One might expect this group to value traditional marriage, oppose abortion and embryo-destructive research, and defend religious liberties strongly, and they do, and yet many in this group have reacted quite negatively to the document. The reaction intensified, at least in the blogosphere, after a New York Times Magazine piece on Robert P. George, one of the leading signers of the declaration.

Some of this is the usual antipathy towards Roman Catholicism, which remains severe enough to prompt even a signatory like Dr. Albert Mohler to feel the need to explain his association with the document. The main intellectual objection is precisely the one mentioned in the Times piece, namely, “that [George] puts too much faith in the power of reason, overlooking what Christians describe as original sin and what secular pessimists call history.” The notion that the natural law forgets sin and thus depreciates the necessity of Christ and the supremacy of Scripture is an old one, to be sure, and is a common objection raised against the ethics and theology of Thomas Aquinas by this same group of Protestants. For example, James White states that George’s position is “a direct refutation of the biblical view of the supremacy of divine revelation and the corruption of human reason through sin,” and Phil Johnson claims “the biblical truths of original sin and human depravity [pose] a fairly fundamental challenge to Robert George’s notion that society can be won to righteousness through human reason alone.” And these are among the more moderate objections. The influential Protestant apologist Francis Schaeffer spoke for many when he characterized Aquinas as believing “the will was fallen or corrupted but the intellect was not affected.”

Certainly Thomas held that the first principles of the natural law could not be erased from the human being (ST I-II 94. 6), and neither did sin fundamentally negate human nature, for if human nature were to be essentially changed by sin then our first parents were of a different species before and after the first sin. A nature cannot change essentially without changing the essence of a being, after all.

But only a wooden and uncharitable reading of Aquinas stops here, for Aquinas has a sophisticated view on the question. He holds that the prelapsarian human was endowed with the grace of original justice, a rectitude whereby reason is subject to God, the lower human powers subject to reason, and the body subject to the soul. Such a person would not sin because he or she is properly ordered; without concupiscence, the unfallen human would always follow the dictates of right reason. Original sin, among other consequences, deprives the human of this original justice, destroying the harmonious relation of human powers to each other and to God.

Since the will is for Aquinas a rational appetite, the will is directed to the good of the whole person rather than to some power or part of the person. While a particular appetite, say for food or sex, seeks only its particular satisfaction, the will integrates and directs all these competing desires into a whole, into a human act, which is why humans can, for the sake of their own and the common good, control their desires to consume too much food or fornicate with this or that person. Particular appetites are directed and placed in order by the rational appetite.

Given original sin, the rational appetite is inordinate and can act counter to right reason. We do disobey the divine mandate, we do allow lower appetites to dominate reason, and we do allow the goods of the body to triumph over the goods of the soul. Further, given original sin and the loss of human integrity and rectitude, we do suffer what Thomas calls the wound of ignorance, that is, we can voluntarily ignore truth and the desire for truth. We can, and do, act in cunning fashion, whereby reason is bent to devise new and clever evils in service to inordinate desire.

There is no cheery optimism in Aquinas with respect to reason. The human is disordered;, one might even say we suffer a totality of depravity since not a single human capacity or function remains in the state of original justice. Yes, humans are utterly messed up, but they are still human beings, and as human beings, as rational animals, they still possess the natural law, for to lose the natural law would be a loss of humanity, actually to become a beast. Not, that is, to act bestially—humans do so—but to be a beast. And this has not happened, since original sin does not change our essence—nor could it. The basic human goods remain the same basic human goods for Adam and for Hitler, and the flourishing of human persons qua persons has not changed. But sin does change our willingness to function as we ought, as we can all attest.

There is, then, no contradiction between the natural law and original sin, at least as understood by Thomas Aquinas. The “Manhattan Declaration,” therefore, remains the declaration of cosmopolis, for insofar as the declaration is reasonable it is reasonable for all, even us sinners.


R. J. Snell is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Ten months have passed since the inauguration of President Obama for a four-year term. However, President Obama has not so much as even nominated a candidate to fill the vacant position of U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.

Meanwhile, a growing body of research indicates that religious freedom appears to be a positive factor in enabling societies to be prosperous and stable, and individuals to be happy. The 2009 Legatum Prosperity Index, which ranks countries on how well they support combined factors of wealth and human well-being, found that countries that attain well-rounded success – economic prosperity and happy citizens – treat a bundle of freedoms all together like a prix fixe meal, not like a pick-and-choose visit to a cafeteria. “Freedom,” according to a key finding of the report, “cannot be divided. While some nations seek to allow one aspect of freedom while restricting other aspects, prosperous nations respect freedom in all of its dimensions: economic, political, religious, and personal.” Also, “The highest levels of overall life satisfaction are reported in countries which score best in the areas of health, safety, personal freedom, and social capital.” So, Finland, which offers economic, political, religious, and political freedom comes out on top, while by contrast Saudi Arabia, a foe of religious freedom if there ever was one, may have monetary wealth but scores in the lowest quartile of human prosperity (81^st out of 104) when considering well-rounded human flourishing.

In 1998, Congress enacted the International Religious Freedom Act establishing and requiring appointment of an Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom and creating an Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF) in the State Department.

Yet, in this effort to advance religious freedom the State Department’s IRF office faces several challenges. To begin with, it is structurally and culturally isolated inside the State Department bureaucracy. Outside of the IRF office itself, the Department of State IRF Fan Club is, alas, not vast. To correct this, the IRF office needs to establish long-term working partnerships with other sections in the State Department, such as Public Diplomacy, in order to extend integration of religious freedom into U.S. foreign engagement.

In addition, the IRF office needs to increase awareness inside the State Department about the positive contributions of religious freedom to human well-being. The nearly exclusive focus of the IRF office on highlighting and seeking short-term intervention in cases of religious persecution and oppression has led some in the powerful regional bureaus of the State Department to flee the moment they see IRF staff coming. The IRF office would do well to expand its efforts to highlight and expand programs supporting the advantages offered by religious freedom, so that the regional bureaus will pursue rather than repel IRF engagement.

This is not just a matter of promoting a nice-sounding ideal to make the world a better place. There is also a national security imperative in supporting religious freedom. At a time when Muslims who advocate for peaceful pluralism face crushing censorship and devastating intimidation in many volatile areas of the world such as Egypt, creating and protecting freedom for constructive Muslim voices to participate freely and vigorously in public discussion is vital.

Support for religious freedom needs to be “translated” into concrete steps forward.

The area which offers the most potential for fruitful expansion is more robust incorporation of religious freedom into U.S. public diplomacy. Public diplomacy, the Cinderella of the U.S. foreign policy establishment since the abolition of the U.S. Information Agency in 1999, is an underfunded and underestimated asset in our foreign engagement toolbox—including for advancement of international religious freedom. And other U.S. government-funded foreign engagement efforts also could be potentially fruitful allies for expanding religious freedom.

To its credit, Department of State Public Diplomacy has some efforts related to religious freedom. So too, though on an even lesser scale, with the radio and television programs of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and the work of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). However, these tend to be sporadic at best, and at any rate not a priority or an area with long-term dedicated funding and staff.

With an eye to concrete action, I would like to suggest some avenues for supporting religious freedom. No one of these ideas is a “silver bullet.” Rather, these suggestions are meant encourage creative thinking about ways to foster engagement with Muslim and other voices on multiple fronts, leveraging already existing programs in the U.S. government. Perhaps this may spark other ideas in both foreign policy circles and the private sector that will expand religious freedom.

1. Book translations. The Department of State’s Public Diplomacy Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) office facilitates translation and publication of American books overseas. Fund an effort to include books about religious freedom in the IIP Book Program. This could include American books by Muslims about religious freedom. But don’t just print paper books; make the translated books available online in both text and audio versions.

2. Speakers Bureau. The Speakers Bureau run by the Department of State Public Diplomacy sends Americans overseas to engage foreign audiences. Establish long-term funding and develop a Speakers Bureau program dedicated to sending experts on religious freedom and religious leaders with experience in religious freedom issues overseas.

3. Exchange programs. Expand access to exchange programs offered by State Department Public Diplomacy Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) for religious leaders, seminary students, academics, and others with an interest in religious freedom so they can participate in foreign exchange programs.

4. International visitor programs. Boost the budget of ECA in order to enable ECA collaboration with the Department of State Office of International Religious Freedom to bring academics, civic leaders, seminary students, and religious leaders to the U.S. to learn about what religious freedom is and how it benefits society at large in the U.S.

5. Films. The American Film Program of ECA lists support for, among other values, religious freedom. Collaboration with the IRF office and dedicated funding could expand this effort, for example supporting the dubbing and subtitling of films about religious freedom into key foreign languages. This should not be limited to documentaries; include feature films.

6. Polling. Understanding perceptions and misperceptions of foreign populations regarding religious freedom is essential if one wants to identify hurdles as well as opportunities in the expansion of religious freedom. When we say, “religious freedom,” what do people in Egypt, China, and Iran think this means? Which aspects of religious freedom are least understood in key target audiences? Understanding this would help us best determine how to use limited resources wisely in promoting religious freedom.

7. Radio and television. Provide funding specifically for programming about religious freedom on the radio and in television broadcasts, such as Voice of America and Al-Hurra, funded by U.S. tax payers, overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

8. Arts. Develop a Religious Freedom and the Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts which would support development, translation, and distribution of creative media, such as plays and novels, that explore the role of religious freedom, and the social consequences of the lack thereof. To begin with, translate Akbar Ahmed’s play The Trial of Dara Shikoh and the novel The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout into Arabic and other languages.

9.  USAID. Expand USAID support for inclusion of religious freedom promotion in development projects, and establish long-term mechanisms for collaboration between USAID and the IRF office.

10.  U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP). Designate funding for collaboration between IRF and USIP to examine and foster ways in which protection of religious freedom can support peace and stability.

On Thursday, November 19, the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, part of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, plans to hold a hearing on, “The State of Political and Religious Freedom in the Middle East”. Hopefully Congress will support not only the Congressionally mandated Office of International Religious Freedom, but also a variety of other efforts to expand religious freedom.

As for President Obama, the clock is ticking. He has only three years and two months left before this term is up. If his administration is to make a difference for religious freedom, he needs to appoint an ambassador for religious freedom. The president will need to move quickly to set attainable goals to support international religious freedom and stand behind implementation of them before the window of opportunity in this term of the Obama administration ends.


Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The blurb hints at the most obvious (and most marketable) answer: perhaps Simon can help us evaluate recent American military engagements in the Middle East. The book is said to offer “an interesting case study of such ethical concerns as just war theory and preemptive war, and is of particular relevance in our modern political climate.”

Simon makes several points that are of definite relevance to the moral evaluation of any invasion. All these points, it should be noted, seem to count against supporters of America’s recent military actions.  For instance, Simon critiques the then-popular argument that Italy had the right, even the duty, to bring a higher civilization to Ethiopia. He grants that much about Ethiopia is deplorable, but points out that “it is always easy to move people by describing…what is most unhappy about a country, without saying anything about the favorable sides of the situation” (which, it goes without saying, are jeopardized by war); that there are low odds that a conquering nation can effect deep and lasting changes among a people “strongly ensconced in the double citadel of its mountains and age-old customs;” that efforts at pacification and reform will be “necessarily burdensome” to the natives, involving violence—perhaps on a larger scale than before.

There is an even more striking passage, which may titillate some of those who opposed the war in Iraq on moral or religious grounds: “The question which then confronted the Christian conscience was this: Would the teaching of the Catholic Church on the war be taken seriously? . . . A dishonest conscience is never embarrassed. . . Greedy merchants will always have plenty of good reasons that their profits conform perfectly within the laws of just price. . . Likewise, why bother to openly declare that one rejects the teaching of the Church on the conditions of a just war . . .? It is much cleverer to profit by the obscurities which inevitably accompany the application of a necessarily abstract doctrine. Using the cover of darkness as a means of protection is a deceptive method familiar to all marauders, pickpockets, and assassins.”

Still, as gratifying a pastime as proof-texting is, it would be perverse to enlist Simon as a partisan in such a complex contemporary debate. The man who wrote that “true morality demands, when confronted with every new situation, a new effort at analysis, adapted to all the particularities of the situation” would surely be the first to suggest a large number of relevant disanalogies between Mussolini’s Italy and Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia on the one hand and the contemporary United States and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on the other. The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought deserves to be read, but not as a work of prophesy or as a hornbook that saves us the trouble of wrestling with unique facts. We should read it with attention because it provides an inspiring and challenging model of citizenship.

A gifted philosopher, Simon was obviously comfortable with abstractions and rigid formal systems. But The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought reveals a man who also energetically absorbed and synthesized the concrete, multifarious, ever-changing facts of politics and history, generating subtle and incisive analyses.

In part, this habit seems to have been characteristic of his generation. According to James McAdam’s forward, most educated Parisians of the interwar period sought to “combine the hard facts of politics with the highest human ideals.” Consequently, “thorough immersion in the political and social questions of the day was a way of life.” Although no society can hope to mass produce men of Simon’s stature (and it was France’s tragedy that men like him would prove too rare in subsequent years), his moral and intellectual grandeur is a credit to the literary and political culture that nurtured him—a culture that stands as a grim judgment on our own, sadly decayed public discourse.

But Simon was remarkable, even among his contemporaries, for his focus on political deliberation as a moral, not merely intellectual activity that demands exacting self-criticism from the individual citizen. It is crucial to recognize that The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought is not a just another salvo in an ongoing public dispute. Simon certainly has a settled and undisguised view of the Italian invasion (he thinks it clearly unjust), but his object in writing his book is not to defend that opinion. Instead, he seeks what he terms the “rectifying of French consciences.”

He proceeds by surveying the public writings of French intellectuals during the Ethiopian crisis and subjects them all to searching analysis. He attempts to lay bare errors of logic and judgment on all sides of the debate. These errors, he argues, are born of partisan passion undisciplined by firm adherence to truth. He writes, “Anything that might come to trouble our lucidity of judgment would give another chance to the most immense evils that threaten us. Silence then for the party spirit, silence for nationalist passion, for anti-Fascist passion; silence for hatred, even hatred that takes as its object indisputable criminals. All political agility will be powerless if it is not ruled by a clear-seeing and honest interior attitude.” In short, Simon thinks that the sickness afflicting French (and, more broadly, European) politics is fundamentally spiritual, and he offers this book as a spiritual exercise. His attitude represents that supremely admirable political stance that is usually mistaken for glib “beyondism.”

The geopolitical situation has been almost totally transformed since 1935, but Simon’s exhortation to rectify consciences is as urgent as ever. There is much to be said in favor of the structural cynicism (the justly celebrated “checks and balances”) that is such a notable characteristic of the American system, but such provisions can only temper the effects of widespread vice and dishonesty—and only some of the time. To prevent the corruption of public thought that leads to corrupt acts, citizens must recognize political debate as a thoroughly moral enterprise. They must see it as a mutual discernment of a good, just life in common, and they must understand that this exploration that is spiritually taxing, requiring the painful subjection of passion and personal interest to truth and justice.

It is difficult to see how such a high conception of politics, with its attendant corporate and personal disciplines, can arise or long endure, unless most citizens view truth and justice as sacred. In Simon’s case, his intense focus on rectification of conscience was inseparable from his belief that the author of all reality, searcher and judge of hearts, shared his priorities. Simon therefore stands not merely as a model of citizenship in the abstract but also as proof that societies need—or, at least, can gain much from—religiously informed public philosophies.


Stefan McDaniel is an assistant editor of First Things.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

From 2001-2003, I spent nearly 16 months conducting interviews with more than 150 people in the Haitian communities of Miami, Montreal, and Paris. I traveled twice to Haiti to learn Haitian Creole and gathered important background historical and cultural information about Haiti in preparation for my sociological study of Haitian immigrants. I was interested in learning more about the social and spiritual work being done by the Haitian Catholic mission of each of the cities I studied, and how those Catholic missions interacted with other Haitian organizations and government agencies. The book based on this research, Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, was recently released by the University of California Press.

A few vivid examples from my fieldwork in Miami, Montreal, and Paris demonstrate how religious narratives—especially Christian narratives about transformation and redemption that are largely lacking in secular discourse—provide Haitians with real meaning and hope in the difficult circumstances in which they find themselves. The Haitian proverb that states “faith makes us live” captures the power of religious narratives in many Haitians’ lives. Many people I interviewed had little money, couldn’t find a job, or faced a medical problem, but they nonetheless affirmed that “my faith makes me live. I would be dead if it were not for my faith.”

Immigrants’ faith and the parishes, prayer groups, and social groups they form to share their faith constitute what I call cultural mediation. By relying upon belief in the incarnation of Christ, by serving the church, and by assisting the broader Haitian community, Haitians find psychological relief in the difficult adaptation process—including experiences of discrimination, poverty, unemployment, and awaiting the adjudication of political asylum claims.

For example, Marie, a 40-year old Haitian mother-of-two in Montreal described how her faith helped her cope with intense loneliness when she first arrived in Montreal. Echoing many other Haitians across the three sites, she said, “God lives in me all the time. I can call on him when I want.” Her personal faith led her to become an active member in her parish and to join a weekly prayer group. In contrast to the social isolation she felt in Montreal, belonging to a prayer group made her feel like she belonged somewhere, and she explained how “when you feel that you are somebody, [that] you are a person, [that] you are important, you can move mountains, and that is faith.”

Numerous other examples illustrate how even immigrants from the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere go beyond being needy newcomers who are passive recipients of state social support and become agents of their own successful adaptation just by praying for others and volunteering to help with church activities. Many clergy and lay leaders explained that getting people to see themselves as agents in their own lives was desperately needed before trying to assist them in some material way. Although many Haitians are convinced that their faith can literally move mountains, they also firmly believe that authentic faith requires action. Illustrating the close connection between faith and action, the second part of the Haitian proverb that begins with “faith makes us live” ends with “but misery divides us.”

Cooperation with state agencies and access to government funding are crucial to the success of such missions. Mark Chaves, a professor of Sociology at Duke University and one of the nation’s leading scholars on religious congregations and their social service agencies, stated that my research shows that “when immigrants are religious—and so many are—pragmatic cooperation between church and state can hasten their acculturation and improve their well-being.”

Although this point may seem rather uncontroversial in the Unite States, such pragmatic cooperation between the church and the state faces many obstacles in Quebec and France. In fact, despite the fact that Haitian Catholic clergy and lay leaders in Montreal and Paris attempted to runsocial service agencies similar to those of the Haitian Catholic community in Miami, the governments of Quebec and France have largely refused to cooperate with these faith-based mediating institutions, thereby cutting off contact with one of the most important institutions in immigrants’ daily lives. Haitian community leaders in Paris say they felt “invisible” to the government and hence they felt that their initiatives to support their community were weakened. In Quebec, the government passed a resolution favoring cooperation with secular community associations over faith-based ones, which led the most important association in the Haitian community to remove the word “Christian” from its title to avoid what its director called “misunderstandings.”

The models of church-state relations in the three countries could best be described as cooperation in the United States, conflict in Quebec, and invisibility in France. While both first- and second-generation Haitians in Miami, Montreal, and Paris face tremendous challenges to their successful assimilation, it is only in the United States that the Catholic Church’s efforts to support that assimilation—what I call institutional mediation—are likely to have a large impact because the state welcomes the church’s initiatives rather than ignores or hinders them.

Several decades ago, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus argued that religious institutions and community organizations mediate between individuals and the state by providing meaning, personal identity, and fulfillment. Similarly, faith-based institutions like those created by Haitian Catholic leaders in Miami, Montreal, and Paris, can be more effective at meeting the needs of the communities they serve than state agencies precisely because of their close connections to religious institutions, where so many immigrants turn for personal fulfillment and guidance on assimilating into their new home. The Haitian Catholic missions of Miami, Montreal, and Paris, and their affiliated social-service centers, work together to meet Haitians’ spiritual and social needs. Especially for hard-to-reach, vulnerable, and excluded populations like immigrants, prisoners or ex-prisoners, and the poor, government partnerships with faith-based and community organizations make sense.

Some claim that mediating institutions are necessary in the United States only because of a relatively weak welfare state. Indeed, one Quebec official told me that the church only helps immigrants in the United States because the state is absent. In Quebec, he explained, the provident state takes care of everyone so the church has no need to do social work. But my fieldwork showed me that the perfectly provident state is nonexistent. No matter how dense the social-safety net, some members of our societies—immigrants among them—will always need charity to meet their human wants and they will also need institutional mediators to stimulate debates about justice.

Haitian immigrants in Miami, Montreal, and Paris all struggled to find jobs, secure adequate housing, and support their children through school. In such situations, should we be surprised they simply turn to those who they trust the most—their religious leaders—for help? Too often, interactions with state agencies are one-way exchanges from the more powerful to the less powerful. Faith-based mediating institutions can often provide necessary charity that goes beyond both what an individual’s family can do to support him and also the services offered by the state. Perhaps more importantly, because these institutions are most often a central part of people’s daily lives, people who receive help are also asked to give something back to the community, even if all they can give is their volunteer time, a smile, or a prayer for someone else.

Debates about church-state relations cannot end with principles of “neutrality” or “secularism,” terms that too often mask an attempt by the state to largely the church’s social work (as in France) or to refuse to cooperate with faith-based service agencies (as in Quebec). As Raphaël Liogier argues in “Legitimate” Secularism: France and its State Religions, (published in French in 2006 as Une laïcité “légitime”: La France es ses réligions d’Etat) the French government in theory claims neutrality toward religion, but in practice state agencies use secularism as a straight jacket for freedom of thought and speech. Thus, French secularism essentially grants the government the authority to pick and choose which religions and which religious expressions of those religions are “legitimate,” a practice which leads to decisions that baffle many North Americans, such as the 2004 ban on women wearing the Muslim headscarf in many public places in France, including public schools.

Our conception of religious freedom should encompass the right of individuals and groups to practice their religion by founding associations with spiritual as well as social and educational purposes. The situation of the Haitian immigrants shows that such an approach is not only right on the grounds of principle, it carries with it real practical benefits.

For millions of immigrants past and present to the U.S., the principle of religious freedom has created a society in which being religious serves as a kind of currency, a valuable token that provides a kind of social identity. Religious associations abound and flourish in the U.S., thus helping newcomers integrate into the broader society from a position of strength. In contrast, not only for Muslim but also for devout Christian immigrants to France and Quebec, being religious forms a barrier to integrating into secular society. As we debate how best to integrate immigrants, we should focus not only on socio-economic mobility, but also on how immigrants create a sense of moral order in their new homes, for the two are inextricably linked.


Margarita Mooney is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. You can read more about her book and see pictures from her fieldwork at www.faithmakesuslive.com. Contact information and more details about her other articles and books on immigration, religion, and education can be found at www.margaritamooney.com.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The ECHR statement suggests that democracy is a necessary condition for pluralism, but this seems unlikely. Far more plausible is the claim that the existence of democratic society is sufficient for a high degree of pluralism. The freedoms that liberal democracy brings inevitably lead to differences and disagreements, even between people uprightly striving to seek the truth. What John Rawls called the “burdens of judgment” make it reasonable to expect that when a question is not solved by empirical evidence, liberty of belief will result in difference of judgment. So some degree of pluralism does indeed seem to be a natural result of liberal freedoms.

The ECHR seems to go further, however, in referring to this pluralism as “dearly won.” The suggestion here is that there is something beneficial to the fact of pluralism in itself, something of value to the fact of competing religious traditions, belief systems and even moral frameworks. This claim seems problematic. After all, if religious traditions, belief systems, and moral frameworks are the result of a genuine commitment to and search for the truth, then disagreement of truth claims among adherents must be taken as a sign that some, or even all, of the searches have failed. If two religious traditions make incompatible truth claims—about the nature or identity of the divinity, for example—then at least one of those traditions must be wrong in at least that particular. How can this be a good state of affairs?

It is instructive, perhaps, to compare the situation of religious pluralism with that of moral pluralism over an issue of grave significance. Those who consider the destruction of unborn life unjust must think of the disagreements that underlie such assaults as roughly parallel to the disagreements that underlay slavery: they can and must be overcome because overcoming them will rectify a tremendous wrong. Thus, to the extent that there is genuine pluralism about unborn human life—a principled disagreement between persons of mutual good will—it would be indecent to speak of this pluralism as “dearly won.”

If there is a truth in questions of religion, as there must be (including the possibility that all religions are false), then talk of a pluralism of religious belief as being “dearly won” must be wrong-headed. But what is the difference, for, say, a pro-life Catholic Christian, between the existence of a pro-choice ideology that is widely recognized as occupying a reasonable space of belief, and the existence of Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, religious belief systems the truth of which is clearly incompatible with the truth of Catholic Christianity? Or suppose a widespread and accepted pluralism about the morality of slavery; how would this differ from widespread religious pluralism?

It is certainly possible for error to accompany what is good. The pursuit of scientific achievement depends upon a process of trial and error; excellence in play or work comes about through the overcoming of error; and mistakes can create the opportunities for artists to creatively transcend what they otherwise thought possible. Errors can therefore be embraced as a necessary side effect of pursuing the good, and as a means of discovering new truths.

Injustices, on the other hand, are intrinsically to be avoided; they cannot be acceptable as side effects. Like errors, they may be overcome, but they cannot be embraced as a beneficial aspect to progress towards what is good. Yet some injustices are linked intrinsically and inevitably to some errors. These errors cannot be considered benign or beneficial as the errors just discussed can be. Errors about the equality of persons that underlie the practice of slavery, for example, must be considered as baleful as the injustices they underwrite.

Disagreement and pluralism about religion must be taken as signs of error, for reasons I have already mentioned. And the errors that result from religious disagreement may lead to injustice in various ways. For example, particular false religious claims can lead to injustice. A religion that asserts the moral acceptability of human sacrifice results in injustice if put into practice.

Even true religious claims can result in injustice. A religion that asserts the importance of worship and honor for the divine can result in injustice, not by virtue of the claims themselves, but by virtue of how they are implemented, a matter over which disagreement and hence error is clearly possible. So religious error, of which religious pluralism is a sign, can lead to injustice. But religions need not, by their very nature, make false claims that lead to injustice, nor must the true claims of any religion inevitably lead to injustice. Indeed, a religion may be false in many particulars, yet just and peaceful.

The fact that religious pursuit can end in error does not impugn that pursuit, for most worthwhile pursuits bring with them the possibility of error. Furthermore, it is not religious disagreement and error as such that is responsible for the injustices to which religions have given rise. If the good of religion is itself important—that is, if it is valuable for human beings to pursue knowledge of, and a relationship with, whatever greater than human source of meaning there might be—then the injustices associated with religion are detachable from that value and its pursuit, even when that pursuit is in some respect or other in error. While the injustices that arise by accident, as it were, from religious disagreement may be indecent, neither religion itself, nor religious disagreement as such, need themselves be indecent.

It is, however, precisely disagreement about the value of nascent human life that leads to injustices against unborn human beings. While the errors resulting from such disagreements need not impugn the value of any practices with which they are accidentally associated, such as the practices of science and medicine, these errors, and the disagreements to which they give rise, are of no value at all. Their perpetuation must be considered indecent to any who recognize squarely the terrible injustices to which they lead. The case is similar with the errors that lead to slavery.

How can the errors that result in such injustices be overcome? And, if these can be overcome, why cannot the errors of religion be similarly overcome? Two main differences between judgments concerning the unborn and judgments concerning the divine are crucial. First, both the scientific judgment that unborn human beings are just that—individual human beings, members of the species Homo sapiens—and the moral judgment that all human beings are to be treated with basic moral respect—the sort of respect that demands immunity from unprovoked violence—are judgments entirely available to natural reason. They can in principle be shared by all human persons capable of intellection, without going beyond the evidence or relying upon faith in revelation or authority. But, clearly, the judgments of religion, while often founded upon reasonable claims, nevertheless go beyond what is available to natural reason, and require faith. While it certainly seems possible for the divine to guide all mankind to a uniformity of faith, such a possibility cannot be expected of human persons operating exclusively under the steam of their own natural reason.

Still, given democratic freedoms, some disagreement about the morality of abortion is inevitable, as is some degree of divergence in practice from the relevant moral norms. But here is a second difference: true judgments about the nature and moral worth of the unborn may justifiably be enforced by law even over those who disagree with those judgments, for falsity here, as mentioned, results in significant injustice, and the matter is in principle one for which natural reason is sufficient. So a convergence of practice, even if not a complete convergence of belief, could reasonably be desired, pursued, and achieved where the value of unborn human life is concerned.

But religious belief and practice are unlike this. In particular, the practical convergence which could be brought about through permissible means on the matter of unborn life (or slavery) could only be humanly brought about where religious belief is concerned by unjustly coercive means, means which failed to respect the necessity of freedom for the choice to believe and to commit oneself to that which is offered to faith. In other words, moral norms make religious pluralism indissociable from a free society, but such norms do not necessarily require similar forms of moral pluralism.

In consequence, there is, even for truth-seeking religious believers, some reason to celebrate religious pluralism. Given the role that error plays in the pursuit of any worthwhile end, religious disagreement can be a sign that people are taking that pursuit seriously; but, more importantly, it can be a sign that individuals and religious communities are being accorded those political liberties necessary to foster the good of religion.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

One way President Obama could be respectful of and show his appreciation for Islam would be to nominate an Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom and support religious freedom in his administration’s foreign policy.

To those who dismiss religious freedom as a “western” concept or the desire only of Christian missionaries, and argue that out of respect we should not “impose” this on Muslims, I would like to provide an overview of the perspectives of some of the many Muslim thinkers, both Sunni and Shia, who argue for religious freedom.

There are Muslims who oppose religious freedom, of course, and they are well-known. The exploits of the Taliban and the Saudi government get press. The views of Osama bin Laden and his cohorts are available free online in many languages. But there are also Muslims who favor religious freedom. It is high time the perspectives of the latter get the public attention they deserve.

A key phrase in President Obama’s Istanbul speech was that “we seek broader engagement” with Muslims. If President Obama is sincere in his desire to “seek broader engagement,” his outreach must extend beyond foreign-government-sanctioned and foreign-government-financed Muslim institutions, which tend to have more to do with representing the political needs of authoritarian regimes (often regimes the U.S. government readily supports) than with the actual broader dynamic underway among Muslims today.

If our American “engagement” is to be authentically “broader,” it needs to be open to the diversity that exists in Islam. This would include considering the perspectives of Muslims who favor religious freedom. What follows is an overview of why some Muslims favor religious freedom. These authors have rooted their arguments in foundational Islamic texts, the Quran and Hadith, and principles of Islamic law.

These authors are not arguing for religious freedom simply to secure minority rights (such as those of the persecuted Shia in Saudi Arabia), nor do they argue for religious freedom as a temporary bridge to get them into political power. Quite to the contrary, their arguments support the principle of religious freedom as integral to the practice of Islam, and more broadly as beneficial to humanity. These authors shun the mixing of political and religious authority, and highlight this as a threat to the well-being of Muslims and to their faith lives. In addition, these authors see freedom of Muslims and non-Muslims to enter and exit faith communities as essential if belief in Islam is to have any meaning.

Abdullah Saeed, a professor at the University of Melbourne, and his brother Hassan Saeed, Attorney-General of the Maldives, offer an in depth examination of Islam and religious freedom. Their study, Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam, is an exploration of the topic of religious freedom in the Quran and the Hadith. Based on the results of their study, they argue, “ . . . freedom of religion is a fundamental principle of Islam and that the death penalty for apostasy violates this principle.” They conclude that Islam and freedom of religion are not just simply compatible; the findings of their study reach further. They observe, “One of the new positions emerging among many Muslims today is that the Qur’an supports the view that freedom of belief is an essential aspect of Islam.”

Other Muslim writers addressing religious freedom include Mohamed Talbi, from Tunisia, Mohsen Kadivar, from Iran, and Abdolkarim Soroush, also from Iran. Essays by these three authors are now available in English in the excellent compendium, The New Muslim Voices: Rethinking Politics and Modernity, edited by Mehran Kamrava. This compendium includes both Sunni and Shia perspectives on issues of importance to modern Muslims, such as religious freedom. Also in Kamrava’s compendium is an article by Nasr Abu Zayd, an Egyptian, which touches on the issue of religious freedom. (Some of Kavidar’s writings are available at his website in English, though the English translation in Kamrava’s collection is of higher quality.)

These authors critically examine and debunk popular assumptions and inherited traditionalist interpretations about Islam and religious freedom, including the assumption that Islam must respond to apostasy with execution. Kavidar observes, “ . . . these interpretations [of the Quran and Hadith] often fall significantly short of capturing the essence of the Holy Book or a particular Prophetic tradition and, in fact, often contradict them.”

While Saeed and Saeed focus on textual exegesis, Talbi, Kavidar and Soroush elaborate guiding principles for approaching the issue of religious freedom as Muslims. The types of advantages they, as Muslims, see in religious freedom include the following:

1. Religious liberty provides a foundation for authentic belief:

Talbi notes the “inner liberty” of individuals, and observes that recognition of this inner liberty enriches how he, as a Muslim, interacts with non-Muslims. This is not just a matter of peaceful-coexistence, but rather recognition of the “sacredness” of each individual. He writes of bearing witness to non-believers of his Muslim faith neither by sword nor with scratchy, screechy loudspeakers blasting from mosques, but rather “in the most courteous way that is most respectful of the inner liberty of our neighbors and their sacredness.”

Kavidar observes that the notion of religion without religious freedom lacks logical coherence. He observes, “ . . . the freedom to choose one’s beliefs and creed predates religion. It is through this freedom that religion is chosen and belief is established.” Furthermore, he questions, “How could a religion, one that asks of its followers to explore for themselves and to choose their beliefs based on critical reason and thought, deny the necessity of freedom of religion and belief?”

2. Religious liberty frees Islam from political manipulation:

Since religious freedom makes possible faith as individual belief, it transfers the centrality of religion in society away from a cultural or tribal identity, and removes it from the hands of power-hoarders who would use religion as a political football for their personal, near-term objectives. A free environment, namely one that includes religious freedom, makes possible exposure of the falsehoods of those who would manipulate religion for personal gain.

Soroush offers the frank observation that, “The contest of freedom eliminates the masters of mediocrity, the pompous windbags, and the incompetent overlords . . . .In a closed and oppressive system . . . truths do not get a chance to shine against falsehoods.”

The Saeeds note the harm caused to Islam by political abuse—not only in the eyes of non-believers, but also in the eyes of Muslims: “ . . . the misuse of Islam by political authorities in the Muslim world to suit their own political agendas plays a significant role in driving some Muslims away from Islam.”

3. Religious liberty enriches Muslims’ faith:

The arguments these authors present supporting religious freedom suggest that religious freedom offers an enriching—not a threatening—environment for the Islamic faith.

Soroush observes (echoing Quran verse 2:256), “Religion is, by definition, incompatible with coercion. Freedom has two virtures: it endows life and the choices we make in it with meaning.” Kavidar notes, “If free will did not exist, sin and atonement would be meaningless. Religion and faith are meaningful only when people can freely choose them.” And Talbi observes, “Faith, to be true and reliable faith, absolutely needs to be a free and voluntary act.”

Societal freedom, argues Soroush, is as an environmental necessity for internal spiritual life, and the lack thereof is a threat to Muslims seeking to live out their faith. He argues, “Living under tyranny plunges the whole society into such iniquity and causes such legitimation and institutionalization of corruption that fighting the internal battle becomes impossible.”

4. Religious liberty promotes respect for Muslims

Respect for Islam and Muslims is a recurring theme in these authors’ arguments for religious freedom. Religious freedom provides an environment to protect Islam from political manipulation and settling for mediocrity. These authors honor their faith and consider it unworthy of mediocrity.

Soroush discusses the complexity of truth and the resulting need for pursuit of truth to be a shared enterprise. He writes, “Freedom is there not only for people to say their piece and blow off steam. It is there because they need each others’ help against darkness and falsehood.”

Integrally linked to their respect for Islam is these authors’ respect for Muslims alongside all human beings. Hence they highlight the benefits of religious freedom for all society and note their concerns of harm to society where freedom is denied. Kavidar asserts, “ . . . freedom of thought and religion are beneficial for society at large and ought to be sought after.” He observes, “limiting the choice of religion and belief leads to discord, deceit, and hypocrisy. Those who would be persecuted or killed for spreading false beliefs have no choice but to feign obedience to whatever religion happens to dominate at that the time. Hypocrisy undermines and destroys faith. Robbing people of their right to choose their religious beliefs only results in the spread of discord and hypocrisy.”

The Egyptian Muslim author, Nasr Abu Zayd, now exiled to Europe, also emphasizes in Kamrava’s anthology the detrimental impact on society when there is a lack of freedom for “religious discourse.” He observes, “Censorship and stagnation go hand in hand. Because religious discourse is tied to public discourse, all facets of society deteriorate as a result of censorship. Only confident and free societies have an ability to repel stagnation and decay . . . People must be free to challenge opinions in the marketplace of ideas. Islam must protect this right.”

5. Religious liberty reflects respect for God’s sovereignty.

These Muslim writers also believe that religious freedom reflects respect for God’s sovereignty. Kavidar comments on the Islamic belief that God rewards good and punishes evil and observes that denial of freedom would run counter to this understanding of who God is. He writes, “If there were only one path that everyone had to follow—the right path—then there would be no need for independent judgment, and for God’s rewarding of good and His punishment of evil.”

Soroush notes that valuing reason and truth reflects trust in God, “Where both reason and the truth are held to be weak, freedom cannot be cultivated.” He writes, arguing for an intellectual rather than a bloody jihad, of the need to “struggle and wage Jihad against falsehoods, and put our trust in God. We must know that fraud will not succeed nor the iniquitous prevail. This is the meaning of tavakkol (trust in God).”

For Talbi too, his support for religious freedom is related to his understanding of who God is. He observes, “From a Muslim perspective, and on the basis of the Qur’an’s basic teachings . . . religious liberty is fundamentally and ultimately an act of respect for God’s sovereignty and for the mystery of God’s plan for humanity, which has been given the terrible privilege of shaping entirely on its own responsibility its destiny on earth and hereafter. Ultimately, to respect humanity’s freedom is to respect God’s plan. To be a true Muslim is to submit to this plan. It is to put one’s self, voluntarily and freely, with confidence and love, into the hands of God.”

These Muslim voice represent an important segment of a critical population. If President Obama wishes to follow through on his stated desire to “respect Islam” and “broaden engagement” with Muslims, he should look at the too-little-known writings of these authors. He can lead our government’s outreach to Muslims beyond listening only to authoritarian political leaders of Muslim populations, such as those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Appointing an Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom who could engage with these voices of Islam would be one concrete step in the right direction.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Lost in the Sacred, first published in German in 2005 and appearing in English translation earlier this spring, attributes the crisis of the Middle East to an “overflow of the sacred.” For Diner, “the sacred” is not a strictly religious category; it refers to “the burning omnipresence of transcendence in all areas of life.” Drawing examples from modern-day Baghdad, Istanbul at the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, and Medina under Mohammad, Diner shows how divinity permeates spaces that the Western tradition never sees as “sacred”: from language and financial transactions, to conceptions of political authority and the home.

We often speak about a “crisis” in the Muslim world, but rarely define our terms. Diner sums it up by examining the groundbreaking U.N. Arab Human Development Report (AHDR), which Time magazine named “Book of the Year” in 2002. Though not written in response to 9-11, the AHDR seemed to provide a comprehensive diagnosis of the Middle East’s many social ills. It described a region destabilized by low technological development, authoritarian states, the absence of democratic institutions, the deliberate exclusion of women from public life, and a lethal hostility to the outside world—the sorts of problems that sustained rogue regimes in countries such as Libya, and allowed more virulent cancers like al-Qaeda to spread through the region.

But the report, written largely by social scientists from the Middle East, said nothing about religion or secularity. For Diner, this is a worrying sign. From his point of view, secularity is the engine of change in a dynamic society: It allows us to decode the world by human reason, respond to change, and rise to new challenges. He claims the certain brands of religion hamper this process. Especially in the case of Islam, a religion that professes to regulate all areas of life through a divine law, there can be no negotiation with an ever-changing modern world. As long as religion wins the day, Diner argues, the crisis of the Muslim world will result from “a deficit of secularization.”

Diner’s argument often depends on a dichotomous and simplistic portrait of “Islam” and “the West.” He juxtaposes a Muslim world consumed with the otherworldly and the past versus a West anchored in science and progress. We live in an age when such simplistic readings of the Middle East can have profound political consequences: We recall the American failure to court Arab public opinion after 9-11 and the post-invasion mishaps in Iraq as two glaring examples of how misreading the region can actually widen chasms between “us” and “them.”

It doesn’t help that Diner often uses untidy categories when he talks about the Muslim world. He gives a brief caveat about this in his introduction, but it would have been worth emphasizing throughout the book that not every Muslim is an Arab, nor every Arab a Muslim, nor every Muslim deeply religious. Even if Diner understands these distinctions himself, most readers do not. We tend to see the Middle East as a cultural, religious, and political monolith, a view specialists should work to dispel.

Diner’s analysis of the AHDR introduces a particularly controversial thesis. In it, he argues that the problems of the Middle East derive from cultural and religious characteristics. Obvious socio-economic factors like income inequality or repressive governments are pushed to the side; they are treated as symptoms of a deeper crisis, the failure to delineate sacred and secular space. Embedded in this argument is a more general suspicion of religion itself. According to Diner’s view of the Middle East, religion can only retard, never stimulate progress. But even as Diner condemns a “deficit of secularization” in the Muslim world, he forgets that the historical apogee of Muslim culture—the so-called “renaissance” of the ninth and tenth centuries, which fertilized the European renaissance—was ultimately a religious enterprise.

To identify the “deficit of secularization,” Diner wanders far and wide. One “problem” he cites is that of the Arabic language. On the one hand, Arabic exists in the form of “Fusha,” the classical, quasi-Qur’anic dialect used in mosque sermons, political speeches, newspaper articles, and other formal settings; on the other, it exists as “Amiyya,” the colloquial dialect of everyday life. Even in a secular context, Fusha is infused with a sacred quality, and as a sacred language, it responds slowly to changing cultural circumstances. It is also inaccessible to vast sections of the Arab public, who speak and experience life through local dialects. According to Diner, the tension between these “registers” hampers intellectual growth, since the real language of cultural and social change is not sanctioned as intellectually respectable, while the intellectually respectable language is somewhat archaic.

The sacred also permeates literary culture in the Muslim world. For centuries, literary culture was tied to the Qur’an. But the Qur’an is largely an oral text—heard aloud in a mosque—and due to its sacred, unchanging quality, huge taboos originally surrounded its printing. Indeed, the first printed Qur’ans appeared in sizeable numbers a full three centuries after Europe’s presses began printing Bibles. And unlike the Bible, whose translation and mass production prepared a European public to consume other genres of printed literature, the slow appearance of the Qur’an in print form stunted access and interest in other kinds of written material. To this day, most written materials are in Fusha (as opposed to the more widely-understood colloquial), and forms of literature such as novels still have tiny followings in the Arab world. The statistics bear this out: In 1991, there were 102,000 new books published in North America. In the entire Arab world, 6,500 books were published (on mostly religious or technical subjects): 1.1% of the world’s book production for 5% of its population. The transmission of outside knowledge into Arabic is equally abysmal.

Diner’s argument about language and reading is interesting, but it leaves a few questions unanswered: How does a diglossic language like Arabic compare to something like Japanese, which has succeeded as a modern language despite rigid distinctions among “honorific,” “written,” and “colloquial” forms? How does book production in the Arab world compare to other regions at similar developmental stages? Surely there are places in the world where written culture is even more embryonic, yet where the Qur’an exercises no special influence. And what about forms of literature, such as poetry, that remain wildly popular in the Arab world? Do they not count as “suitably enriched” forms of writing?

For most readers, the biggest problems in today’s Muslim world are not language and books, but the marriage of religion and political authority. Perhaps because these issues typically receive the most attention, Diner does not devote much space to discussing them. But if we want to engage in the dangerous dance of identifying “intrinsic qualities” in Muslim culture that blur the line between “sacred” and the “secular,” this is the place to focus.

One relevant issue Diner does discuss is the famous Qur’anic exhortation “to command the right and forbid the wrong.” Throughout the history of Islam, it has served as a mandate for each individual to obey the law, and when necessary, ensure that others do the same. After all, Islam has never been comfortable ensuring the salvation of the individual in isolation from his community. Communal salvation depends on the shari’a—an all-encompassing divine law taken from the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet and his followers. It theoretically imbues even the most secular spaces with a sense of the sacred, for in everything Muslims do, from performing the Hajj to taking out bank loans, they are theoretically supposed to act out a particular obligation to God.

This is certainly true in classical Islam, but in much of today’s Muslim world—even in theocratic states like Saudi Arabia, which profess to enforce shari’a—civil law has displaced divine law. Diner acknowledges this, but fails to demonstrate in concrete terms how an ancient legal ethos that blurred “secular” and “sacred” still affects a modern Muslim world where God is no longer lawgiver except in certain jurisdictions, like family or inheritance law, where shari’a holds undisputed sway.

Throughout Lost in the Sacred, we see a few key weaknesses surface time and again. The most obvious remains the unresolved tension over responsibility: Do the problems of the Muslim world come principally from religion and culture or politics and economics? Skeptical readers will rightly wonder why Diner must seek elusive explanations for the “9-11 world” when the obvious suffices in so many cases. Chronic food shortages, ferocious censorship laws, and income inequality are among the unambiguous factors that have contributed to the crisis of the modern Middle East, none of which have anything to do with religion. But Diner argues it must be something older, embedded in the fabric of society. It is a theory difficult to prove, and whatever its merits, Diner must discount the more obvious explanations before he can substantiate his subtler claims.

Secondly, if Islam is the “x-factor” in the crisis of the Middle East, how does Diner explain the existence of similar, perhaps worse conditions in places like sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, where Islam has no foothold? Could the Middle East’s problems simply be the growing pains of an average developing society?

Thirdly, Diner often resorts to broad caricatures of the Muslim world—a realm that stretches from the suburbs of Detroit to Morocco, Iran and the Philippines. Its inhabitants speak Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu and dozens of other languages. If we can still speak of a single “Muslim world” and not a diverse collection of cultures that practice Islam, Diner needs to tell us why.

As a final reflection, Diner takes a fairly pessimistic stance toward the central role of religion in Muslim countries. The only way out of the crisis, he writes, is to delimit the sacred through Western-style secularization. But Diner forgets that the fallout of secularization is not always pretty—in the West, the removal of religion from the public sphere has caused an erosion of public values, the collapse of the family, and a bitter string of culture wars, to name a few negative consequences. Lost in the Sacred fails to identify these corrosive side effects, and in the process, finds it hard to sympathize with the positive role religion can play in an individual’s life and in the welfare of a nation. What the Muslim world needs is not Western-style secularization that stresses the privatization of religion, but a form of authentic faith at ease with modernity—one which encourages peace, equality among men and women, engagement with the outside world, and an openness to change. This is the challenge: to identify traditions that preserve Islam but which allow it to speak the language of modernity, and in turn, help modernity speak the language of religion.

Christian C. Sahner is a Rhodes Scholar studying Islamic history at the University of Oxford.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Obama’s efforts paid off. In 2008, according to CNN exit polls, Obama won forty-three percent of the presidential vote among voters who attend religious services once a week or more, up from Senator John Kerry’s thirty-nine percent in 2004. Obama did especially well with Black and Latino believers. But he also made real inroads among traditional white Catholics, according to a recent article by John Green in First Things.

His cultivation of churchgoing Americans has not let up since winning the election. From his selection of Rick Warren to deliver his inaugural invocation to his public support for charitable choice to his recent remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama has sought to signal to the faithful in America that his administration is no enemy to religion.

I do not doubt the sincerity of Obama’s religious intentions. But while many social conservatives have pointed a spotlight on Obama’s socially liberal policies (repealing the Mexico City Policy, for example) few have paid attention to the likely impact his stimulus, bailout, and economic welfare programs will have. One unremarked and unintended consequence of Barack Obama’s audacious plans for the expansion of government—especially in health care, education, and the environment—is that the nanny state he is seeking to build will likely crowd out religious institutions in America. In other words, if he succeeds in passing his ambitious agenda, the Obama revolution is likely to lead the United States down the secular path already trod by Europe.

To fund his bold efforts to revive the American economy and expand the welfare state, Obama is proposing to spend a staggering $3.6 trillion in the 2010 fiscal year. Obama’s revolutionary agenda would push federal, state, and local spending to approximately 40 percent of Gross Domestic Product, up from about 33 percent in 2000. It would also put the size of government in the United States within reach of Europe, where government spending currently makes up 46 percent of GDP.

Why is this significant for the vitality of religion in America? A recent study of 33 countries around the world by Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde, political scientists at the University of Washington, indicates that there is an inverse relationship between state welfare spending and religiosity. Specifically, they found that countries with larger welfare states had markedly lower levels of religious attendance, had higher rates of citizens indicating no religious affiliation whatsoever, and their people took less comfort in religion in general. In their words, “Countries with higher levels of per capita welfare have a proclivity for less religious participation and tend to have higher percentages of non-religious individuals.”

Gill and Lundsgaarde show, for instance, that Scandinavian societies such as Sweden and Denmark have some of the largest welfare states in the world as well as some of the lowest levels of religious attendance in the world. By contrast, countries with a history of limited government—from the United States to the Philippines—have markedly higher levels of religiosity. The link between religion and the welfare state remains robust even after Gill and Lundsgaarde control for socioeconomic factors such as urbanization, region, and literacy. The bottom line: as government grows, people’s reliance on God seems to diminish.

How do we account for the inverse relationship between government size and religious vitality? As Gill and Lundsgaarde point out, some individuals have strong spiritual needs that can only be met by religion. This portion of the population remains faithful, come what may.

But other individuals only turn to churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques when their needs for social or material security are not being met by the market or state. In an environment characterized by ordinary levels of social or economic insecurity, many of these individuals will turn to local congregations for social, economic, and emotional support. At times of high insecurity, such as the current recession, religious demand goes even higher. Witness, for instance, press accounts chronicling the recent boom in churchgoing among Americans hit hard by the recession. Of course, many of those who initially turn to the church around the corner for instrumental reasons often end up developing an intrinsic appreciation for the spiritual and moral goods found in their local congregation.

By contrast, the more the state steps in to reduce the economic and social insecurity of its citizens, the less likely fair-weather believers are to darken the door of a church on Sunday. Now, to paraphrase Charles Krauthammer, Obama hopes to expand the size of the welfare state by offering cradle-to-grave health care and cradle-to-cubicle education to Americans. If he gets his way, Americans will not have to trust in God, or their fellow congregants, to support an ailing parent, or to help them figure out how to pay for their daughter’s college tuition. Instead, they can put their faith in Uncle Sam.

To secularists and religious skeptics, this may seem no great loss. Who cares if Americans substitute “In God We Trust” for “In Government We Trust”? But as political scientist Alan Wolfe observed in Whose Keeper?, one of the primary dangers associated with the rise of the nanny state is that “when government assumes moral responsibility for others, people are less likely to do so themselves.” Wolfe noted that large increases in welfare spending in Sweden, Denmark and Norway over the last half century have ended up eroding the moral fabric of families and civic institutions in these societies. Scandinavians have come to depend not on family, civil society, or themselves, but on the government for their basic needs.

The problem with this Scandinavian-style welfare dependency is that many Scandinavians, especially young adults who have grown up taking the welfare state for granted, are markedly less likely to attend to the social, material, and emotional needs of family and friends than earlier generations. As a consequence, social solidarity is down and social pathology—from drinking to crime—is up. In Wolfe’s words, “High tax rates in Scandinavia encourage governmental responsibility for others; they do not, however, necessarily inspire a personal sense of altruism and a feeling of moral unity toward others with whom one’s fate is always linked.” Not surprisingly, cheating on taxes is on the rise in Scandinavian countries, both because the social solidarity undergirding these societies is fraying and because men and women—especially high earners—are recoiling from paying the hefty taxes associated with keeping their nanny states afloat (sound familiar?).

The dangers that Wolfe identifies in societies like Sweden would likely be even more salient in America, which has a much lower level of cultural homogeneity and collectivism than the Scandinavian nations. In the United States, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, religious institutions have long provided crucial social and moral ballast to the individualistic ethos of our nation. For instance, as political scientist Arthur Brooks pointed out in his recent book, Who Really Cares, religious Americans are significantly more likely to give to charity and to volunteer their time than are secularists. In 2000, he found, for instance, that ninety-one percent of regular churchgoers (those who attend religious services nearly every week or more frequently) gave money to charities, compared to sixty-six percent of secularists (those who attend religious services a couple times a year or not at all); moreover, sixty-seven percent of churchgoers volunteered, compared to forty-four percent of secularists.

This is why, even though Obama’s audacious agenda might provide short-term relief to the economic and social challenges that now beset us, over the long term the Obama revolution is likely to erode first the religious and then the civic and moral fabric of the nation. Undoubtedly, this is not the change religious believers who put their faith in Obama last November are hoping for from this president. But if the European experiment with the welfare state tells us anything, it tells us that this is the change we can expect from a successful Obama revolution.

W. Bradford Wilcox, associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is a fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse. He is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press titled Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Childbearing, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

One foundational judgment of practical reason is that religion is a basic good to be pursued. That is to say, any human being thinking clearly about the range of possibilities that could make him well-off will recognize that being right with—i.e., conforming one’s will to—whatever greater than human source of meaning there might be is an intelligibly attractive possibility.

Most people, recognizing the good at stake, seek to discover whether there is such a source. But not every agent who makes this judgment and acts upon it believes that there is such a more than human source of meaning. Concluding that no such source exists, some people seek to realize the good of religion by making their peace with the absence of this source of meaning. But for the many who consider it more reasonable to believe that such a being exists, it is then necessary to ask who and what such a being might be, and to ask how one is to be “made right” with that being in one’s life and action.

These deliberations involve a mix of speculative and moral considerations. While the existence of a creator can, plausibly, be known through the use of natural reason, this creator is not entirely and unmistakably present to us as the God of some particular revelation or religious tradition. How then have some people arrived at such robust conceptions of God? After arriving at the reasonable conclusion that God exists, many people further judge that God has offered mankind signs and opportunities by which we may come to know and love Him. He has, in other words, extended to us the possibility of a personal relationship. Such a relationship is itself a human good, and its desirability—and the desirability and even necessity of accepting that offer—is recognized by practical reason in a concrete judgment: That I should, for example, accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and henceforth strive to act as he would have me act. Or that I should submit to Allah and follow the teachings of the Prophet. Similar practical judgments, albeit to different conclusions, are made by others who have accepted different possible revelations as true, and have acted accordingly.

Conscience and its acts are thus at the root of our pursuit of the good of religion and of our acceptance of—our faith in—some particular religious tradition (and surely, that faith’s perfection will be found where the revelation accepted is true, and human flourishing will be compromised to some extent insofar as the revelation accepted is false). Considerations of this sort are at the root of sound thinking about freedom of religion: There is an obligation to seek religious truth and choose in accordance with what one acknowledges as religious truth. But the seeking, the judging, and, especially, the conforming, all require freedom. Such freedom is both existential (the freedom of being a person) and social/legal (the freedom of political liberty in a non-threatening, non-coercive context).

The results of one’s deliberations and acts of faith when considering one’s possible relationship to a supreme being can play a unique role in the rest of one’s practical deliberations. Consider the illusion that, in being self-constituting, we are self-sufficient, reliant only upon ourselves for successfully actualizing our possibilities. Such a thought is truly illusory: we are not responsible for our own existence; nor are we responsible for existing as the kinds of beings we are, with the particular set of goods that are beneficial for us.

Further, our success in pursuing those goods through judgment, choice, and action, is not of our own making. By my own power, I do not have the capacity to ensure the continued existence of the world through to the completion of any act I perform, much less the particular set of conditions necessary for success, rather than failure, in my actions. Indeed, I can no more ensure even the existence of my acts of judgment and will while exercising those powers. Literally everything that I am, everything that I do, and every measure of my success must be seen as accomplished in overwhelming reliance upon something, or someone, else.

It is natural, from the standpoint of one who has answered questions about the existence of a transcendent source of meaning affirmatively, to identify this source as the cooperating agent and to see thereby every endeavor as part of a potentially cooperative relationship with this being. It is likewise natural to see that being’s revelation as an invitation to us to accept His guidance in that cooperative relationship. One’s every action, from this standpoint, will be suffused with both gratitude, for the gift that has been given, attentiveness, to what God is asking of us as regards our participation in the relationship, and profound significance, insofar as everything that we do will either contribute positively or negatively to the building up of that relationship. We may call that relationship to which we are called our vocation.

What, then, justifies religious authority? There are two justifying reasons: one primary, the other secondary.

The primary reason for religious authority must be that some set of persons are believed to be in a special epistemic position as regards what God wishes of human beings in order that the human-divine relationship be protected and promoted. Call this magisterial authority. The secondary reason is that some form of quasi-political authority—call it ecclesial authority—is necessary in order to coordinate the actions of those persons who together take themselves to be oriented towards God and his purposes by way of some magisterial authority or other.

When some set of persons are believed to possess, and believe themselves to possess, a special awareness of, or access to, the divine plan for human-divine relationships, and it is believed, including believed by those persons themselves, that part of the divine plan involves their promulgation of that plan, then those persons’ assertions and other acts related to the divine plan will be taken to be authoritative in a strictly religious and magisterial sense. What those persons proscribe and prescribe, as regards actions and beliefs, will be taken to give believers good, and indeed overriding reasons for action and belief, even in cases in which the believers might otherwise have thought some other belief or action justified.

Absent magisterial authority, there might be the authority common to other voluntary associations, all of which also need some locus for authoritative decision making in order that a common way of proceeding be initiated and maintained by the members of the association. But, while a religious club might indeed need and have such an authority, there seems no particular point in calling this “religious authority.” Moreover, a political authority might have religious functions without being taken to have the special epistemic position characteristic of religious authority. Again, I see no need to think of this as religious authority in the primary sense.

Now it appears that, under these conditions, it is not the case that a non-coercive religious authority—that is, an authority which cannot punish with the sword—is ever in a position to violate the conscience or religious liberty of its members or its alleged members. For those members are either believers, in which case they look to the magisterial authority for guidance and, receiving it, take it to be authoritative for the formation of their conscience, or, they are not believers, perhaps because, having consulted their consciences and exercised their reasoning capacities, they no longer believe in the privileged epistemic position of the magisterial authorities. These agents, whom the magisterial authority is unable to coerce, are free to leave the set of believers, or accept what non-coercive—because avoidable at will—punishments, such as excommunication or lighter discipline the ecclesial authority may mete out, just as agents in any other voluntary association are free to leave, or accept that association’s non-coercive punishments.

At the same time, it is also clear, based on what has been said, that a mingling of religious authority and political, or coercive authority, is inappropriate, given the nature and importance of conscience and the good of religion. Yet it is important to see this as the locus of abuse, not the exercise of magisterial authority as such. Religious authority that is exercised with genuinely coercive power—the sort of power characteristic of the political state—is a perversion of both religious and political authority, and is inadequate to the tasks of either. Magisterial authority need pose no threat to religious liberty; and if the claims of some magisterial authority are true, then such authority must be considered essential for the fullest participation in the good of religion.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Well, o.k., not quite, but almost.

In the play Madah-Sartre: The Kidnapping, Trial and Conver(sat/s)ion of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir by Algerian Francophone playwright Alek Baylee Toumi, French intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir show up in Algeria at the 1993 funeral of Tahar Djaout, a writer who was assassinated by Islamists. (Wait, you say, Sartre died in 1980 and De Beauvoir in 1986! Yes, but this is fiction.)

Islamists kidnap Sartre and De Beauvoir at gunpoint and then threaten them with death unless they convert to Islam. An international outcry leads to a flurry of activity and an ineffective “diplomatic waltz.” As for the captives, already being dead gives them a great advantage: Sartre and De Beauvoir have utterly nothing to fear in the face of a death threat. They challenge their captors—intellectually, of course.

So begins Madah-Sartre, written originally in French, and now available in English translation. What follows is a spirited debate between Madah (part of a group of Islamist thugs) and Sartre, and a debate of somewhat less substance between Madah’s nameless female counterpart “Chief Chador” (reflecting her leadership role among the female Islamists and veiled attire) and De Beauvoir.

Madah and his Islamist gang view intellectuals as their movement’s greatest threat. As a result, they desperately seek to convert Sartre and De Beauvoir to Islam.

Yet Madah is more desperate than he is clever. Early on he gives Sartre a Quran to read in between “conversion” sessions. Madah returns from a weekend hiatus expecting that Sartre’s reading of the Quran has led him to embrace Madah’s Islamism. Quite to the contrary, Sartre has been armed with arguments against Madah’s fundamentalist ideology. The philosopher contrasts what he has learned from the Quran about respect for “people of the Book” (Christians and Jews) with the extreme restrictions in Algeria placed not only on Christians, Jews, and atheists, but on Muslims who disagree with the Islamist creed.

Sartre launches into a hefty argument in favor of religious freedom for believers and non-believers alike. Sartre defends rights for Madah which Madah denies for Sartre; Sartre asserts, “Democracy and freedom are not Western luxuries, but rights for everyone. I have defended, and still defend, liberty and justice for all, including you Madah.” Madah has no substantive response; he just calls Sartre a heretic. (Sartre’s “heresy” in the play is, however, not atheism. Sartre and De Beauvoir now live in heaven where they have encountered God.)

Madah seems to have quite a high opinion of himself and his ideology. But Sartre is unimpressed. He bluntly points out that his captors have failed in providing their people with such basics as food, literacy, and an economic livelihood, all because Madah and his cohorts pursue their “obsession” with “eliminating others who are different, at all costs.”

Rather than just sitting back smugly and condemning their captors while patting themselves on the back for their own tolerance and critical thinking, Sartre and De Beauvoir engage their opponents, trying to unravel the fundamentalism which has their captors tied in mental knots. It is listening to the arguments of their captors that enables Sartre and De Beauvoir to counter their captors’ arguments, and from time to time even toss in a slam-dunk argument which leaves their captors dumbfounded. Engagement leads to cracks in an ideology which had thrived in isolation. The partial success Sartre has in his debates with Madah comes not by self-promotion, but rather by focusing on Madah’s ideology and highlighting the weaknesses in it. Sartre does not try to change Madah’s mind by promoting all-things-French and all-things-existentialist the way State Department public diplomacy seems to believe that if they just repeat promotion of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” like a broken record it will sway our adversaries to turn away from hateful ideologies.

In all this, Toumi may nudge some play-watchers and play-readers out of their comfort zones. His proposal is a bold one. It asserts that Islamists should be met by arguments, and not just by guns, wiretaps, and airport screening lines.

The juxtaposition of Islamists with super secular Europeans advancing superior arguments might make one wonder if the plot is anti-Muslim. Au contraire. Before the play even starts Toumi includes a “WARNING”. He notes, “The victims are Muslims, while the killers, the assassins, the terrorists are Islamists” (emphasis his). In the play itself Toumi stresses repeatedly that Madah and Chief Chador do not represent Islam. Toumi’s portrayal of “man-on-the-street” Muslims is sympathetic.

The play’s most powerful testament to the suffering of peaceful Muslims at the hands of Islamists is the character of the taxi driver—a nameless, hardworking, faithful Muslim man just trying to feed his nine children and wife, and care for his ailing mother. He does not, like Madah, drive around in a Saudi-provided Rolls Royce. Rather, the taxi driver struggles terribly to meet day-to-day needs and is treated badly at every turn: bullied by Islamist thugs, bullied by government thugs, unable to get basic healthcare in a healthcare system void of “care” but full of corruption.

Still, reading these debates in which only anti-religious secularists get a say against the Islamists left me wondering what Muslims who favor peace and are comfortable with pluralism (like the taxi driver) would say to Madah and Chief Chador. Toumi’s amusing creativity has developed a plot with potential beyond just this play. Imagine a television series in which Muslim champions of peace and creativity return to have a word or two with Madah and Chief Chador. Just for starters, Pathan leader Badshah Khan (1890-1988), an effective Muslim advocate of non-violence, Iranian poet/painter Sohrab Sepheri (1928-1980), a voice for beauty and joy, and Sufi Rabia (717-801), who highlighted God’s love, would, be candidates. Of course one would hope that already being dead would not be a prerequisite for intellectual engagement free from fear. Stay tuned.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Is there, in fact, such a model, and such a concept, at work in America? What are its features? And, is it worthy of the Pope’s apparent endorsement?

Looking back, for a moment, to America’s founding, we are reminded that Thomas Jefferson regarded the religious-freedom guarantees enacted into law after the Revolution as a “fair” and “novel” experiment. Similarly, it was the confident hope of James Madison that America’s bold experiment in religious liberty—one that rejected both mere “toleration” and Jacobin anti-clericalism alike—“promised a lustre to our country.” Madison believed that a specifically “American model” of religious freedom was emerging, and that it would distinguish us, shape us, and strengthen us. He and other leaders among the founding generation were keenly aware that they were attempting something new and great, something that would change—indeed, remake—the world. At the same time, they felt the weight of great responsibility. John Adams revealed as much when he wrote that “the People in America have now the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence has ever committed to so small a number, since the transgression of the first pair; if they betray their trust, their guilt will merit . . . the indignation of Heaven.”

Fortunately we have not—not yet, anyway—betrayed this trust. Today the American experiment in religious liberty is both vital and vulnerable. Our religious-freedom protections are robust, but incomplete. Our church-state arrangement is exemplary, yet confused. This much, though, seems clear: what was true at the founding remains true today, namely, that there are at work several different models, or ways of thinking about, the freedom of religion under and through law. Indeed, to quote John Witte, the various competing models of Adams’s day—and it should be emphasized that there were competing models—have “born ample progeny, and the great rivalries among them are fought out in the courts, legislatures, and academies throughout the land.”

That said, it is possible to identify an American model of “healthy secularism” that our Constitution and laws do, and should, reflect and protect.

The freedom of religion is seen not as a quaint relic from a simpler past, or as an anachronistic, even dangerous, threat to democracy. It is embraced whole-heartedly as a fundamental, natural human right, one that is intimately connected to human dignity and flourishing. This right and its protection can and should co-exist with the political community’s obligation to secure public order and safety. In the “American model,” the law does not purport to exclude religious believers and values from public life and the civic conversation. Instead, it protects everyone—believers and non-believers alike—against coercion in religious matters. It leaves to the voluntary associations of civil society the responsibility of religious education and evangelization, but it protects their right to carry out this responsibility. The right to “public” religion is protected, as is the freedom of “private” religion. “Church” and “state” are separate, not in the sense that faith is excluded from politics—such exclusion, after all, is impossible—but in the healthy, “positive” sense that the institutions and authorities of government are separate from, and prevented from interfering with, the proper independence of the institutions and authorities of religion.

The model is “secular” in the sense that laws and policies are not supplied directly by religious authority; it is “positive,” though, in that the understanding of human flourishing that it is designed to promote includes the search for religious truth and the sanctity of religious conscience. The American experiment should be seen as an attempt to secure religious liberty and authentic human flourishing through constitutional limits on interference by government with religion, and constitutional protection of the profession and practice of faith.

These are the features of the American model at its best. At the same time, it is not the only one that is, or has been, at work in the United States. Nor is it the case that American courts, judges, and officials always act in accord with this model. Indeed, it is easy to find stories—in the media and in the law books—involving public officials who have neglected the model’s fundamental premises, even turning them upside-down, treating citizens’ public religious expression with suspicion, rather than with evenhandedness and respect. In some quarters, the view persists—not only among government regulators, but also among commentators, scholars, judges, politicians, and many of our fellow citizens—that our Constitution calls for the exclusion of religious expression and argument from the public square of civil society. Why? Why do so many seem to think that religious-inspired arguments are inappropriate, even unwelcome, in political discourse?

I do not believe that most public officials harbor ugly prejudices or deep hostility toward religious believers. Nor do I believe that they are willfully neglecting their obligations under the Constitution. Instead, I am convinced that these officials—and also, unfortunately, many well-meaning Americans today—fail to understand and appreciate the “American model” of positive secularism. This misunderstanding is revealing. It reflects the competition, and the tension, between at least three different approaches to religious freedom in America today. The “American model,” then, is not static, but dynamic; not fixed, but in flux. And again, it is vulnerable.

These three approaches can usefully be characterized as “freedom from religion,” “freedom of religion,” and “freedom for religion.” (There is, I should note, a fourth possibility—“theocracy,” or direct rule by religious authority—but this is not a live option in America, and has not been for centuries, despite what you may have heard from some hysterical commentators.)

The first approach—“freedom from religion”—accepts religion as a social reality, but regards it primarily as a danger to the common good, and regards it as a practice that should be confined to the private, personal realm. On this view, it is “bad taste”—or worse!—“to bring religion into discussions of public policy.” Under this approach, as Professor Stephen Carter memorably put it, religion is “like building model airplanes, just another hobby: something quiet, something trivial—not really a fit activity for intelligent . . . adults.” Religious belief is protected, but the permissible implications and expressions of those beliefs are limited. The dominant concern is the domestication of religion, and its assimilation to the often-relativistic ideology of the state. The role of law and government is to maintain the boundary between private religion and public life; it is certainly not to support, and only rarely to accommodate, religious practice and formation.

This “freedom from” approach has found some expression in American law and policy, both in the past and—in some instances—today. It is not, however, true to the Constitution, to religious liberty properly understood, or to the nature of the human person, who is hard-wired and by nature drawn to search for truth and to cling to it when it is found. It is a good thing, then, that this approach’s influence seems more pronounced among academics and a few political activists, than among Americans generally.

The second approach—“freedom of religion”—tends to emphasize toleration, neutrality, and equal-treatment. Religion, on this view, is something that matters to many people, and so the law does not permit it to be singled out for special hostility or discrimination. It is recognized and accepted that religious believers and institutions are at work in society, and the stance of the law is even-handedness. Because we are all entitled to express our views and to live in accord with our consciences, religious believers are so entitled, too. The law, it is thought, should be “religion-blind.”

Although this approach is not hostile to religion, it is also reluctant to regard religion as something special. Religious liberty is just “liberty,” and liberty is something to which we all have an “equal” right. Religion is not something to be “singled out,” for accommodations and privileges, or for burdens and disadvantages. Again, religious commitment, expression, and motivation are all, in the end, matters of taste and private preference.

This approach represents an improvement on its “freedom from” competitor, and it, too, has been and is reflected in American law. In fact, it is fair to say that its influence is much more pronounced in the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. The Justices have emphasized, for example, that officials may not treat religiously-motivated speech worse than speech that reflects other viewpoints. Similarly, courts have ruled that public funds may be allocated to religiously affiliated schools and social-welfare agencies—so long as they are providing a secular public good—on the same terms as non-religious ones. At the same time, governments are not required to provide special accommodations for religious believers, or to exempt religiously motivated conduct from the reach of generally applicable laws.

Finally, a third approach: “freedom for religion.” This approach, in my view, represents the American experiment in “healthy secularism” at its best; it is the one that we should be rooting for. Under this approach, the search for religious truth is acknowledged as an important human activity. Religion, as religion, is special; its exercise is seen as valuable and good, and worthy of accommodation, even support. The idea is not, to be clear, that the public authority should demand religious observances or establish religious orthodoxy; it is, instead, that a political community committed to positive secularity can and should still take note of the fact that people long for the transcendent and are, by nature, called to search for the truth, and for God.

The appropriately secular and limited state will not prescribe the path this search should take, but it will take steps—positive steps—to make sure that “freedom for” religion and the conditions necessary for the exercise of religious freedom are nurtured. The government, under this approach, will not only refrain from discriminating against religion, it will take special care to accommodate and facilitate it—though always in a way that respects the distinction between “church” and “state” and the liberty of individual conscience. It not only avoids imposing unnecessary burdens on religion, it also looks for ways to lift such burdens where they exist.

It is often observed, and regretted, that American law and constitutional doctrine dealing with religious liberty is not entirely coherent. Given the discussion so far, though, this fact should not come as a surprise. Instead, it reflects the tensions between and among the three approaches I have identified. Indeed, it is precisely this ongoing competition that allows for the “American model,” one that—while not perfect—provides good reason to share the Pope’s hopes for it.

There is no denying that the relevant case-law and judicial opinions are riddled with clichés, unhelpful “tests,” bad history, and clunky rhetoric. Still, things could be worse. And, in my view, they have improved markedly in recent years, as we have been moving away from “freedom from” and toward “freedom of” and “freedom for.” (My former employer, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, deserves much of the credit for this development.) Again: the American experiment in religious liberty is both vital and vulnerable. Our religious-freedom protections are robust, but incomplete. Our church-state arrangement is exemplary, yet confused.

Richard W. Garnett is a Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame and a contributor to Public Discourse. This essay is adapted from a lecture presented in Rome on January 13, 2009, at a conference, “The American Model of Church-State Relations,” organized by Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon and celebrating the 25th anniversary of formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Holy See.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The primary example Senator Clinton provided for what she would do for public diplomacy as Secretary of State was “. . . opening ‘America Houses’ in cities across the Arab world, which will be modeled on the successful program the United States launched following World War II.” (America Houses were publicly accessible centers featuring American books and films, and hosting events about America.)

The mere fact—cited by Senator Clinton herself—that these America Houses were particularly effective during the Cold War, under different circumstances, should give cause to question, not necessarily cause to embrace, this approach.

More fundamentally, we need to step back and question the underlying assumption that public diplomacy means promoting the U.S.A. This approach yielded unimpressive results the past few years, and there is little reason to expect an improvement now.

When foreign audiences are deeply concerned with other topics, are angry at us, and don’t want to hear about us, a “Let me tell you about America . . .” approach could do more to agitate than to convince. Look at what happened to China during the 2008 Olympic torch relay, when China apparently thought it could improve its image by increasing attention on China in the media. China was out of touch with audiences in Europe and North America, where concern about Chinese human rights abuses was at the fore. When China raised its profile in the news media through the Olympic torch relay, these audiences responded with an angry sense of “China?? You want to talk about China?!? Sure, let’s do that . . .” and they went on to heap negative attention on China in public protests and news editorials. The result was, arguably, a net loss for China’s public image.

How does this translate to American public diplomacy? Consider the Palestinians in Gaza today. America needs a strategy to engage this foreign audience (not just their political leaders) in a manner that supports our national interests. It is unlikely that erecting an “America House” and telling them about the U.S.A. is going to alleviate their current concerns or reduce the number of rockets Hamas is launching into Israel. I expect it would instead provoke an anti-American backlash even stronger than the current anti-Americanism in Gaza, and could even fuel motivation for increasing rocket launches into Israel.

This is as true outside of the crisis zone. In Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, to name just a few, we have more to gain from an increase in protection of freedom of speech, to allow for progressive Muslim media, than from pushing more stories about America into these populations, especially with the youth.

As an alternative to the self-promotion definition of public diplomacy that Senator Clinton seems to have adopted without much reflection, we need to consider alternative frameworks for public diplomacy. One possible definition I propose is this:

Public diplomacy engages foreign audiences to promote ideas, issues, and concepts that are in our national interest.

There is, to be sure, an important role for telling people about America, and there are times and audiences for which this is in our national interest. But at other times, with other audiences, we may have more to gain by setting ourselves aside and engaging their issues instead. It is not always about us. We need to stop behaving like a child belting out what one might call opera voice training, namely, “me, me, me, me, me.”

This is particularly important for U.S. engagement of foreign Muslim populations. There is currently a large-scale intra-Muslim struggle underway over the future of Islam. In a nutshell (though recognizing that the overall struggle is highly complex), the core struggle is between Muslims who view Islam as inherently totalitarian and Muslims who consider civility to be an inherent part of Islam.

America needs to have government officials focused on effective engagement that supports our national interests in this struggle. While this intra-Muslim struggle is not a fight for our government, it is vital that we do what we can to facilitate creation, growth, and protection of free and open public space for engagement by Muslims. The last item, protection, is particularly important. Protection codified in a constitution and protected by a fair judiciary is what prevents fundamentalist groups from manipulating open forums to gain power precisely in order to shut them down.

But whose job is this? If Secretary of State-designate Clinton adopts the assumption that public diplomacy only means promoting America, then whose job is it to engage foreign audiences strategically? Our strategic interests in foreign populations go far beyond trying to get them to wear “I ♥ America” baseball caps.

As a concrete example of the problem that large-scale, strategically astute engagement of foreign audiences seems to be no one’s job in the U.S. government, I recently mentioned the need to get Tahar Djaout’s important novel The Last Summer of Reason translated into Arabic. Getting this freedom-and-human-dignity-promoting Algerian novel translated from the French original into Arabic is in our national interest on a myriad of levels. But, whose job is such a task? Certainly not State Department public diplomacy, if their job is defined narrowly as just promoting the U.S.A.

There is a Book Program at the State Department, but they have chosen to define their job narrowly as translating only American books into foreign languages. So, instead of getting The Last Summer of Reason translated into Arabic, the State Department Book Program has instead, for example, translated into Arabic a biography of Benjamin Franklin, a horror novel about bounty hunters for Indian scalps, and a controversial children’s book perhaps best known for the rape of a minor in Alaska. There is a role for translation of American books into Arabic, but with limited public diplomacy resources, are these really the only books—for that matter the only media—we should be translating into Arabic?

I remain highly skeptical that young Muslims in Cairo, Gaza City, and Riyadh will desire to rush to book stores to buy a biography of Benjamin Franklin, or be inspired to pursue non-violence by a novel about collecting Indian scalps. By contrast, a book such as The Last Summer of Reason fosters ideas which are in our national interest, is rooted in issues of concern to key Muslims audiences, and supports our national interest because it would mean investing tax dollars in a manner which connects with key foreign audiences such as young Arab Muslims. But whose job in the U.S. government is it to translate such a book into Arabic?

If Secretary of State nominee Clinton is only going to reproduce more business-as-usual in public diplomacy, and just promote the image of the U.S.A., there may be need for Congress to step in. It may even be time to remove public diplomacy from the State Department. After all, the core mission of the State Department is government-to-government relations, not concern with populations at large. We have significant security interests resting on our country’s engagement of foreign audiences; what happens with public diplomacy matters for our national security. Therefore we need to question critically what the nature of our public diplomacy should be.

Simply put, when foreign populations are not attacking us, our interests, and our allies, we are better off. Therefore engagement of foreign populations in ways which reduces their desire to engage in such attacks is in our interest. Public diplomacy is about us in so far as it serves our security and other national interests, but it is not all about us all the time. To be effective, we need to engage foreign audiences in ways which are relevant and attractive for them. If the lone song our public diplomacy Foreign Service Officers sing is, “me, me, me, me , me,” they will find an ever-shrinking audience.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Project on Islam and Civil Society. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Algerian author Tahar Djaout, born January 11, 1954, would have turned 55 this past Sunday.

Instead he is dead. In May 1993 Islamists in Algiers shot Djaout in the head. Several days later he died. The Islamists viewed Djaout’s creative and intellectually rich writing as a threat to their efforts to control and narrow the horizons of Algerian society.

Djaout is dead, but fortunately not silent. His poetry, novels, and articles remain—and deserve a broader audience. His works are in French, his language of publication, and while a few are available in English, German, and Dutch translation, almost none have been translated into Arabic, the language in which they could have the most impact.

One of the gems of his legacy is a short novel appropriately and chillingly titled The Last Summer of Reason. The manuscript for the book, without a title, was found among his papers after his murder. The title comes from a passage in the book. The book itself seems to have come as a prophecy of Djaout’s own fate—to put it mildly, things did not end well for Djaout. In lusciously beautiful prose in this novel, Djaout takes the reader on a walk through the reflections and experiences of the main character, Boualem Yekker. It is a walk which is gorgeous yet also painful; things do not end well for Boualem.

Boualem is a bookseller in a city with a religion identical to Islam (this society’s religion is not named, but the parallels to Islam are unambiguous). A particular strain of the local religion, very Talibanesque, has almost completely taken over the society and its government. This totalitarian movement is policed by the “Vigilant Brothers” (V.B.) whose love for power is matched only by their fear and hatred of creativity and beauty.

For example, plans are underway to ban spare tires in automobiles, justified by the claim these indicate lack of confidence in the abilities of God. Alongside this, violence and death become common. Boualem lives in a world overtaken by a “logic that causes blood to flow out of passion, that has claimed the right to destroy people in order to save their souls.” Absurdity abounds. Destruction abounds. Salvation, not so much.

For survival, Boualem nourishes his mind and soul through his memories of an era before the V.B., when intellectual inquiry and art were part of the fabric of day-to-day life. His books provide a lifeline for him, at least for a while. Boualem lives in a “gruesome-faced present,” in a city “bleeding so dreadfully inside, this city predisposed to joy but from which joy has been banned.” Integral to the V.B. banning of joy is their banning of books, and eventually burning of them. Though devastated, Boualem is not surprised, for he sees that “words, put end to end, bring doubt and change,” which are clearly foes of the neat, tidy absolutism of the V.B., who have manipulated a religion into a fundamentalism which is more focused on wielding human power than enriching humans’ relationship with their Creator.

The vital importance of Boualem’s rich memories is made particularly poignant by the contrast of these with the rigid attitudes children have acquired from their schooling in this “new world” of the V.B. So pervasive and deep is the V.B. indoctrination in society that even Boualem’s wife and his own children become estranged.

In the new world of the V.B., children are brought up to be “blind and convinced executors of a truth that has been presented to them as a higher truth. They have nothing on this earth: no material goods, no culture, no leisure activities, no affection, no hopes; their horizons are blocked.” In the realm of the V.B., any sense of educating children to be explorers, inventors, problem-solvers, and/or entrepreneurs has been extinguished. The next generation will not have memories, to say nothing of role models, to inspire broader deeper thinking.

This, precisely, is the risk we Americans and our allies face if we fail to confront the creep, and in some places the sweep, of Islamist ideologies taking root and marginalizing, or, worse yet, assassinating, Muslims who embrace intellectual inquiry, creativity, and peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims.

Djaout knew that the confrontation of fundamentalism had to take place in hearts and minds. This is why he placed particular importance on education. In a magazine he founded, Ruptures, he asserted in January 1993, “Among the structures to be remodeled as fast as possible is the educational system. It is useless to repress fundamentalism if the Algerian school continues to prepare for us new packs of fundamentalists who, in their turn, will take up arms in ten or fifteen years.”

Perhaps while reading this article you are thinking of a gazillion other articles and books you ought to read, and feel you don’t have time to read some Algerian novel. Frankly, I suggest you do not have time not to read this novel; its tour-de-force message is of vital importance to our era. Thanks to University of Nebraska Press and translator Marjolijn de Jager, The Last Summer of Reason is available in paperback (a short book, just 146 pages) in an excellent English translation from the French original.

The character Boualem “used to tell himself that the city would not be long in expelling the parasitic body that was such an insult to the landscape. Thus he waited for things to return to normal, for the messengers of fanaticism to go back to their dark corners . . . [yet] It was enough for beauty and reason to doze off for a moment, abandoning their defenses, for night to shove day out and pour across the city like a horrifying flood.”

We cannot sit back and wait for the fanatics to just go away, for life to return to our blissful ignorance of September 10, 2001. The lull of September 10 only yielded September 11.

As Julija Sukys notes in her biography and reflections about Djaout, in Ruptures in January 1993 Djaout observed, “Algeria is going through a period of decisive battles, in which every silence, every indifference, every abdication, every inch of surrendered territory can prove fatal.” For Djaout, the silence, indifference, abdication, surrenders of others did prove fatal.

We would do well to reflect on our own silence, indifference, abdication, surrender in the “war of ideas” both before and since 2001, and look now instead for opportunities in the new administration to protect and empower those in Muslim communities who speak out, take interest, hold firm to positive values, and forge ahead on the offensive in favor of peaceful, tolerant civil society.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Project on Islam and Civil Society. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2009 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Muhammad Sven Kalisch, who converted to Islam at age 15, is a professor at the university in Munster, Germany. So far the focus of the controversy has gravitated to Kalisch’s peculiar historical-critical approach. But due to the nature of Kalisch’s university position—as much one of a government official as an esoteric scholar—what might otherwise be an academic molehill is becoming a public mountain.

In 2005 Kalisch became the first faculty member in Germany assigned the task of training Islam instructors for German public schools. While American public schools, for example, usually give students a social-studies introduction to world religions, German public schools offer students government-sanctioned instruction in their respective religious faiths.

And it is this—the role of the German government in trying to determine what is and what is not a “legitimate” interpretation of a faith— which merits attention.

Kalisch is a strong advocate of academic freedom, including in Islamic studies. But his role as a government-appointed professor tasked to train government-sanctioned public school teachers of Islam leaves academic freedom subject to political pressures. In fact, the Coordination Council of Muslims in Germany has rejected Kalisch. They have begun to call for a replacement for Kalisch and have urged aspiring teachers of Islam to not take Kalisch’s lectures. Even in this there is a government role, namely in selecting which Muslim organizations the government chooses to recognize as the official representatives of Islam, which lacks the formal structures of, for example, the Roman Catholic Church.

Entangling intellectual explorations of Islam with governmental attempts to sanction one viewpoint over another for children’s religious education is more likely to stifle than encourage the much needed open, free public space for explorations of the meaning of Islam. In selecting Kalisch, a moderate Muslim from the minority Zaidi sect of Shia Islam, the German government appears to have thought it could impose moderate Islam. But in fact, all the German government accomplished was to establish itself as arbiter of Islam. Kalisch is now out, but the efforts to bring government-sanctioned Islamic education into the public schools are already well underway. The established Islamic groups in Germany are more likely to represent conservative interpretations of Islam, and are now seizing the ouster of Kalisch to impose their own selection.

The structure of the German government’s sanctioning of religious instruction in schools was designed with organized religions that have a clearly identifiable hierarchy in mind. Islam, however, has no such formal structure, especially not in its Sunni branch. Rushed efforts to recognize the most organized groups as the official representative of Muslims in Germany may in fact aid rigid conservatives and inhibit free discussion and exploration of the relation of Islam to modern society.

So what is the alternative? The golden rule for government protection of religious freedom is play fair. In light of this, the German government cannot continue to offer Christian religious education in public schools while excluding Muslims from their own religious education. It may be time to consider that, perhaps, the most fair and sensible move the German government could make is to extricate itself from the business of religious education entirely.

The German government has a legitimate concern that now-marginal radical Islamism could become main-stream among Muslims in Germany. Yet what the German government views as a solution—namely government sanctioned religious education in public schools—may well prove to be the primary barrier to a solution. In Muslim majority countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the governments exercise tight political control over the Islamic universities, leaving little room for intellectual freedom, and even less room for religious freedom. The result has been marginalization, or even exile, of rationalist, liberal Muslims from Arab Islamic studies programs. Now in Germany, by trying to place the government as an arbiter of intra-Muslim (and for that matter intra-any-faith) disputes, the German government risks limiting, rather than protecting, free intellectual exploration of faith at a time when the need for such free and open exploration within Islam is great.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Project on Islam and Civil Society. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Copyright 2008 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

In its recent report on the role of conscience in medicine, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists discussed whether or not physicians should be allowed to follow their consciences in refusing to perform morally contested procedures like abortion. Perhaps most controversially, the report suggested that in some cases physicians should be compelled to perform abortions. Why is this problematic?

The first thing one notices about the ACOG Committee report is that it is an exercise in moral philosophy. It proposes a definition of conscience, something that cannot be supplied by science or medicine. It then proposes to instruct its readers on “…the limits of conscientious refusals describing how claims of conscience should be weighed in the context of other values critical to the ethical provision of health care.”

Knowledge of these limits and values, as well as knowledge of what should count as the ethical provision of health care, are not and cannot possibly be the product of scientific inquiry for medicine as such. The recommendation offered by those responsible for the ACOG Committee report represents a philosophical and ethical opinion—their philosophical and ethical opinion.

The report goes on to, “outline options for public policy,” and propose, “recommendations that maximize accommodation of the individual’s religious and moral beliefs while avoiding imposition of these beliefs on others or interfering with the safe, timely, and financially feasible access to reproductive health care that all women deserve.”

Yet again notice that every concept in play in the committee’s report—the putative balancing, the judgment as to what constitutes an imposition of personal beliefs on others, the view of what constitutes health care or reproductive health care, the judgment about what is deserved—is philosophical, not scientific or, strictly speaking, medical. To the extent that they are “medical” judgments even loosely speaking, they reflect a concept of medicine informed, structured, and shaped by philosophical and ethical judgments.

Those responsible for the report purport to be speaking as physicians and medical professionals. The special authority the report is supposed to have derives from their standing and expertise as physicians and medical professionals, yet at every point that matters, the judgments offered reflect their philosophical, ethical, and political judgments, not any expertise they have by virtue of their training and experience in science and medicine.

At every key point in the report, their judgments are contestable and contested. Indeed they are contested by the very people on whose consciences they seek to impose—the people whom they would, if their report were adopted and made binding, force into line with their philosophical and ethical judgments or drive out of their fields of medical practice. And they are contested, of course, by many others. And in each of these contests a resolution one way or the other cannot be determined by scientific methods; rather the debate is philosophical, ethical, or political.

Lay aside for the moment the question of whose philosophical judgments are right and whose are wrong. My point so far is only that the report is laced with, and dependent upon at every turn, philosophical judgments. The report, in other words, in its driving assumptions, reasoning, and conclusions does not proceed from a basis of moral neutrality. It represents a partisan position among the family of possible positions debated or adopted by people of reason and goodwill in the medical profession and beyond. Indeed, for me, the partisanship of the report is its most striking feature.

Its greatest irony is the report’s concern for physicians’ allegedly imposing their beliefs on patients by, for example, declining to perform or refer for abortions—or at least declining to perform abortions or provide other services in emergency situations and certainly to refer for these procedures.

The truth is that the physician or the pharmacist who declines to dispense coerces no one. He or she, that physician or pharmacist, simply refuses to participate in the destruction of human life—the life of the child in utero.

By contrast, those responsible for the report and its recommendations evidently would use coercion to force physicians and pharmacists who have the temerity to dissent from their philosophical and ethical views either to get in line or go out of business.

If their advice were followed, if they had their way, their fields of medical practice would be cleansed of pro-life physicians whose convictions required them to refrain from performing or referring for abortions. The entire field would be composed of people who could be relied on either to agree with, or at a minimum go along with, the moral and political convictions of the report’s authors. So, in truth, who in this debate is guilty of intolerance? Who is favoring coercion? Who is imposing their values?

While I am on the pro-life side of the abortion question, one need not share my view to see that it is those responsible for this report who are the ones seeking to impose their views and values on others.

Whether an elective abortion or an in vitro procedure or what have you counts as health care as opposed to a decision about what one desires or what lifestyle choices one wishes to make cannot be established or resolved by the methods of science or by any morally or ethically neutral form of inquiry or reasoning. One’s view of the matter will reflect one’s moral and ethical convictions either way. So the report’s constant use of the language of “health” and “reproductive health” in describing or referring to the key issues giving rise to conflicts of conscience is at best—at best—question begging.

There is one final irony in all of this. In defending its proposal to compel physicians in the relevant fields to at least refer for procedures that physicians may believe are immoral, unjust, and even homicidal, the report said that such referrals “need not be conceptualized as a repudiation or compromise of one’s own values, but instead can be seen as an acknowledgement of both the widespread and thoughtful disagreement among physicians and society at large and the moral sincerity of others with whom one disagrees.”

So suddenly it’s the case that the underlying issues at stake, such as abortion, are matters of widespread and thoughtful disagreement, and I myself agree with that. And it becomes clear from the report that we should show respect for the moral sincerity of those with whom we disagree. But it seems to me that it follows from these counsels that thoughtful and sincere people need not agree that abortion, for example, is morally innocent or acceptable or that there is a “right” to abortion or that the provisions of abortion is part of good health care or is health care at all, at least in the case of elective abortions.

But then what could possibly justify the exercise of coercion to compel thoughtful, morally sincere physicians who believe that abortion is a homicidal injustice either to perform the procedure or make a referral for it, or else leave the practice of medicine? The report’s “my way or the highway” attitude is anything but an acknowledgement of the widespread and thoughtful disagreement among physicians and society at large and the moral sincerity of those with whom one disagrees. Indeed, it is a repudiation of it.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He serves on the President’s Council on Bioethics and on UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). George is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey and sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2008 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Many Syrians are acutely aware of the tensions that exist in their country. Talk to a Damascene merchant for ten minutes and the conversation invariably veers to a favorite subject: Syria’s tarnished image abroad. “When the West looks at Syria, they see terrorism and Islam,” says Khalid, a grocer. “But you come here and you see how Syria is different. The people are not terrorists. We are open.”

If there’s one place in Damascus that bucks the stereotype of a culturally monolithic Middle East, it’s Bab Touma, the ancient Christian quarter where Saint Paul himself once preached. Nationally, Christians constitute around ten percent of the population. They are disappearing in many Middle Eastern countries in the face of mounting persecution, but not in Syria—a point many residents of Bab Touma are eager to make. “I am Syrian,” says Marie, a Christian shopkeeper, “My neighbor is Muslim, my family is Christian, but we are all Syrians.” The feeling of inclusion among religious minorities is often attributed to Syria’s ruling family, the Assads. They belong to the Alawi sect of Shi’a Islam, which for centuries existed on the margins of this majority-Sunni society. With an Alawi-led secular government, Syria is among the most hospitable places in the region for minority groups.

Those expecting an Arab Pyongyang will be deeply disappointed when they arrive in Damascus, a city as cosmopolitan as it is diverse. For millennia, it has been a crossroads of intellectual and commercial exchange with the West. Its bazaars still brim with goods from around the world; it boasts a fine opera house and lively music scene, and its streets hum with conversation in Arabic, English, French, and Farsi. Wander around certain neighborhoods of Damascus late at night, and you’ll see restaurants packed with people casually smoking water pipes and children playing in the streets. As Layla, a former journalist, remarks, “In some ways Damascus has always felt like a part of Europe to me; we live in a Mediterranean world that’s closer to Rome than to Saudi Arabia or Egypt.”

Though the capital bucks the all-too pervasive image of Syria as a closed, autocratic society, the country defies easy categorization. For its many bright spots, Damascus is still a place encumbered by restriction and silence.

In the streets, it’s hard to avoid the image of President Bashar al-Assad. It hangs prominently in shop windows, on billboards, and in family homes. Yet frank discussion of politics in Syria is highly circumscribed. Part of the problem is Syria’s security force, the Mukhabarat, whose plainclothes officers far outnumber their uniformed counterparts. On a walk through Bab Touma Square, a Syrian friend points discreetly toward two men husking corn into a large wicker bowl. “Police,” he says, “They’re watching everything.” Thanks to the Mukhabarat, anyone who squawks too loudly in public about President Assad or Israel may find himself under surveillance or abducted into custody. But their influence is also more subtle: The perception of an omnipresent “Big Brother” creates a culture of self-censorship in Syria that, in a sense, polices itself.

Whatever restrictions they encounter on the streets, Syrians are eager to talk politics in private—especially the American presidential election. Like most countries in the Middle East, Syria polled “deep blue” in the period leading up to the election. The Iraq war is hugely unpopular, and Sen. Obama was enthusiastically greeted as a change-agent. President Assad even issued a note of congratulations to the president-elect, expressing “hope that dialogue would prevail to overcome the difficulties that have hindered real progress toward peace, stability and prosperity in the Middle East.” John McCain had his fans as well—if for less principled reasons. As Hassan, a young Arabic-language instructor told me before the election, “Obama will end the war; without war in the Middle East, Americans and Europeans lose interest in the language, and I lose my customers!”

Despite the “Axis” label America has given their nation, many Syrians have great admiration for America. The huge line for visas at the door of the American embassy and the wildly popular Oprah Winfrey Show reveal a society open and at ease with Western culture. The only foreign power that arouses truly unequivocal complaints is Israel. The state-controlled media is filled with reports slamming Israel for aggression and human rights abuses. It’s an adversarial relationship that colors the views of even the most apolitical Syrians.

Take Iman, a 23-year old education student at the University of Damascus. A Sunday school teacher at her local Catholic church and an ardent devotee of Queen Latifah, she embodies the refreshing blend of old and new ascendant in modern Syria. Yet when Israel comes up in conversation, she stiffens. She speaks passionately about Israeli attacks on Palestinian women and children, and the widespread deprivations in the West Bank. When discussion veers toward Israel’s nemesis, Hassan Nasrallah, the fiery head of Hezbollah (considered a terrorist group by the U.S.), her mood lightens. “His words are like poetry,” she gushes, “he speaks only the truth, truth to power. He is a freedom fighter.” Her support for Hezbollah is typical here; the group’s yellow flag is easy to spot throughout Damascus. It’s been flying ever since the 2006 summer war with Israel, which was widely seen as a victory for Hezbollah, and by extension, its main allies, Syria and Iran.

For all the chatter about Israel, Syria’s media is quiet about another thorny issue: human rights. Human Rights Watch reports that Syrian jails confine hundreds and possibly thousands of political prisoners, ranging from pro-democracy activists to members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Kangaroo courts try government critics for seditious behavior every year, and Syrians live under an indefinite state of “emergency rule,” instated when the Ba’ath party seized power in 1963.

In spite of this, the government commands huge support. (President Assad was reelected last year with 97 percent of the vote.) Even young people, typically sources of dissent, are not shy in their enthusiasm. Iman is again a case in point. When I asked her about Syria’s political problems, she didn’t seem to grasp what I meant. After explaining, she became visibly upset. “So many Westerners criticize our government for these things [censorship, human rights abuses, etc.]. We have freedom here, we can speak openly about our politics. The police make us safe.”

The response reminded me of how many Chinese reacted to the surge of human-rights coverage during August’s Olympics. In Syria, as in China, information about the government is tightly controlled. Thus, from Iman’s point of view, my questions were as irrelevant as they were misguided. After all, the Mukhabarat are mostly believed to protect rights, not restrict them. The Assad government is largely viewed as a source of stability, not a hegemony, and jailed activists generally seen as troublemakers, not peaceful dissenters.

It’s hard to say what creates these attitudes; some blend of misinformation, alternative conceptions of what makes for a healthy civil society, and a degree of ambivalence toward Syria’s underlying problems seems like a likely explanation. As a new administration in Washington begins engaging with old enemies, we should acknowledge that Syria—both culturally and intellectually—defies our perceptions about life inside the “Axis of Evil.” We must seek and promote the good that exists in Syria, but at the same time, soberly acknowledge that true openness and real freedom remain far off.

Christian C. Sahner is a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford studying Islamic history.

Copyright 2008 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

However, Obsession beats the threat drum so loudly that it drowns out the context surrounding the threat. The costly endeavor of distributing this film does not move us further away from the threat, because it is precisely outside the threat–in the broader realm of Islam which this film neglects–where the counter to the threat can be found.

Hamas and Hezbollah are real and we need to recognize this. But Islam itself is not a half-Hamas, half-Hezbollah monolith.

The film Obsession claims to be about the violent obsession of fanatic Muslims, but the film and support for the film suggest instead an obsession by some non-Muslims with the violent extremists within Islam. This is not the obsession we need, though it is almost all we have heard about Islam since September 11th, 2001. When facing a fire, incessantly crying “Fire! Fire! Fire!” will not make it stop burning. What we need is to reorient this obsession with the problem to focus instead on the solution.

In the broader context of Islam surrounding the minority fanatics, debates today are plentiful and multifaceted. These include Muslims arguing in favor of peace, prosperity, and pluralism. Indeed, some of the most deeply committed opponents of violent extremism in Islam are themselves Muslims. They are Muslims who worship God peacefully, Muslims who want their girls to attend school, Muslims who enjoy their friendships and professional collaboration with non-Muslims, Muslims who want to make a buck instead of a bomb.

A key element in effectively countering the threat we face is supporting Muslims who are the competitors to the fanatics who preach hatred and unleash violence worldwide. But in today’s world, there is scarce soil where such competition can take root and grow.

In many Muslim-majority areas of the world, the face of normalcy is hefty government censorship, education characterized by rote memorization at best or outright illiteracy at worst, and government meddling in clerical education. Add to this the Saudis’ vast, sustained Wahhabist proselytizing and satellite networks such as Hezbollah’s Al-Manar that promote hate and glorify suicide attacks. In such a context, little space remains for the alternative, internal voices which seek to be heard.

To counter the host of radical voices that fill the Muslim world, engagement of the private sector, including non-Muslims, is essential. (In case you haven’t noticed, the U.S. government has, to put it mildly, dropped the ball on this one. At present the U.S. government is structured to engage foreign governments, not foreign populations, and it has lacked the will power, commitment, and vision needed for vigorous, sustained, substantive engagement of Muslim populations. Given the magnitude and immediacy of the threat we face, holding our breaths waiting for dramatic change on this front would be dangerous.)

Private citizens who recognize the threat and who care about the freedoms we enjoy must take substantive, solution-oriented action. Foster critical thinking, provide positive role models, show what attractive alternatives to violent extremism would look like in day-to-day life–and do this in a culturally astute manner. Back local groups which seek to offer training in their regions about constitutions and protection of religious freedom. Support progressive Muslim novelists and filmmakers censored by their own governments. Develop mechanisms to help local populations circumvent censorship. Insist that the U.S. State Department stop using taxpayer dollars to coddle authoritarian regimes that are fiercely pro-censorship. Invest in private-sector broadcasting channels to provide television, radio, and internet platforms for Muslims casting visions for the future of peaceful pluralism.

Here are ten specific ideas for ways Americans and others–Muslims and non-Muslims together–can support efforts to counter the threat posed to us all by the obsession with violent extremism which has taken root in some Muslim populations.

1. Invest the millions that could go to make more Obsession-like films and their distribution instead in production of high-quality, culturally relevant media programming for children in regions at risk of violent extremism.

2. Declare 2009 “The Year of the Saudi Novel.” Translate Saudi novels into English, French, and other languages so others can hear these Saudi voices calling for reform and welcoming creative arts. Make these rich plots accessible to major filmmakers. And not least of all, make these novels–banned in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries–available in Arabic to Arabs. Next time you’re en route to the Middle East, buy one in London (a key publishing hub for progressive Arab books) and bring it with you–then leave it behind.

3. Host screenings of films by Muslims challenging and undermining violent extremism, for example the Tunisian film Making Of, the Algerian film Bab el-Oued, the Yemeni film Losing Bet. Clamor for films which are difficult to obtain, such as Youssef Chahine’s Destiny, to be available from Netflix and other film distribution outlets. (In Destiny, Muslims who value critical thinking and cooperate with non-Muslims in intellectual endeavors battle extremists claiming to represent Islam, but really only seeking political power, who manipulate youth into becoming religious fanatics.)

4. Start an NGO dedicated to building an audio library of substantive, constructive, and entertaining writings by Muslims. Purchase copyrights for these works and make the audio library available online, passed along via radio, distributed on CDs, etc.

5. Support translations of fiction and non-fiction, including religious texts.

6. Serialize fictional stories in text and audio so they can be shared via mobile phone.

7. Support filmmakers casting a vision for a hopeful future.

8. Build partnerships between professional artistic organizations in the US and in Muslim-majority countries to support artists. Partner writers with writers. Partner filmmakers with filmmakers. Partner puppeteers with puppeteers. Partner actors with actors.

9. Fund prizes to reward and draw attention to the highest quality, most substantive works in fiction, film, non-fiction, theater, cartoons, and many other media forms.

10. Develop internship programs to support aspiring creative Muslim minds otherwise squelched by rote memorization and government censorship. Start by enabling internships for funny Saudis–which, by the way, is not necessarily an oxymoron–at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Jon, Stephen, how ’bout it? Just imagine uncensored Saudi Daily Show and Colbert Report style programs broadcast freely in Saudi Arabia . . . someday.

At the end of the film Obsession, after nearly an hour of video of Hezbollah rallies and the like, there is mention that moderate Muslims actually do exist, and there is encouragement to support them. O.K., good. But then instead of funding distribution of the Obsession DVD, let’s fund the genuine competition to the obsession.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Project on Islam and Civil Society. She is a contributor to Public Discourse.

Before I begin, I need to say what a friend of mine calls my ”Litany to the IRS.” Here it is. I’m not here to tell you how to vote. I don’t want to do that, I won’t do that, and I don’t use code language – so you don’t need to spend any time looking for secret political endorsements.

I plan to speak candidly, but I can only do that if you remember that I’m here as an author and private citizen. I’m not speaking for the Holy See, or the American bishops, or any other bishop, or even officially for the Archdiocese of Denver. So the things I say are my personal views, nothing more. I think they’re pretty solidly grounded in Catholic teaching and the heart of the Church, but it’s your task as Catholics and citizens to listen, evaluate and then act as you judge best.

As adults, each of us needs to form a strong Catholic conscience. Then we need to follow that conscience when we vote. And then we need to take responsibility for the consequences of the vote we cast. Nobody can do that for us. That’s why really knowing and living our Catholic faith is so important. It’s the only reliable guide we have for acting in the public square as disciples of Jesus Christ.

Render Unto Caesar

So let’s talk for a few minutes about my recent book Render Unto Caesar. When people ask me about the book, the questions usually fall into three categories. Why did I write it? What does the book say? And what does the book mean for each of us as individual Catholics?

Why did I write this book, now? One answer is simple. A friend asked me to do it. Back in 2004, a young attorney I know ran for public office as a prolife Democrat. He nearly won in a heavily Republican district. But he also discovered how hard it can be to raise money, run a campaign and stay true to your Catholic convictions, all at the same time. After the election he asked me to put my thoughts about faith and politics into a form that other young Catholics could use who were thinking about a political vocation – and it really is a ”vocation.”

That’s where the idea started. But I also had another reason for doing the book. Frankly, I just got tired of hearing outsiders and insiders tell Catholics to keep quiet about our religious and moral views in the big public debates that involve all of us as a society. That’s a kind of bullying, and I don’t think Catholics should accept it.

Another reason for writing the book is that when I looked around for a single source that explains the Catholic political vocation in an easy, authentic and engaging way, it just didn’t exist. So I thought I might as well try to write it, because a friend told me it would ”practically write itself.”

So what does the book say? I think the message of Render Unto Caesar can be condensed into a few basic points.

Here’s the first point. For many years, studies have shown that Americans have a very poor sense of history, and that’s very dangerous, because as Thucydides and Machiavelli and Thomas Jefferson have all said, history matters. It matters because the past shapes the present, and the present shapes the future. If American Catholics don’t know history, and especially their own history as Catholics, then somebody else – and usually somebody not very friendly – will create their history for them.

Here’s the second point. America is not a secular state. As historian Paul Johnson once said, America was ”born Protestant.” It has uniquely and deeply religious roots. Obviously it has no established Church, and it has non-sectarian public institutions. It also has plenty of room for both believers and non-believers. But the United States was never intended to be a ‘’secular” country in the radical modern sense. Nearly all the Founders were either Christian or at least religion-friendly. And all of our public institutions and all of our ideas about the human person are based in a religiously shaped vocabulary. So if we cut God out of our public life, we cut the foundation out from under our national ideals.

Here’s the third point. We need to be very forceful in defending what the words in our political vocabulary really mean. Words are important because they shape our thinking, and our thinking drives our actions. When we subvert the meaning of words like ”the common good” or ”conscience” or ”community” or ”family,” we undermine the language that sustains our thinking about the law. Dishonest language leads to dishonest debate and bad laws.

Here’s an example. We need to remember that tolerance is not a Christian virtue, and it’s never an end in itself. In fact, tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of evil. Likewise, democratic pluralism does not mean that Catholics should be quiet in public about serious moral issues because of some misguided sense of good manners. A healthy democracy requires vigorous moral debate to survive. Real pluralism demands that people of strong beliefs will advance their convictions in the public square – peacefully, legally and respectfully, but energetically and without embarrassment. Anything less is bad citizenship and a form of theft from the public conversation.

Here’s the fourth point. When Jesus tells the Pharisees and Herodians in the Gospel of Matthew (22:21) to ”render unto the Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,” he sets the framework for how we should think about religion and the state even today. Caesar does have rights. We owe civil authority our respect and appropriate obedience. But that obedience is limited by what belongs to God. Caesar is not God. Only God is God, and the state is subordinate and accountable to God for its treatment of human persons, all of whom were created by God. Our job as believers is to figure out what things belong to Caesar, and what things belong to God – and then to put those things in right order in our own lives, and in our relations with others.

So having said all this, what does the book mean, in practice, for each of us as individual Catholics? It means that we each have a duty to study and grow in our faith, guided by the teaching of the Church. It also means that we have a duty to be politically engaged. Why? Because politics is the exercise of power, and the use of power always has moral content and human consequences.

As Christians, we can’t claim to love God and then ignore the needs of our neighbors. Loving God is like loving a spouse. A husband may tell his wife that he loves her, and of course that’s very beautiful. But she’ll still want to see the evidence in his actions. Likewise if we claim to be ”Catholic,” we need to prove it by our behavior. And serving other people by working for justice and charity in our nation’s political life is one of the very important ways we do that.

The ‘’separation of Church and state” does not mean – and it can never mean – separating our Catholic faith from our public witness, our political choices and our political actions. That kind of separation would require Christians to deny who we are; to repudiate Jesus when he commands us to be ”leaven in the world” and to ”make disciples of all nations.” That kind of separation steals the moral content of a society. It’s the equivalent of telling a married man that he can’t act married in public. Of course, he can certainly do that, but he won’t stay married for long.

Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question about Barack Obama

I began work on Render Unto Caesar in July 2006. I made the final changes to the text in November 2007. That’s a long time before anyone was nominated for president, and it was Doubleday, not I, that set the book’s release date for August 2008. So – unlike Prof. Douglas Kmiec’s recent book, Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question about Barack Obama, which argues a Catholic case for Senator Obama – I wrote Render Unto Caesar with no interest in supporting or attacking any candidate or any political party.

The goal of Render Unto Caesar was simply to describe what an authentic Catholic approach to political life looks like, and then to encourage Americans Catholics to live it.

Prof. Kmiec has a strong record of service to the Church and the nation in his past. He served in the Reagan administration, and he supported Mitt Romney’s campaign for president before switching in a very public way to Barack Obama earlier this year. In his own book he quotes from Render Unto Caesar at some length. In fact, he suggests that his reasoning and mine are ”not far distant on the moral inquiry necessary in the election of 2008.” Unfortunately, he either misunderstands or misuses my words, and he couldn’t be more mistaken.

I believe that Senator Obama, whatever his other talents, is the most committed ”abortion-rights” presidential candidate of either major party since the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in 1973. Despite what Prof. Kmiec suggests, the party platform Senator Obama runs on this year is not only aggressively ”pro-choice;” it has also removed any suggestion that killing an unborn child might be a regrettable thing. On the question of homicide against the unborn child – and let’s remember that the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer explicitly called abortion ”murder” – the Democratic platform that emerged from Denver in August 2008 is clearly anti-life.

Prof. Kmiec argues that there are defensible motives to support Senator Obama. Speaking for myself, I do not know any proportionate reason that could outweigh more than 40 million unborn children killed by abortion and the many millions of women deeply wounded by the loss and regret abortion creates.

To suggest – as some Catholics do – that Senator Obama is this year’s ”real” prolife candidate requires a peculiar kind of self-hypnosis, or moral confusion, or worse. To portray the 2008 Democratic Party presidential ticket as the preferred ”prolife” option is to subvert what the word ”prolife” means. Anyone interested in Senator Obama’s record on abortion and related issues should simply read Prof. Robert P. George’s Public Discourse essay from earlier this week, ”Obama’s Abortion Extremism,” and his follow-up article, ”Obama and Infanticide.” They say everything that needs to be said.

Of course, these are simply my personal views as an author and private citizen. But I’m grateful to Prof. Kmiec for quoting me in his book and giving me the reason to speak so clearly about our differences. I think his activism for Senator Obama, and the work of Democratic-friendly groups like Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, have done a disservice to the Church, confused the natural priorities of Catholic social teaching, undermined the progress prolifers have made, and provided an excuse for some Catholics to abandon the abortion issue instead of fighting within their parties and at the ballot box to protect the unborn.

And here’s the irony. None of the Catholic arguments advanced in favor of Senator Obama are new. They’ve been around, in one form or another, for more than 25 years. All of them seek to ”get beyond” abortion, or economically reduce the number of abortions, or create a better society where abortion won’t be necessary. All of them involve a misuse of the seamless garment imagery in Catholic social teaching. And all of them, in practice, seek to contextualize, demote and then counterbalance the evil of abortion with other important but less foundational social issues.

This is a great sadness. As Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George said recently, too many Americans have ”no recognition of the fact that children continue to be killed [by abortion], and we live therefore, in a country drenched in blood. This can’t be something you start playing off pragmatically against other issues.”

Meanwhile, the basic human rights violation at the heart of abortion – the intentional destruction of an innocent, developing human life – is wordsmithed away as a terrible crime that just can’t be fixed by the law. I don’t believe that. I think that argument is a fraud. And I don’t think any serious believer can accept that argument without damaging his or her credibility. We still have more than a million abortions a year, and we can’t blame them all on Republican social policies. After all, it was a Democratic president, not a Republican, who vetoed the partial birth abortion ban – twice.

The truth is that for some Catholics, the abortion issue has never been a comfortable cause. It’s embarrassing. It’s not the kind of social justice they like to talk about. It interferes with their natural political alliances. And because the homicides involved in abortion are ”little murders” – the kind of private, legally protected murders that kill conveniently unseen lives – it’s easy to look the other way.

The one genuinely new quality to Catholic arguments for Senator Obama is their packaging. Just as the abortion lobby fostered ”Catholics for a Free Choice” to challenge Catholic teaching on abortion more than two decades ago, so supporters of Senator Obama have done something similar in seeking to neutralize the witness of bishops and the pro-life movement by offering a ”Catholic” alternative to the Church’s priority on sanctity of life issues. I think it’s an intelligent strategy. I also think it’s wrong and often dishonest.

It’s curious that nobody seems to worry about the ‘’separation of Church and state,” or religious interference in the public square, when the religious voices that speak up support a certain kind of candidate. In his book, Prof. Kmiec complains about the agenda and influence of what he terms RFPs – Republican Faith Partisans. But he also seems to pay them the highest kind of compliment: imitation. If RFPs are bad, is it unreasonable to assume that DFPs – Democratic Faith Partisans – are equally dangerous?

As I suggest throughout Render Unto Caesar, it’s important for Catholics to be people of faith who pursue politics to achieve justice; not people of politics who use and misuse faith to achieve power. I have no doubt that Prof. Kmiec belongs to the former group. But I believe his arguments finally serve the latter.

For 35 years I’ve watched thousands of good Catholic laypeople, clergy and religious struggle to recover some form of legal protection for the unborn child. The abortion lobby has fought every compromise and every legal restriction on abortion, every step of the way. Apparently they believe in their convictions more than some of us Catholics believe in ours. And I think that’s an indictment of an entire generation of American Catholic leadership.

The abortion conflict has never simply been about repealing Roe v. Wade. And the many pro-lifers I know live a much deeper kind of discipleship than ‘’single issue” politics. But they do understand that the cornerstone of Catholic social teaching is protecting human life from conception to natural death. They do understand that every other human right depends on the right to life. They did not and do not and will not give up – and they won’t be lied to.

So I think that people who claim that the abortion struggle is ”lost” as a matter of law, or that supporting an outspoken defender of legal abortion is somehow ”prolife,” are not just wrong; they’re betraying the witness of every person who continues the work of defending the unborn child. And I hope they know how to explain that, because someday they’ll be required to.

Before I conclude and we go to questions, let me say just a couple of things about ENDOW. Betsy Considine, Marilyn Coors, Terry Polakovic and the other women who founded ENDOW are extraordinary leaders. The success of ENDOW is a testimony not just to their enthusiasm and hard work, but to yours. ENDOW succeeds because its message for women is true.

These are difficult times for our country. Even within our Church, the economy, the Iraq War, the life issues in general, and this election in particular, have created a deep spirit of conflict and anxiety. But I do believe Scripture when it tells us not to be afraid. God uses each of us to renew the world if we let him. The genius of women is their capacity to love; to blend talent, intelligence and energy with patience, understanding, respect for the sacredness of life and compassion for others.

That’s the kind of leadership we need, in our communities of faith, in our public service and throughout our country. Whatever happens next month and in the years ahead, ENDOW will have a hand in sustaining and refreshing the heart of the Church. That’s not a bad achievement for an organization so young. I’m proud of your witness, proud of what you’ve accomplished and very, very grateful for your service to the Church. God bless you.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the author of Render Unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life (Doubleday, 2008). The views expressed here are his own, and do not represent those of the Archdiocese of Denver.

Copyright 2008 The Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.