Replicating many of the assumptions that underlie this approach but with a twist, other studies have sought to locate human rights within various religious traditions. In this vein, and in distinction to the more separationist tendencies of its liberal counterpart, different religious teachings and traditions are said to support or stand at the foundation of various modern regimes of rights and freedoms. An example is Abduh An-Naim’s efforts to establish the compatibility of Islamic law with human rights. Another is the Berkley Center’s project at Georgetown, entitled “Christianity and Freedom,” which describes itself as an attempt to “explore Christianity’s contribution to the construction and diffusion of freedom.”
Difference and governance
I would like to propose a different point of departure animated by a different set of questions about rights, religion, law, and freedom. As Benjamin Berger asks in his contribution to this series, “What are the political and social purposes or uses of the idea of religious freedom, when both religion and freedom are so unstable as social facts? Who is empowered in a legal culture – or a transnational politics – focussed on religious freedom, and at whose expense? What patterns of governance does it enable?” Far from conceiving of rights as occupying an autonomous sphere independent of religious affairs, and far from seeking to ground rights advocacy in one religious tradition or another, I approach religious freedom as an important site for the study of difference and governance. Religious freedom advocacy is an exercise of power that involves an attempt to govern social difference through (religious) rights. This shapes both politics and religion by regulating the spaces in which people live out their religion in specific and identifiable ways, and authorizing particular forms of politics. This post introduces the history and politics that surround the deployment of religious freedom internationally. It then evaluates one of the consequences of its deployment - the tendency to single out ‘religious’ individuals and groups for legal protection.
In the United States, religious freedom is often referred to as the “first freedom” and seen as one of the building blocks of the post-World War II international human rights edifice. A leader in external religious freedom advocacy for decades, including under the rubric of ‘global spiritual health’ during the Cold War, the U.S. mandate was reinvigorated nearly two decades ago with the passage of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, or “IRFA.” Most Americans have never heard of IRFA. Most would associate U.S. religious freedom promotion abroad with pressuring other governments to observe minority rights and adhere to international legal instruments, such as the ICCPR and UDHR. If asked, many would also affirm a divine origin of the right to religious freedom. The National Association of Evangelicals portrays it as a God-given human right occupying a privileged position above other rights claims. There is a broad constituency for these programs that spans the political spectrum. It is not only evangelicals. It is not only Republicans.
And it is not only the United States. Canada, many European states, the UK, and the EU are also institutionalizing external religious freedom programming. In February, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched an Office of Religious Freedom at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Ottawa that is modeled on the U.S. State Department Office. The British and the European Union are promoting religious freedom through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the European External Action Service, respectively. Since 2009 the FCO has distributed a ‘toolkit’ called “Freedom of Religion or Belief, How the FCO Can Help Promote Respect for this Human Right.” Other European states are scrambling to get on the religious freedom bandwagon. Italy seems particularly interested of late.
Unsettling Religious Freedom
As someone who studies the politics of secularism and religion comparatively and internationally, I became interested in religious freedom promotion because, quite simply, everyone is for it. Both liberal internationalists and those affirming a divine origin of the right to religious freedom, and almost everyone else, seem to have accepted the notion of religious freedom as a fundamental human right, legal standard, and social fact that can be objectively measured and achieved by all political collectivities. It is a matter of persuading people and governments to understand and comply with a universal standard. Peace, inter-communal harmony and prosperity will follow. States and societies are positioned along a spectrum of progress, inclined either toward the achievement of religious freedom as a social fact, or slipping back into religious persecution and violence caused by religious hatred. IRFA both reflects and reproduces this narrative, attributing the failure to achieve religious freedom to a lack of social and cultural maturity: “In many nations where severe violations of religious freedom occur…there is not sufficient cultural and social understanding of international norms of religious freedom.”
This dominant storyline elicits a number of concerns. One is the extent to which it presupposes a direct convergence between the rule of law and social justice. As Talal Asad has observed of the UDHR, but which also applies to efforts to globalize and legalize religious freedom, “the rule called law in effect usurps the entire universe of moral discourse.” Asad concludes that this equation privileges the state’s (or associations thereof) norm-defining function, “thereby encouraging the thought that the authority of norms corresponds to the political force that supports them as law.” There is no space for non-state norms. Religious freedom, one could say, effaces the distinction between law and justice. It has, as Paul Kennedy has observed of human rights, “captured the field of emancipatory possibility.”
In my experience these concerns about religious freedom only multiply and intensify the more one considers the diverse histories and politics that attend religious freedom advocacy. Over the past three years I have co-directed the Politics of Religious Freedom project, a collaborative effort to study the discourses of religious freedom in South Asia, North Africa, Europe, the United States, sub-Saharan Africa, and Brazil. In re-describing the historical and cultural assumptions underlying national and international projects to promote religious freedom, we have sought to unsettle the agreement in policy circles that religious freedom is a singular achievement, and that the problem lies in its incomplete realization. Is it possible that a norm intended to secure human flourishing and peaceful co-existence could in some circumstances enact the opposite?
Confessionalizing public life
The connection between knowledge about religion, understandings of religious freedom, and practices of law and governance is complex, full of feedback loops that disrupt notions of causality favored by many social scientists. My claim is not that that advocacy for religious freedom ‘causes’ violence, but that it engenders a series of political logics and insistences that shape the fields in which it is deployed in specific ways. The remainder of this post will discuss one of these logics.
Under a regime of religious freedom, individuals and groups are described, and often legally defined, in religious or sectarian terms rather than on the basis of other social bonds and affiliations—for example, as groups based on social class, historical ties, neighborhood bonds, kinship networks, or professional associations. Positing religion as prior to other identities and affiliations underscores the salience of whatever is counted as religion in different contexts. Religious identity and difference are taken as the natural foundation of social order, as just the way things are. This engenders a ‘confessionalization’ of public life.
American responses to the so-called Arab spring have fallen prey to these dynamics. The Arab spring uprisings had little if anything to do with religion, or any notion of religious freedom. At stake were calls for government accountability, human dignity, justice, economic opportunity, and an end to dictatorship. Yet in Washington, and now in European policy circles, developments in the MENA region are increasingly read through the prism of Christian minority rights and freedoms. In August Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri introduced the Near East and South Asia Religious Freedom Act of 2013, aimed at protecting the rights of religious minorities in the Middle East and South Asia. The legislation proposes to create a new Special Envoy for religious freedom to monitor “and combat acts of religious intolerance and incitement” and “ensure that the unique needs of religious minority communities” in these areas are addressed. Allocating one million dollars annually for these activities, the legislation enjoys bipartisan support.
Who can be against religious freedom? The religious rights and freedom framework fuels a proliferating array of like-minded efforts by Western governments and international tribunals and organizations to secure equality and justice abroad by recognizing religious individuals and communities in law, and seeking to guarantee their religious freedom. These efforts adopt “religion” as a category to draw together individuals and communities as corporate bodies that are depicted as in need of legal protection to achieve their freedom. My claim is that the structural logic of promoting “Christian rights” (or “Hindu rights” or “Muslim rights,” and so on) contributes to what might be described as a religionization of social life. In Ethnicity, Inc. the Comaroffs track the commodification and essentialization of ethnicity. A similar dynamic holds in the case of religion, which starts to appear in tractable and alienable form. There is an imperative to define one’s identity in religious terms: “are you this or are you that?” You need to know what you are, to know who you are, and how you fit in. There is an incentive to make political claims on religious grounds. Melani McAlister identifies this dynamic in a recent Religion Dispatches piece in which she describes interviews with Sudanese refugees in Egypt. “If you want help,” the refugees told her—“be a persecuted Christian!”
The religious rights model engenders a political logic in which religious difference becomes more pronounced as a marker of political identity and community. It hardens and “overcodes” religious boundaries, to borrow a term from William Connolly. It incentivizes individuals and groups to frame conflicts and describe social tensions in religious terms. This contributes to the social dynamics associated with what is often decried today as sectarianism. In Syria, for example, emphasizing religious freedom enables a political logic in which being Christian or Muslim, Sunni or Shia, becomes freighted with public and political significance, as these perceived lines of difference overshadow whether one is pro- or anti-regime, or pro- or anti-democracy.
Positing discrete religious identities and communities as defining features on a political landscape lends authority and authenticity to groups that are designated as religions. Agency and community come to be defined in what are understood to be religious terms. We are dealing here with a powerful construct that, as Pamela Klassen and Courtney Bender have remarked of the ideology of pluralism, “articulates and naturalizes the very boundaries of difference that it seeks to diminish, overcome, or mediate.”
There are other consequences. Elsewhere, I have argued that international religious freedom promotion presupposes and produces an autonomous subject distinguished by his or her right to choose belief or non-belief. Governing difference through the right to believe or not protects and privileges individuals and communities that subscribe to a modern liberal understanding of faith. As the (now) former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Suzanne Johnson-Cook, has remarked, “anyone who identifies as a believer (though religious freedom is for believers and non-believers) can come to our roundtable.”
Today a believing or non-believing “freely” choosing religious subject is being celebrated by the U.S. foreign policy establishment, disseminated through public international legal regimes, and normalized through everyday state administrative practice. This commitment to free religion as chosen belief—and to believers as free religious choosers—shapes the spaces in which people live out their religion. It is also, as Courtney Bender has argued, part of a powerful political doctrine of freedom. Religiously liberated subjects are not brought into a particular American or capitalist normative system. They are brought into freedom itself.
The Future of Religious Freedom
In the essay inaugurating this series Winnifred Fallers Sullivan observes that the category of religion “seems to have gathered political and legal salience at the very time that it is being deconstructed by those in religious studies. The instability, indeed the incoherence, of the category of religion seems a slender reed on which to pin so many, often grandiose, hopes.” Linde Lindkvist counters by clinging to the hope that religious freedom is always changing and adapting, and may yet succeed in challenging “ingrained patterns of injustice and exclusion” despite its historical particularities.
Both claims are worth considering. There is little doubt that changes are afoot. Governing difference through the prism of religious rights, freedom and toleration has created new categories of actors in world politics, spawned new careers, mandates and commissions, and disseminated new modes of social and religious organization. Far from a unitary, settled norm that tames violence and mitigates insecurity and inequality, however, the right to religious freedom is a particular mode of framing and governing social difference that naturalizes the very boundaries that it proposes to mediate or transcend. It is far from evident that a world in which religious freedom holds sway will be one in which violence, poverty, and discrimination have been vanquished.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University
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