Islam: An American Religion

What place does Islam have in American foreign policy? To what extent does the foreign policy debate over Islam differ from domestic policy discussions? Controversies inside the United States reveal big differences between the logic of law, on the one hand, and the logic of public debate and political mobilization, on the other. I have shown how different normative frameworks clash: on one side, liberal principles of equality and contract; on another, notions of merit, sacrifice, and convenience. One does not find such sharp contrasts in foreign policy debates. On the contrary, the latter are characterized by much crisscrossing between the discourses of liberalism, security, and morality.

Since the end of the 1990s, Islam is viewed in American foreign policy in terms of either national security or religious freedom. The main objective is to put in place programs that prevent radical Islam and radicalization and that promote a moderate Islam—in countries such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Yemen—with the aim of pacifying the region and protecting American interests. At the same time, in parallel with this realist security perspective, there has also been a liberal approach to promote religious freedom in the world through the efforts of diverse lobbies and political figures. For example, the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) was adopted in 1998 during the Clinton presidency as a tool to exert diplomatic pressure to defend individual rights to religious freedom. For many intellectuals, diplomats, and political figures, the Muslim world is now a major focus of this policy initiative. Because this supposedly unified cultural area is often described as oppressive and intolerant, it functions as the ideal terrain for this mission. This policy of exporting the American concept of international religious freedom is obviously closely linked to the defense of the United States’ interests in Muslim-majority countries. Thus the realist, culturalist paradigm of national security, on the one hand, and the liberal, idealist defense of religious liberty, on the other, appear as two sides of the same coin when it comes to understanding and managing Islam outside its borders. This is what leads Elizabeth Shakman Hurd to speak of “securitization” when talking about the use of religion in the American conception of international relations.¹

Since 2001, many studies devoted to America’s policy in the Middle East have been published, and they are often very critical of the United States’ imperialism and its will to be the dominant power in the region. A complete account would go beyond the scope of this book. The goal here is to analyze how in American foreign policy a legalist perspective intermixes with a moralistic civilization argument when treating the category of religion, and more specifically Islam.

There is not an official American foreign policy regarding Islam, or any foreign policy toward religion in general. Rather than being an operative category of recognized concrete action, Islam and religion are topics within the discourse of public diplomacy.² American international relations specialists are in disagreement over the importance that ought to be given to religion as a factor in world conflicts and their resolution. For some, conflicts are to be explained, above all, by looking at the material conditions and the unequal distribution of wealth and symbolic powers.³ They do not consider differences in religious affiliation to be a leading cause of violence. Thus it is useless to have religion be a central theme in public diplomacy and international treaties. It’s more important to encourage economic development of conflict-prone areas. However, there are also divisions among researchers who consider religion to be a factor that needs to be taken seriously. Some of them, in the tradition of Samuel Huntington, claim that there exists an irreducible difference between the Muslim world and the West, the former being, in their view, naturally more disposed toward violence than the latter. One of the leading representatives of this line of thinking is Monica Duffy Toft, who, on the basis of a comparative study of forty-two conflicts between 1940 and 2000, concludes that Islamic culture is characterized by great difficulty adapting to other cultures and by a more militaristic attitude. From her point of view, the resolution of conflict necessarily requires reforming Islamic culture. Other researchers come to similar conclusions but without sharing the same negative, culturalist vision of Islam. For them, there is no inherent problem with Islam—rather, religion and the religious are important vectors of communication and negotiation that have for too long been neglected in diplomacy and foreign policy. They claim that it is possible to find common ground around religious values and to take better advantage of the resources offered by religious communities for building peace. The idea of religion as an essential tool of “state-building” and the resolution of international conflicts is the thesis of the essay collection Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft (1995).⁴ One of the volume’s editors, Douglas Johnston, went on to found the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy in Washington, a think tank devoted to promoting these ideas to politicians and the general public.

These disagreements over the role of religion in international relations are a leading symptom of the indeterminate status of the category of religion itself. “Religion” floats between meaning individual belief, a set of practices, and an organized collective with institutional hierarchies. When analyzed in relation to conflict resolution, it is understood as either a tool for pacification or a cause of radicalization. These conceptual uncertainties appear clearly in a report published in April 2010 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs titled Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy. The thesis of the report is that religion in general (and not just Islam) ought to be considered as an asset and resource. Most of the study evokes the positive force of individual faith that leads people to act in the world. But one of its footnotes proposes another definition of religion, the only explicit effort at definition in the entire study, and it insists more on the collective and institutional dimension of religion: “We define religion as an established system of belief, practice, and ritual based in a collective affirmation of a transcendent or otherworldly reality that encompasses and gives ultimate meaning to earthly existence.”⁵

Whether the insistence is on individual faith or on a social institution, religion for the Chicago Council is defined by its capacity to act immediately on conflicts in ways that other types of actors, actions, and institutions fail to do: “Religion—through its motivating ideas and the mobilizing power of its institutions—is a driver of politics in its own right.”⁶ Such an approach is problematic not only because of its tendency to essentialize religion as a “distinctive logic” of practices, representations, and discourses but also because it in no way explains the mechanisms by which religion allegedly shapes behaviors. Thus the category of religion understood as a resource functions in the reasoning of the Chicago Council experts as a sort of deus ex machina, thereby producing the illusion of an explanation and a strategy for global conflict resolution.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank specialized in questions of security and international relations, began a similar discussion of the problem in 2007 with its own report that laid out the same questions. The authors note that “government officials remain concerned about developing and implementing religion-related policies abroad in part because legal guidelines on the applicability of the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses to foreign policy are still evolving.”⁹ According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, even if government agencies are increasingly aware of the religious factor since 2001, most government officials remain highly skeptical about the grounds and legality of such an approach. Many say they fear legal proceedings for acting in violation of the establishment clause. John Hanford, former United States ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, is quoted in the report as stating that those fears are exaggerated and unhelpful: “There is a concern—I see as excessive—about the separation of Church and State that has led to a lack of comfort in dealing with religion.”¹⁰ Nevertheless, neither the report nor any of the meetings and conferences held since its publication have come up with a clear response.

And yet the question does not simply concern hypothetical policies. In 2015, Brookings Institution expert Will McCants raised this question again. He reported that the lawyers in the State Department opposed a project he had submitted when he was working there as a senior adviser for countering violent extremism. While the project sought to compile Islamic scriptures advocating for tolerance, the State Department lawyers objected, saying that such a document was meant to “promote one interpretation of a religion over another” and, as such, was in conflict with the establishment clause.¹¹ Likewise, some programs sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have been criticized for their violation of the establishment clause. Since fostering moderate Islam has become a key theme of policies aimed at building stability in the Middle East in the name of advancing both American interests and the ideal of democratization, several programs have been put in place by American governmental agencies in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, but they would be judged unconstitutional if they were operating in the United States, according to Jesse Merriam, a constitutional law specialist. One example is the Islam and Civil Society (ISC) program launched by USAID in Indonesia on the idea that Indonesian political reform necessarily presupposes a reform of Islamic doctrine. “Religious terminology is more effective than secular discourse in winning popular support for democratic values,” say the authors of the summary assessment of the program.¹² In order to build stronger ties between the United States and Muslim nongovernmental organizations, the program offers financial and logistical aid to different religious organizations—notably, a conservative association of Muslim students that has recently begun promoting themes of pluralism and democracy. The ISC supports civil studies education projects in universities such as the State Islamic University of Jakarta and the private Muhammadiyah University of Magelang in Central Java, Indonesia. The ISC also financed the publication by State Islamic University of the manual Democracy, Human Rights and Civil Society as well as the creation of the course “Democracy, Human Rights and Gender Equality in an Islamic Perspective.” The USAID program encourages reaching out to and supporting organizations that defend a certain theological approach to Islam judged favorable to advancing American interests. The agency also finances “democracy education workshops” aimed at preachers who speak at Friday services. The program has sought to finance the distribution of roughly two thousand manuals and brochures on “democracy and pluralism” as well as the training of female preachers to lead debates on equality of the sexes. According to USAID, this collaboration with women allows them to fight against “harsh interpretations of Islamic (sharia) law.”¹³ In similar fashion, the radio show Religion and Tolerance financed by the ISC aims to promote the idea that the “true” interpretation of Islam is tolerant, pro-democratic, and favorable to American interests.

To what extent are such initiatives compatible with the establishment clause? For Merriam, similar programs financed by government agencies would never be able to operate inside the United States:

USAID members themselves hold divergent opinions. Some years ago, a conflict erupted between the legal counsel for USAID and Clifford Brown, then an employee of an agency based in Kyrgyzstan.¹⁵ USAID’s lawyers prohibited Brown from carrying out his project of translating moderate Islamic writings into the Uzbek and Kyrgyz languages on the grounds that USAID’s financing of that project would violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause. Brown rejected this interpretation, however, claiming that the clause did not apply outside the United States. The question came up again in a July 17, 2009, audit by the inspector general of USAID.¹⁶

The investigation focused especially on the funding of two projects that were judged problematic: one to pay $325,000 for repairs to four mosques in Iraq, and the other a program to fight the AIDS virus that also encouraged young people to learn passages from the Bible. The leaders of the mosque restoration project in Iraq admitted that they were unable to give a clear answer as to whether their work was in conformity with the First Amendment and federal regulations. Federal regulations prohibit using USAID funds to restore structures devoted to “inherently religious purposes.”¹⁷ But the legal counsel for USAID-Iraq did not apply because the principal aim of the construction project was to provide work for masons, plumbers, electricians, and gardeners: “For example, some of the expected benefits from rehabilitating the Al Shuhada Mosque were stimulating the economy, enhancing a sense of pride in the community, reducing opposition to international relief organizations operating in Fallujah, and reducing incentives among young men to participate in violence or insurgent groups.”¹⁸

USAID leaders were confronted with the same sort of dilemma with the funding of an AIDS-prevention program in Africa called the “Abstinence and Behavior Change for Youth Program.” This project included optional use of Bible stories and memorizing religious verses with the aim of helping young people better resist sexual exploitation. USAID’s financing of this program represents an indirect official endorsement of Christian principles and even a preference for Christianity. But the local USAID authorities were not certain that the establishment clause applies as strictly outside as inside the United States, especially when an American foreign policy objective as important as the fight against AIDS is at stake. They also insisted on the idea of “cultural differences”—arguing that recourse to religious themes in the African context is “useful for connecting with the target audience.”¹⁹ The report decries the fact that the Department of Justice never replied to USAID’s leaders who asked for clarification about which projects the agency could or could not fund. One of the report’s major recommendations is that the director of USAID’s Center for Faith-Based Initiatives obtain a clear response from President Obama and the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

One of the first American legal scholars to have closely examined this question is John Mansfield, a former law professor at Harvard University.²⁰ For Mansfield, the Constitution does not apply the same way abroad and on American soil, first, because of the necessity of adapting to constraints of the foreign context and, second, out of respect for “the rights of foreign nations to follow their own customs.” That said, Mansfield does not give a definitive answer to the debate. He simply invites one to make the distinction between cases that involve what he calls “a core Establishment Clause value” and others that do not. According to Mansfield, one can accept that the federal government would finance a religious school in a foreign country to develop science education as long as religious schools are the only ones available for receiving financing in the country. Even if in this case the financing scheme is contrary to the establishment clause as it applies to domestic policy, such a program would still be acceptable because it serves the interests of the United States. But if the federal funds were to permit not science education but the school’s development of certain theological interpretations, that, says Mansfield, would be an unacceptable violation of the establishment clause: “For the United States directly to embrace the doctrines of a particular religion, albeit for political ends, might conflict with the values of the religion clauses to an extent that cannot be outweighed by foreign policy considerations or the importance of respect for other cultures.”²¹

To resolve the question of the applicability of the Constitution in foreign policy contexts, Jesse Merriam proposes two criteria: the “anomalous” and the “impracticable.” In other words, one has to consider that the Constitution always applies to American foreign actions, except in cases where it would be anomalous or practically impossible to do so. Similar criteria have been used implicitly since the Insular Cases, a series of disputes treated by the Supreme Court between 1901 and 1914 that had to do with the status of territories, including islands, acquired by the United States in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898. During the proceedings, the Supreme Court argued that all constitutional rights did not automatically extend to all regions under American control. That discussion contributed to the development of the theory of territorial incorporation, which holds that the Constitution applies in its entirety to only incorporated territories (such as Alaska and Hawaii) but only partially to new, non-incorporated territories (such as Guam and Puerto Rico). Despite the explicit use of this criterion in the cases Reid v. Covert (1957) and Boumediene v. Bush (2008), the matter remains highly ambiguous.²² The Supreme Court gave very little guidance that would help define the “anomalous” and the “impracticable.”

The first step in evaluating the case of USAID’s funding of mosque repairs in Iraq is to define clearly what the goals are of the U.S. mission in Iraq. If one accepts that the mission’s goal is to build stability and economic development there, one could ask how the strict application of the establishment clause would obstruct progress toward those goals. For Merriam, this is not the right question. The reasons given by the USAID leaders to justify the reconstruction of the mosques—that is, creating jobs, restoring a feeling of community pride, stimulating the economy, and reducing the risk of youth turning to violence—are reasons that could justify building all sorts of structures and not only mosques. This is why “it seems entirely practicable to apply the Establishment Clause to this funding of mosques in Iraq.”²³ The situation is different in the case of the funding of the African AIDS prevention program. That mission, according to the USAID audit, is “devoted to improving the self-awareness and self-worth of young people so that students of the program might become less vulnerable to sexual exploitation and thus less at risk for HIV.”²⁴ In this case, the U.S. government cannot carry out this mission if it strictly applies the establishment clause—in other words, by refusing to include any and all theological references in the sex-education manuals. In short, for Merriam, the criterion of what’s “impracticable” brings some clarity to the debate: in the case where the strict application of the establishment clause renders realizing an essential foreign policy objective impracticable, one can take the view that the Constitution does not apply.

To this day, however, no clarification has come down from the Department of Justice or from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships concerning the application of the establishment clause outside the United States. After the publication of the audit, the agency proposed changing its own regulations in order to pursue more easily a certain number of activities that would be potentially limited or prohibited if the establishment clause were to be strictly enforced. In a circular published on March 25, 2011, in the Federal Register, USAID deplores “that some provisions in the Final Rule go beyond the requirements of the Establishment Clause and other Federal law, are not supported by Establishment Clause jurisprudence, and constrict USAID’s ability to pursue the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States overseas.”²⁵ USAID proposed modifying the final rule such that “USAID funds may be used for the acquisition, construction, or rehabilitation of structures that are used, in whole or in part, for inherently religious activities, so long as the program for which USAID assistance is provided (i) Is authorized by law and has a secular purpose.” Numerous specialists immediately opposed this attempt to soften the restrictions relating to the financing of religious programs. A group of six First Amendment experts sent a letter to Ari Alexander, the director of USAID’s Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, warning him about the flaws of this new regulation. The latter might prohibit the flagrant establishment of a religion, but it nevertheless authorizes actions that the establishment clause jurisprudence as it currently stands before the Supreme Court also forbids. Notably, the direct financing of explicitly religious activities is prohibited.²⁶ Also prohibited is using government money to finance the construction of buildings where religious cultural activities or religious instruction are to take place.²⁷ The six experts also reject the argument that considers funding a religious activity to be acceptable as long as it serves a secular purpose. This criterion is totally inadequate to justify direct aid from the government.²⁸

USAID’s proposed rule change was finally withdrawn, but the discussion it provoked revealed once again the disagreements and uncertainties that exist around the application of the First Amendment abroad. Given the massive American presence today in countries with Muslim majorities, it is unlikely that these questions will just go away. Neither the White House nor the Department of Justice have provided any clear answers. In 2009, President Obama tried to clarify the relation between the government and religiously inspired nongovernmental organizations with an executive order that defined more precisely what it was permissible to fund.²⁹ “Explicitly religious” activities were excluded. And yet foreign policy officials are still wondering what the exact constraints are on U.S. action in the Muslim world. The question of what exactly the establishment clause permits remains unresolved. The distinction between “rights” and “what is right”—so central to the domestic controversies, as we’ve seen—is not as effective in these foreign cases. There is considerable confusion between the legal argument and the moral, cultural narrative. This gray zone constitutes what Elizabeth Shakman Hurd describes as a “nonseparationist” landscape of religious engagement and reform.³⁰ It has complex and problematic consequences in the politics of promotion of international religious freedom: “It gives an edge to those religions that conform to an American understanding of what it means for religion to be free.”³¹

The International Religious Freedom Act was the outcome of a campaign led jointly by Christian activists and secular human rights activists as a way to place the fight against the persecution of religious minorities at the center of foreign policy.³² In the mid-1990s, violence against Christians in Sudan and against Muslims and Christian minorities in China was a growing preoccupation for these lobbies. In the fall of 1997, Representative Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) and Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) sponsored the Freedom from Religious Persecution Act, which imposed automatic sanctions against governments found guilty of persecuting religious minorities. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright rejected the idea of sanctions and criticized the very principle of such a law, which in her view implied a dangerous prioritization of human rights. The State Department was generally hostile to the idea, which was perceived as largely an initiative of the Christian Right. The business community also worried about the consequences of such a law, fearing the negative repercussions on commerce in the event of such sanctions. Therefore, a slightly modified version, IRFA, was proposed and eventually signed into law by President Clinton in October 1998 after having been approved in the House of Representatives in May 1998 by a vote of 375 to 41.³³ The law calls for the creation of the Office of International Religious Freedom within the State Department and an independent bipartisan commission headed by a special counselor to the president that would be part of the National Security Council. The commission is charged with making recommendations to the president, the secretary of state, and the head of the National Security Council. Its job is to prepare reports that provide essential information about religious freedom in the world and to identify “countries of particular concern” (CPC). Section 402 gives a series of possible sanctions to be imposed against countries that do not respect religious freedom, ranging from public condemnation by the American president to the elimination of university exchange programs or other cultural cooperation activities. Economic sanctions, such as the suspension of economic aid, are also enumerated.³⁴

As the IRFA supporters see it, the legal norm of religious freedom places the accent on individual liberty. This norm is founded on the presupposition that considers personal experience, faith, and sincere beliefs as the essence of religion—to the detriment of other approaches that emphasize being faithful to certain doctrines or social practices. Many detractors of IRFA criticize this propensity to present as universally true and timeless a definition of religion that in fact has a particular situated history. The historian Donald S. Lopez Jr. denounces this wish to erect as a universal legal norm a value that is “an assumption deriving from the history of Christianity that religion is above all an interior state of assent to certain truths.”³⁵ The definition of religion as belief has the effect of making religious practices that are defined differently appear as abnormal or dangerous—for example, those that insist more on ethics, orthopraxy, and community. As Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has noted, the international dissemination of the American norm of religious freedom, far from guaranteeing the survival or emergence of plural ways of life and ethical orientations, works instead to reduce differences to a uniformity: “In its strongest forms, the story of international religious freedom globalizes the secular state’s power over the individual. Appearing as a guarantee of the worth of the individual’s own desires, it is actually a story of telling people who they are, what to do and how to be. It privileges particular ways of doing and being as deserving special protection by the state or associations thereof, leaving others behind.”³⁶ The IRFA policy makes apparent a confusion between a liberal emancipation register of rights and a register of nationalism and security. These two narratives, explains Hurd, “justify intervention to save, define, shape, and sanctify parts of people’s (religious and non-religious) individual and collective lives.”³⁷

This paradigm of international religious freedom, founded on the idea of the primacy of sincere belief and individual conscience, is consistent with what the anthropologist Webb Keane has described as the “moral narrative of modernity.”³⁸ This narrative is founded on the essential distinction between sincere belief and all practices defined as nonessential—alimentary prohibitions, icons, rituals, and the like: “The moral narrative of modernity is a story about human emancipation and self-mastery. According to this moral narrative, modernity is a story of human liberation from a host of false beliefs and fetishisms that undermined freedom in the past.”³⁹

Part of the established foreign policy discourse on international religious freedom seems to presuppose that Islam does not make any distinction between the religious and the political. This suspicion toward Muslims’ alleged incapacity to produce political decisions independently from Islam appeared more recently with the questions raised about the neutrality of the members of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). The commission was criticized on several occasions for its treatment of Muslim employees. In June 2012, Safiya Ghori-Ahmad sued the commission for having reversed its decision to hire her after learning that she was Muslim. This trial, which followed a complaint filed by the commission concerning equality of opportunity in hiring, focused on a particular member of USCIRF, Nina Shea. She is said to have remarked that “hiring a Muslim like Ghori-Ahmad to analyze religious freedom in Pakistan would be like ‘hiring an IRA activist to research the U.K. twenty years ago.’”⁴⁰ Leonard Leo, a conservative lawyer and longtime president of the commission, in addition to being vice president of the Federalist Society and a former adviser to George W. Bush, also came in for questioning during this trial. Serious reservations about the commission’s neutrality and its anti-Muslim prejudice that had been expressed long before the Ghori-Ahmad affair led certain lawmakers to propose terminating its mandate at the end of 2011. The mandate was renewed for three years, but five commissioners were forced to resign, including Nina Shea. The nomination of Zuhdi Jasser to be a member of USCIRF by Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did nothing to calm the critics of IRFA’s orientation. As mentioned earlier, this Muslim doctor and founder of the American Muslim Forum for Democracy had gained public attention for his participation in the hearings organized in March 2011 by Representative Peter King (R-N.Y.) about the radicalization of American Muslims, for his opposition to the Manhattan Islamic center, and for his support of the anti-Sharia movement and of the New York Police Department’s surveillance program directed at Muslims. After 2001, he became famous for his media appearances in which he explained that Islam can be compatible with democracy only if it is purified, reformed, and Americanized. On April 12, 2012, a total of sixty-four associations, mosques, and Muslim intellectuals sent a petition to Senators Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), McConnell, and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), calling on them to withdraw Jasser’s nomination on the grounds that he is a puppet of Islamophobic groups and opposed to the religious freedom of American Muslims.⁴¹

The IRFA is inspired by a vision of the world that began during the Cold War, when an evangelical rhetoric and a liberal-secular discourse in defense of human rights intermingled in an unprecedented way. Since the end of the 1970s, evangelical lobbies have pushed for a moralization of American foreign policy. According to Joshua Green, there has been development over the past three decades of a “movement of Christian solidarity” in the United States that wishes to make opposition to persecutions of Christians in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan become a foreign policy priority. And criticism of Islam is said to be an inseparable part of this combat. Thus Steven Snyder, a member of the association International Christian Concern, could assert in September 2001: “We are at war with an unseen enemy that has demonstrated its resolve to launch a jihad (holy war) on Americans, Christians, and Jews.”⁴² Grace Bible Church in Virginia, of which the Republican representative Frank Wolf—one of the authors of the International Religious Freedom Act—is a member, is active in this movement. Its pastor, Chris Robinson, seeks to convince his congregation, most of whom are engaged in projects to protect Christians in Burma or Sudan, that there is a symmetry between the fate of American Christians since September 11 and that of persecuted Christians in the Muslim world. Since the end of the 1970s, these conservative Christian groups have appropriated the secular discourse of human rights to add more gravitas to their combat. The IRFA is the outcome of this grafting of the secular humanist norms of human rights onto the conservative evangelical program. The career path of Nina Shea, a longtime member of the Commission for International Religious Freedom, is exemplary in this regard. She began to take an interest in religious freedom during the Cold War. After having been involved in the fight against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, she helped found the Puebla Institute, a watchdog group opposed to religious oppression.⁴³ Today she is the director for religious freedom at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, and a leading figure in the campaign against the persecution of Christians around the world. In a Wall Street Journal editorial published on July 5, 1995, Michael J. Horowitz, former head legal counsel to President Reagan at the Office of Management and Budget, denounced the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries, enumerating a series of atrocities: pastors assassinated, children kidnapped, churches burned. In the wake of the emotions stirred by this declaration, the first International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church was organized in 1996 and received massive support from many evangelical churches. Also in 1996, Shea published In the Lion’s Den: Persecuted Christians and What the Western Church Can Do About It, a pamphlet filled with horrible tales intended to show the extent of Christian persecutions in Muslim countries. Many of those close to the IRFA who came of age in the Cold War context continue to have a Manichean and polemical approach to international relations, and for them the United States must play the role of the exceptional country. The image of Christians persecuted by Muslims is the updated version of Christians under siege from godless Communists.

An entire media industry has thus been developed that stages what the historian Melani McAlister calls “the spectacle of persecution.” Since the passage of the IRFA, “there was a remarkable proliferation of materials that constructed a particular image of ‘the persecuted.’ In books and magazines, and increasingly online, believers could consume vivid stories and images of suffering.”⁴⁴ Many organizations—Voice of Martyrs, Open Doors, Christian Freedom International, Compass Direct—have specialized in disseminating narratives of the martyrdom of Christianity by Islam.

The recrudescence of violence against Copts in Egypt after 2011 and the spread of expulsion and oppression against Christian minorities perpetrated by ISIS have reinforced the polarizing and asociological narrative of the clash of civilizations.⁴⁵ A coalition of self-appointed representatives of the Egyptian Coptic and Middle Eastern Christian diaspora, pro-IRFA politicians, intellectuals sympathetic to neoconservative causes, and evangelical leaders turned the Coptic cause into a key component of the international religious freedom campaign. Saba Mahmood has demonstrated how, to demand the protection of the international community, the American Coptic diaspora evokes not only the necessity of protecting freedom of conscience but also the defense of article 27 of the United Nation’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which defines religious freedom as it relates to the right of a minority.⁴⁶ This strategy of referring to religious freedom and to the concept of a minority is another chapter in the continual history of Protestant missions in Egypt that originated in the nineteenth century. As the historical study by Heather Sharkey illustrates, Presbyterian missionaries in Egypt were ardent defenders of the cause of religious freedom in arguments to the U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Office, and the League of Nations.⁴⁷ Saba Mahmood argues that the IRFA exemplifies the same imperialist will as the Protestant missionaries of the nineteenth century who viewed the promotion of religious freedom as a necessary condition for the success of their proselytism.⁴⁸

In the end, the efforts of Protestant missionaries to divide Christians and Muslims produced little result in Egypt. Unlike many other Christian communities in the Middle East, Coptic Egyptians long rejected the offers of European protection. They refused to be transformed into a protected “minority,” and they sided with anticolonial nationalist movements, placing the accent on the importance of national unity. The authoritarian regimes of first Gamal Abdel Nasser and then Hosni Mubarak did, however, contribute to the polarization of Muslims and Copts. As the church came to be defined as the sole legitimate interlocutor of the Egyptian power elite, the identification via the religious marker replaced all other forms of identification for the Egyptian Copts. The Egyptian revolution of 2011 put an end to this equilibrium and this situation where the Copts lived a de facto minority status protected by a strict hierarchy, which was itself subject to the structures of an authoritarian government. The role played between 2011 and 2013 by the Muslim Brotherhood and the advances of the Salafist movement have been serious concerns to the Coptic community.⁵⁰ As Mahmood shows, a lively debate is ongoing among intellectuals and Coptic leaders as to whether they should now embrace the status of protected minority.⁵¹

It should be noted that the members of the Coptic diaspora in the United States practice a less nuanced discourse, more anti-Muslim and pro-American than their Egyptian coreligionists. They largely supported the 2008 initiative of Frank Wolf, who introduced legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives that would make the allocation of American aid conditional on respect for the religious freedom of Copts.⁵² Michael Munier, an admirer of Representative Wolf and the founder (in 1996) of the U.S. Copts Association, is a leading defender of the thesis of Coptic persecution. He collaborates regularly with the Hudson Institute, where Nina Shea and Michael J. Horowitz have organized numerous conferences directed at diplomats and politicians who take up the fate of Egypt’s Copts.

Nevertheless, even if the IRFA paradigm is founded on an orientalist conception of the Muslim world, it’s important not to exaggerate the thesis that religious liberty is actually working as a tool of political imperialism. Researchers and activists may speak of a hegemonic project by analyzing the origins and implications of the IRFA from a theoretical perspective, but those practically concerned with this policy deplore instead its ineffectiveness, lack of coherence, and absence of real results. Thomas Farr, a former director of the Office for International Religious Freedom, has described in detail the failure of this policy.⁵³ Not only is the secular culture of American diplomacy slow to change, but the absence of clear directives concerning the application of the establishment clause overseas also discourages the few diplomats who might be willing to accord more importance to the religious factor. Isolated as it is within the State Department, accomplishing the goals of the IRFA is impeded by the unusual feature of having an ambassador-at-large. Paradoxically, the latter is subordinate to the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor.⁵⁴ This situation is different from the usual hierarchy within the State Department because normally the rank of ambassador-at-large is superior to that of assistant secretary. In 2003, the inspector general of the State Department released a very negative report about the organization of IRFA policy: “The current structure that places the congressionally mandated office of the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom within DRL [democracy, rights, and labor] is at odds with the Department’s organizational guidelines and has proved to be unworkable…. As a consequence the purposes for which the religious freedom function was created are not being adequately served.”⁵⁵ On account of all these difficulties, promoting religious freedom is not perceived by young diplomats as an attractive field to enter but more often as a dead-end to avoid. Most IRFA reports evoke the ongoing tensions between the methods of the commission and that of the majority of State Department civil servants, who generally stick to a secular orientation and are even wary of the approach taken by the commission. According to Farr, the commission’s recommendations are more often shelved rather than being used to serve any real imperial policy. He writes that this mix of disinterest and mistrust when it comes to religion can be found among liberals as well as realists. “Whereas realists see religion as relevant only to understanding the drive to power, liberals tend to see religious communities—especially traditional religious communities—as obstacles to the adoption of liberal policies.”⁵⁶

The nonbinding character of the IRFA program also contributes to its weakness. The principle tool of the USCIRF is the denunciation of a government’s abuses against religious minorities and the place of certain countries on a list of CPCs. But imposing concrete sanctions on the basis of USCIRF recommendations has rarely happened. The IRFA report published in 2007 suggests that the policy of designating CPCs may sometimes even be counterproductive. After listing Saudi Arabia as a CPC in 2004, a nonbinding accord was signed between the Saudi and American governments that stipulated that the Saudi government would agree to stop paying for the studies of radical preachers, terminate the dissemination of Wahhabi literature abroad, and remove language judged overly intolerant from certain school manuals.⁵⁷ Four years after signing this accord, none of these promises had been kept, and the report even notes further stiffening in the language of the school manuals.⁵⁸ In similar fashion, notes Farr, China first expressed displeasure at being classified as a CPC, but very quickly it simply ignored the rhetoric coming from the commission: “[A]s the CPC designations recurred year after year, duly accompanied by a reaffirmation of the ban on control equipment, even the Chinese began to yawn.”⁵⁹ Of the three leading goals of the IRFA bureau—the fight against religious persecutions, the liberation of religious prisoners, and the promotion of religious liberty—the third remains the vaguest and least achievable for the State Department. Implementation of the International Religious Freedom Act consists in identifying problem zones and condemning them verbally more than it does developing concrete measures that are suitable in a particular context. In 2011, Farr summarized the absence of resources, coherent organization, and interest when he described the policy for promoting religious freedom as anemic and ineffective: “Notwithstanding their internal inconsistencies, the combined weight of these arguments has fed a kind of paralysis in U.S. international religious freedom policy, which, on balance, has been anemic and ineffective in Muslim-majority countries.”⁶⁰

In short, after starting off as the pet project of a small network of evangelical activists, the policy to promote international religious freedom has yet to gain wide acceptance. While all foreign policy leaders agree in principle to opposing the persecution of religious minorities, many have reservations about the IRFA’s policies, its presuppositions, and its way of going about things. The incoherence of this program, the lack of resources at its disposal, and the low level of interest it has attracted are regularly deplored. The International Religious Freedom Act may be the instrument of an imperial vision of the world, but the practical successes of this policy have so far been limited. And yet, regardless of the number of sanctions it has been able to impose or other successful pursuits, the activists, intellectuals, and networks sympathetic to IRFA have managed to reinforce among the American people an image of an intolerant Islam and a Muslim world that persecutes Christians.

The case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was decided by the Supreme Court in January 2012, offers a clear illustration of this contrast. On the basis of a principle termed the “ministerial exception,” which prohibits the government from interfering in the internal affairs of religious institutions, the Court handed down its ruling on January 12, 2012, in favor of the Hosanna-Tabor Lutheran School and against its employees, notwithstanding antidiscrimination laws of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Cheryl Perich, a teacher in a school belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Synod (the second-largest Lutheran denomination in the state of Missouri), was obliged to go on sick leave for several months after being diagnosed with narcolepsy, a sleep disorder. Upon her return, her employer encouraged her to resign; in response, she threatened to file suit against her employer, whose next step was to fire her on the grounds of “insubordination and disruptive behavior” because she improperly sought outside support, whereas it was said such conflicts ought to be treated from inside the community. Even though she mostly taught nonreligious subjects (art, science, social studies, music), Perich did also teach a religion class, led students in prayer, and was considered part of the religion faculty since she had received religious training within the organization. By claiming that Perich’s activities fell within the ministerial category, the school directors could legitimately invoke before the Court the ministerial exception, which prohibits secular courts from interfering in the internal discussions within a church. The Supreme Court’s decision was considered a big victory for the leaders of religious organizations. Bishop William E. Lori, chair of the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), expressed his pleasure with the decision in a prepared statement: “This decision makes resoundingly clear the historical and constitutional importance of keeping internal church affairs off limits to the government.”⁶² Chief Justice John Roberts defended his opinion by underlining that “the church must be free to choose who will guide it on its way.”⁶³ The Hosanna-Tabor case thus marks a victory for the principle of religious liberty, not as matter of freedom of conscience, but the freedom for a church to choose, govern, and fire its employees.

In a similar vein, Catholic and Protestant universities rose up to fight the provision in President Obama’s health-insurance-reform legislation that requires reimbursement for contraceptive services, using as their main argument the principle of their religious freedom. Many schools filed suits against the Obama administration, asserting that the obligation to provide free access to contraception for their students and employees was a violation of their constitutional right to religious freedom. Republican candidates at the time immediately seized on this affair as a way to radicalize the public’s opposition to the Democratic president. Mitt Romney, in his blog, encouraged his supporters to sign a petition to protest against “using Obamacare to impose a secular vision on Americans who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away.”⁶⁴ According to Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and then president of the USCCB, “Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.”⁶⁵ Michael Galligan-Stierle, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, also denounced this rule as a violation of religious freedom: “It’s the first time in history that the federal government is legislating or prioritizing something over religious liberty…. This law is saying we are no longer free, that we don’t have a choice. We are paying for things that we don’t believe in.”⁶⁶ In short, opponents of Obamacare—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which became law in 2010—succeeded in turning the reimbursement for contraception services into a constitutional debate over religious freedom, which is understood here in the particular sense of acknowledging a religious community’s freedom to supervise and constrain the consciences and bodies of its employees.

This indirect call to establish the right for religious institutions to regulate the behavior and preferences of their members was clearly formulated by the USCCB in November 2011, and in particular by the Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Freedom chaired by Bishop Lori. The bishop denounced what he called the establishment of nonreligion as a religion in the United States, and he encouraged his colleagues to resist this. He does not speak of nonbelief but of nonreligion. The Founding Fathers, Lori recalls, wanted to create a legal system that ensured citizens the liberty to believe but also the freedom to have “churches and clerical institutions.” For him, it is urgent to demand “the freedom of religious entities to provide services according to their own lights, to defend publicly their teachings, and even to choose and manage their own personnel.”⁶⁷ This indirect plea for the establishment of the autonomy of (Christian) religious institutions is part of a wider movement in favor of a bigger role for Christianity in public life. Coalitions of Catholic and evangelical groups are increasingly using the term “public Christianity,” which they oppose to the idea of a “naked public square.” In the area of international relations, the idea is to strangle the threat of political Islam by insisting on the idea of religious liberty as meaning no freedom of conscience, and by opting for a nonestablishment perspective. In the domestic national debate, however, the idea is to fight to promote another sense of religious liberty so as to permit the development of public Christianity—therefore, one calls for a form of state recognition of certain religious institutions to the detriment of others. A joint declaration by Catholic and evangelical leaders was published in the March 2012 issue of the magazine FirstThings.⁶⁸ This manifesto opposes the reduction of religious freedom to a simple liberty of worship and belief, and denounces the secular influence of human rights discourses. Whereas IRFA sympathizers turn adroitly to the liberal-secular discourse of human rights to better communicate a moral- and security-oriented vision for the Muslim world, in the domestic political debate one notices, on the contrary, a clear opposition between liberal and religious references:

The will of IRFA supporters to make their understanding of religious liberty universal comes up against not only domestic opposition but also skepticism from a number of European countries. For IRFA, the rights that religious liberty must defend are individual rights. They are in conflict, however, with a concept of right to religion that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has sought to put forward since the end of the 1990s. Several resolutions to fight against “defamation of religions” were adopted within the United Nations between 1999 and 2005 by the UN Commission on Human Rights and, starting in 2007, by the body that succeeded it, the UN Human Rights Council.⁷⁰ The UN General Assembly also adopted similar resolutions starting in 2005. These nonbinding resolutions denounce the defamation of religions as a form of violation of human dignity and of religious liberty. They raise a warning about the negative consequences of such defamation for public order and collective harmony. They are regularly proposed by OIC member countries and sometimes passed with no vote, but never unanimously. The United States, Canada, the European Union, and several Pacific Ocean countries have always opposed them. For most Western countries, the OIC project is not only unnecessary, because there already exists a form of protection against inciting hatred in international treaties, but, above all, contrary to the principle of free speech.⁷¹ IRFA supporters refuse the pertinence of OIC reasoning to justify the antidefamation resolutions. Religions cannot be rights-holders; only individuals can be. The idea that religions could claim rights in the same way as individuals would have dangerous implications. It would require individuals to compete with religions for the recognition of rights. Another dangerous consequence would be an easier restriction on individuals’ freedom of expression.

In March 2011, after a decade of discussions and lobbying by human rights organizations and conservative lobbies such as the American Center for Law and Justice, the UN Human Rights Council passed resolution 16/18, which definitively invalidates earlier efforts to criminalize the defamation of religions. American human rights organizations (notably, the International Commission for Religious Freedom) considered this outcome as a victory for the principle of free speech and individual rights.

If this debate has revealed a consensus among Western countries, there still exist important differences between Europe and the United States when it comes to defining religious freedom. The American paradigm that asserts religious freedom equals individual freedom and the American tradition of court cases and jurisprudence to deal with religious conflicts are not easily accepted by European countries. Even if the discourse of individual rights also plays a central role in European debates about religious freedom, the approach founded on the recognition of the cultural heritage of religions competes with the individualist perspective focused on the protection of rights. In Europe, the state has historically played a key role in negotiating relations with churches and religious communities. Churches still proclaim with no compunction their status as culturally dominant or established churches, and states frequently maintain close ties with churches and religious institutions and communities. Discord has emerged on several occasions between the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom and the State Department, on the one hand, and European countries, on the other—for example, on the question of recognizing the Church of Scientology as a religious denomination or on the elimination of “religious affiliation” as a required item on Greek national identity cards.

The difference between the European approach and the American approach based on the paradigm of individual rights appeared clearly in the “Lautsi affair” over the crucifixes in Italian classrooms. In November 2009, after legal proceedings before seven judges of the European Court of Human Rights, it was decided that the obligatory presence of a crucifix in the classroom was in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. However, in March 2011, after a lengthy debate that roused public opinion all over Italy, the European Court reversed its decision. In this second decision, the Grand Chamber of the Court decided, 15 to 2, that the crucifix was not a violation of the convention. The position of the Italian government was supported by a coalition of central and eastern European states as well as by many law associations and religious organizations.⁷³ The European Center for Law and Justice, in association with an American group, the American Center for Law and Justice, submitted to the court an amicus curiae brief in favor of the Italian government. In reference to the first Lautsi decision, the director, Grégor Puppinck, strongly denounced Europe’s secularization politics and the destruction of its Christian heritage: “Lautsi thus epitomizes the paradigm held by those who seek to secularize Europe and sanitize the public sphere of its Christian heritage.”⁷⁴ The patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church also spoke out in favor of maintaining crucifixes in schools. Indeed, the Lautsi affair mobilized the resistance of a powerful coalition of lobbies in Italy, eastern Europe, and the United States to oppose giving priority to the principle of individual freedom (here the freedom of atheists from being bothered by the sight of a crucifix) to the detriment of the notion of the long-standing cultural implantation of the Catholic Church. Despite attempts by IRFA supporters to present the paradigm of individual religious freedom as universally valid, one sees this approach contested not only in the Muslim world but also in Europe and even in America, as these recent campaigns by evangelical and Catholic leaders demonstrate.