Ken Starr: Pope Francis, religious liberty and American responsibility

In a few hours, Pope Francis will speak before Congress for the first time. Religious freedom will be high on his agenda.

The Pope’s attention to this pressing issue is both timely and urgent. We are witnessing a tragic, global crisis in religious freedom — one characterized outside the West by persecution, violence and terrorism, and inside the West by a receding understanding of why religious liberty is necessary for human and social flourishing.

According to the non-partisan Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of the world’s people, including some in the West, live in countries where restrictions on religion are severe. Anti-Semitism is rising at an alarming rate in the Middle East and, most troubling of all, in Europe. Muslim minorities are facing discrimination and persecution, including in Muslim-majority countries. In the Central African Republic, Muslims are being forcibly converted to Christianity.

In the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, Christians and other minorities are being subjected to horrifying torture, rape, imprisonment, forced expulsion and confessions of faith, and death. The very existence of the ancient Iraqi and Syrian Christian communities is increasingly at risk.

But the catastrophic decline of international religious freedom, as horrific as its consequences may be to the foundational right of the expression of personal religious liberty, affects more than the victims. It undermines the national security of the United States. Without religious freedom, aspiring democracies will remain unstable. Sustained economic growth and development will be more difficult to achieve. The advancement of the rights of women and girls will continue to be obstructed. Perhaps most urgent of all, religious terrorism will continue to be incubated, nourished and exported.

In 1998, Congress passed — unanimously — the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Act, which mandates the advancement of religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy. That policy has developed under three administrations of both parties. Unfortunately, the grim statistics demonstrate that our nation has had little effect on the rise of persecution and the decline of religious freedom. It is worth asking why.

Our founders dubbed religious freedom “the first freedom” of the Constitution and the human soul. It has enabled the flourishing of pluralism — that state of mutual respect and political harmony that exists even amid great differences of opinion regarding the common good.

Historically, Americans of all religious commitments — and of none — have embraced the foundational statement of our nation’s birth — that “all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

Most Americans never understood this as a “sectarian” claim that excluded those of different beliefs. To the contrary, it was understood as a radical declaration of truth about the utter equality of every human being, each of whom has been created in the image and likeness of God.

That claim has provided a powerful incentive for Americans to respect and value their fellow citizens, notwithstanding the racial, political, religious or social differences among them.

But increasing numbers of Americans appear no longer to believe that religious liberty is foundational to our laws and our culture. The great institution that helped form our nation and has undergirded our success is now at risk from a diminishing political consensus over who we are and what makes us free. The same Pew reports that show rising violence abroad also show increasing government restrictions on, and social hostility toward, religion in America.

Given these developments, we should not be surprised if U.S. foreign policy has failed to advance international religious freedom. It is hard to sell a product you don’t urgently believe in.

Will the pope call us to revive the American belief in the first freedom? Will he remind us that America’s government, precisely because of its historic commitment to that freedom, has a profound responsibility to protect it in our foreign policy?

Let us hope that he will. The stakes could not be higher.

Ken Starr is president and chancellor of Baylor University in Texas. He was among the participants in the Religious Freedom Summit, “Freedom to Be — Freedom to Serve,” on Sept. 18 in Washington, D.C. The summit was sponsored by Baylor, Catholic University of America and the Georgetown-Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion Religious Freedom Project.

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