TruthBook Religious News Blog

VIDEO: Madeleine Albright Discusses “The Mighty and The Almighty: United States Foreign Policy and God”

By ReligiousLiberty.TV ? August 24, 2008

From Fora.TV - Recorded May 7th, 2006 - Madeleine Albright talks about The Mighty and The Almighty: United States Foreign Policy and God. The former secretary of state offers a provocative and very personal look at the role of religion in America’s foreign policy. She argues that understanding the place and power of religion, and knowing how best to respond to it, is essential if America is to lead successfully around the world.

Labels: America, foreign policy, God, Madeleine Albright, religion, video

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Thursday, July 17, 2008

Recent Poll Shows Christians Believe Religious Freedom is Crucial to Foreign Policy Issue

More than half of Christians in America believe religious freedom should be a high priority in crafting U.S. foreign policy, according to a recent Wilson Research Strategies survey commissioned by Open Doors USA.

“The persecution of Christians in the world today is on the rise, with an estimated 100 million suffering some sort of repression and even death for their faith,” said Carl Moeller, president and chief executive officer of Open Doors USA, a Christian ministry that has served persecuted Christians around the world for more than 50 years. “Open Doors commissioned this study to try to understand what Christians in America feel about religious freedom. Clearly, it is a priority.”

Fifty-four percent of U.S. Christians polled consider religious freedom an important issue in making U.S. foreign policy, according to the survey. This is an especially high priority with those who attend church most frequently (60 percent), compared with those Christians who never attend (40 percent).

The study shows that 96 percent of respondents believe strongly that religious freedom is a basic human right, and that more than eight in 10 believe it is a very important basic right. Those who feel most strongly about the issue are women who frequently attend church. Ninety-one percent believe it is a very important issue.

Respondents did not believe that direct intervention should form our religious freedom foreign policy. Instead, they favored the U.S. using more indirect policies, such as economic sanctions (20 percent) and diplomatic measures to pressure persecuting regimes rather than having the U.S. directly intervene.

“The findings of this study demonstrate that senators McCain and Obama must address the issue of religious freedom in their foreign policy positions if they are intent on winning the vote of faithful Christians,” said Moeller.

Geographically, the weakest support for religious freedom as a basic human right is in New England, with only 76 percent of respondents ranking it as very important, compared with Mountain States, where 9 out of 10 say it is very important.

Among Christian groups, the strongest support came from Baptists, non denominational/independent churches, Lutherans and charismatics. The weakest group support came from Catholics, Presbyterians and Episcopalians.

Of special interest is the finding that 98 percent of frequent listeners to Christian radio believe strongly that religious freedom is a basic human right.

Labels: Americans, Christianity, foreign policy, Open Doors USA, religious freedom, Wilson Research Strategies

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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