Foreign Service Journal - July/August, 2009

LETTERS ;

our policy has focused on denouncing religious persecution, rather than facilitating the habits and institutions of religious freedom. Contrary to what Mr. Jones asserts, I do not believe religious freedom is superior to other fundamental rights, but is inextricably linked with them. Indeed, religious freedom is part of a “bundled commodity” of fundamental freedoms (e.g., freedom of speech and association, equality under the law) without which no democracy can endure.

Advancing religious freedom is necessary for justice and for protecting fundamental American interests. This isn’t absolutism, but realism. It requires us to understand the way the world is, rather than the way we would wish it to be.

Thomas F. Farr FSO, retired Senior Fellow, Berkley Center for

Religion, Peace and World Affairs

Washington, D.C.

Understanding Religion

David Jones’ critique of Thomas Farr’s new book about international religious liberty raises an important point about professional training for Foreign Service officers. Traditionally, FSOs have not been trained to look directly at religious traditions and convictions in foreign cultures. We operate in a secular professional culture that places greater weight on the political, economic and social aspects of foreign governments and leaders.

While Farr focuses on promoting religious freedom through government advocacy under the aegis of human rights, this is different in substance from understanding other people’s cultural and religious values and

how these influence and govern their political actions.

When I was a young, Farsi-speak-ing cultural affairs officer with the U.S. Information Service in Iran, I was ill-prepared to grasp the nuances of parochialism among the people I met regarding religious tolerance. There was almost no discussion or focus on this in the daily cable traffic from Embassy Tehran. How would policymakers in Washington have known of the convictions of religious leaders opposed to the shah? We weren’t reporting about them.

Today, FSOs would benefit from more training in analysis of cultural and religious values in other societies, because these often drive political de-cision-making. Had my colleagues and I spent more time learning about Iranian religious history and analyzing the statements of various religious leaders who opposed the shah’s policies and actions, we might have been able to exert more influence on our leaders in Washington. And they, in turn, might have better understood the emotional forces that drove so many Iranians to embrace Ayatollah Khomeini and the revolution, whether they liked his politics or not.

The liberty that millions of them were seeking at that time was one of a national identity free from Iran’s relationship with the United States and from the shah’s narrow, secular authoritarianism. The shah had persecuted, jailed and even executed religious dissidents who, he claimed, threatened his regime. At the same time, he periodically allowed the predominantly Shia Muslim population to vent by persecuting certain religious minorities.

In the years I served in India, I came to see a generally tolerant soci-

ety that accommodated believers of many different faiths. Yet even there, religious persecution sometimes boiled over in horrible crimes against minority communities. But we tended to search for the immediate political triggers for such acts rather than understanding the deeper, older substrata of religious values.

Certainly everyone should be free from persecution for her or his own convictions, whatever they may be. Yet for many people around the world, the practical consequences of professing one’s faith are discrimination and even death. It is exactly in this area that Foreign Service officers need to expand their knowledge of the interplay between religion and politics.

Perhaps this is already under way, as is evident in the actions of U.S. diplomats in China and other countries where religious minorities are persecuted. This effort should be expanded and additional training offered in understanding Islam and other faiths in their many manifestations in specific cultures.

In shaping a new diplomatic policy supporting greater religious liberty, we might start by analyzing what freedom of religion has meant in shaping our own pluralistic society. And then we might look at our own history of religious and cultural intolerance as a guide to analyzing that phenomenon in other societies.