingly aggressive secular ideologies, and an increase in religiously demarcated violence — illustrate and exacerbate the continent’s increasing tensions.

Religious freedom also correlates highly with other human rights, such as Freedom House’s civil-liberty index (.862) and political-liberties index (.822), and with Reporters without Borders press-freedom index (.804). Countries with good religious records also have comparatively little social conflict, remain democratic, and are unlikely to become failed states.

There is strong relation with economic wellbeing; both of men and women, and religiously based social restrictions on women are one of the major determinants of their economic status. One major reason for this is the strong linkage with economic freedom: Our religious-freedom scores have a correlation of .743 with the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal economic-freedom index. This is more than a finding that rich countries tend to have other good things as well.

Religious freedom not only correlates well with positive economic outcomes but also actually contributes toward them since it promotes the accumulation of social and spiritual capital. Good religious policies, good economic policies, and good economic outcomes go together.

Our modern world is becoming increasingly religious, religion shapes countries, and political and economic freedoms require religious freedom. Realistic foreign policy requires that action on the first freedom be moved from the fringes of diplomacy and given a centrality that reflects its growing importance.

— Paul Marshall is senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and the editor of the forthcoming book Religious Freedom in the World 2007 .

Labels: economics, first amendment, foreign policy, George Bush, Muslim world, Paul Marshall, radical Islam, religious freedom