NEWS ANALYSIS: Religious freedom act continues to stir controversy

c. 1999 Religion News Service HARTFORD, Conn. _ Balancing U.S. foreign policy interests became trickier with passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which requires Washington to factor how it can promote religious liberty abroad into its decisions on security, trade and other diplomatic concerns. Complicating the equation further was the act’s mandate […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

HARTFORD, Conn. _ Balancing U.S. foreign policy interests became trickier with passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which requires Washington to factor how it can promote religious liberty abroad into its decisions on security, trade and other diplomatic concerns.

Complicating the equation further was the act’s mandate that nations deemed derelict in their treatment of religious believers _ allies and enemies alike _ become subject to a menu of U.S. responses likely to provoke upset among protocol-minded diplomats.


The possible responses range from private notes of concern to broad economic sanctions, although the act also allows the White House to take no action by invoking national security considerations.

Three core questions were at the heart of the long debate that preceded passage of IRFA:

What constitutes religious persecution, what right does the United States have to insert itself into other nations’ domestic affairs, and does U.S. action help or hurt those suffering because of their beliefs?

One year later, the same questions continue to divide those concerned with IRFA, about two dozen of whom met Sunday and Monday (Sept. 26-27) on the campus of Trinity College here to discuss the act’s worthiness.

The conference, organized by Trinity’s Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, was mostly off-the-record. However, some of the State Department officials, congressional aides, academic and think tank representatives, human rights activists and others on hand agreed to be quoted by name.

For the congressional aides, who were responsible for writing most of the act, IRFA is an important tool for protecting what they believe may well be the most fundamental of all human rights, the right to live in accordance with one’s deepest religious beliefs.

Protect religious expression and you’ve given form to such broader freedoms as the right to free speech and assembly, they argued. Allow people to worship as they see fit and you’ve assured the spread of American-style democracy.


IRFA is imperfect and it won’t change overnight the way China, Saudi Arabia and Sudan tightly control religious expression (those nations were among those most harshly criticized in a recent State Department global survey also mandated by the act). But that doesn’t mean incremental change is impossible, said the aides.”You do what you can when you can,”said Laura Bryant, an aide to Rep. Bob Clement, D-Tenn.”To say you can’t choose one issue and try and make a difference is a fallacious argument.” State Department officials, whose job it is to make IRFA work, agreed. To them, IRFA is a noble effort rooted in a bedrock American ideal that seeks to prod recalcitrant foreign governments into complying with international standards for religious freedom that they have agreed to, but honor mostly in the breach.”The right to freedom of religion undergirds the very origin and existence of the United States,”IRFA states unequivocably.”From its birth to this day, the United States has prized this legacy of religious freedom and honored this heritage by standing for religious freedom and offering refuge to those suffering religious persecution.” To others, however, those words reflect more the American myth than its reality, and they point to religious intolerance directed at early Mormons, American Indians and black slaves who brought with them to this nation Islam and tribal beliefs.

For these critics, IRFA is a misguided act of U.S. political hubris made worse by insensitivity toward complex foreign cultural mores and superficial analysis of long-running conflicts involving race, class, economics, ethnicity, history and _ but only in part _ religious differences.

Because much of the original impetus for congressional action that culminated in IRFA came from conservative evangelicals, some IRFA critics also suspect the act’s hidden agenda is primarily to make the world safer for Christians, and to help spread the faith in Muslim, former communist and other nations where that is now difficult.

The State Department and congressional aides at Trinity vehemently denied IRFA was meant in any way to favor Christians. But the critics remained unconvinced.”Religion is a deeply ambiguous, complicated piece of human culture … that is difficult to compartmentalize. Religion shouldn’t be part of foreign policy … Better to have called the act the `freedom of conscience act’ to include all beliefs,”said Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, a religious studies professor at Virginia’s Washington and Lee University.

Abdullah An-Na’im, a professor at Emory University Law School in Atlanta, labeled IRFA a”Lone Ranger”approach viewed in much of the Muslim and developing worlds as hypocritical because of America’s failure to ratify international covenants meant to guarantee human rights for women and children, or the treaty to ban land mines.”Why hasn’t the U.S. acted on issues about which the world has reached consensus?”said An-Na’im.”Instead it chooses to act unilaterally on an issue about which there is no international consensus. This raises alarm bells.” Ultimately, he added, the act will undermine gains in religious freedom around the world because political considerations will force the United States to apply IRFA unevenly and make promises to persecuted religious minorities it will fail to keep.

By the end of the conference, with agreement nowhere in sight, some conference participants became openingly testy.”What’s the alternative?”asked a visibly agitated John Hanford, an aide to Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind.”Don’t accuse me of not being concerned about those who suffer because of their faith just because I oppose”IRFA, said an angry Sullivan.


Tiring of the hypocrisy accusation, Jeremy Gunn of the U.S. Institute of Peace, and a former State Department consultant on religious freedom, shot back:”You show me a country that is not hypocritical in its foreign policy and I will show you a nation that no longer exists.” As IRFA continues to divide those concerned with the issue, it also has the State Department walking on eggs.

In early September, the agency released a 1,100-page report detailing how some 194 nations and territories have performed in regard to religious liberty. It was the department’s first such report (religious persecution was previously reported as part of a general document on global human rights). Under IRFA, the”Report on International Religious Freedom”will become an an annual affair.

In conjunction with release of the report, the department is supposed to release a separate list of”countries of particular concern”_ those whose records on the issue are most egregious. Such nations will, theoretically, be subjected to the harshest U.S. response, although the president may invoke the national security waiver.

But no such list was produced with the first report, and State Department officials in Hartford would say only that they hoped one soon will be forthcoming.”This is new territory,”said one State Department official, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is proceeding cautiously on the matter. Merely fingering a nation as being of particular concern will cause a diplomatic brouhaha, the official noted.

Given that sensitivity, he added, prudence remains the better part of valor _ no matter how well-meaning IRFA may be.

DEA END RIFKIN

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