The Complexity of Compassion: A Review of Knox Thames’s Ending Persecution

As the world has grown more interconnected, we now have more immediate access to information about the horrors of human rights abuses around the world. A generation ago, most Americans would not know anything about Rohingya Muslims in Burma or the Uyghurs of China, but today we cannot claim ignorance of the state-sponsored genocide that targets these minority groups. This is true of dozens of instances of religious persecution around the world that are, unfortunately, present on every continent. 

As these abuses have grown more visible, American efforts on behalf of the persecuted have expanded due in no small part to people like Knox Thames, who often go unrecognized and unappreciated. Thames’s recent book, Ending Persecution: Charting the Path to Global Religious Freedom, is a thought-provoking and enlightening read for anyone interested in international religious freedom and the failures and triumphs of America’s contribution to it.

Knox Thames’s government career spanned three presidential administrations and included stints at the State Department and two foreign policy commissions. Since leaving government service, he has served the cause in the nonprofit sector at think tanks and now at Pepperdine University. He has played a vital role in this field and his book combines his personal experiences as an activist and diplomat with his analysis of international policy on the subject.

Ending Persecution begins with a survey of the “Big Problem,” as Thames describes it, of religious persecution around the world, and an overview of the way it is addressed through the mechanisms of the United Nations. The following eight chapters are thematically grouped into couplets that pair unique approaches to ending persecution with the agents responsible for it. Authoritarians, like the regime in Burma, are best checked by policies of deterrence. Democracies that lack legal protections for religious minorities are apt to adopt laws and policies that protect majorities at the expense of minorities. (This is sometimes the case in India.) Thames argues that determined international networks and public diplomacy provide the most effective means of influencing these nations.

The last two broad categories receive the most visibility in the West. Persecution that is traceable to religious extremism, like that often observed in the Muslim world, calls for education that fosters tolerance. And finally, some of the most egregious examples of persecution arise from those committed to terrorism like ISIS and Boko Haram, groups nearly impervious to rational or even self-interested appeals. The book concludes with a chapter that introduces some broad recommendations for the future and a hopeful epilogue.

Speaking as an advocate for religious freedom everywhere, I am not sure that it is possible to praise Knox Thames’s personal and professional contributions to the field enough. He has been a tireless advocate for the persecuted and a voice of conscience inside the US government. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the firsthand accounts of how the first Religious Freedom Ministerial in Washington materialized in 2019, or the sidebar conversations with diplomats representing intolerant regimes in New York and Geneva. I sympathize with his first experience with vodka with the president of Uzbekistan, because my first experience with it was as the guest of a man brutally beaten by Hungarian communists who poured the best in the house in my honor while I was still contractually obligated to be a teetotaling Southern Baptist.

The world is a complex place and Thames appreciates that. Religious persecution, when it is found in the United States or other places in the West, is categorically different from persecution in other parts of the world in societies dominated by non-Christians. Considering this, his approach of systematizing persecution is very helpful. It is no surprise that the book has been well received by so many. It has garnered well-merited praise from friends and organizations that I would consider heroic in their commitment to this important work. I certainly do not find any basis to dissent from that praise.

But Ending Persecution does provoke serious reflection on some fundamental aspects of this work as Americans specifically, and Westerners more broadly, engage in it.

First, while there is some excellent work on the Islamic and other religious bases of liberty, I am not sympathetic to arguments that the rise of individual freedom in societies shaped by a Judeo-Christian morality is coincidental. It is remarkable that we would enshrine in law not only tolerance but the affirmative right of our neighbors to hold fastidiously to wrong answers about the most fundamental questions of life. Furthermore, the American version of religious freedom does so with great optimism that we will find common ground to work together even while ordering our individual lives around mutually exclusive claims of truth. This is an incredible innovation in human history, and it is probably unrealistic to believe that American-style pluralism can emerge in other places even if they are “Christianized” parts of the world.

One example of this can be found in the book’s discussion of blasphemy laws. Thames describes religious conversion as a “victimless ‘crime’” resulting in “the broader community somehow feel[ing] vaguely harmed.” Well, it is only a vague and unidentifiable harm when one presupposes religious diversity. No matter how irrational it may appear with 400 years of hindsight, The Thirty Years’ War was waged among Christians because religious conversions threatened political power and social stability. To be clear, I am not a proponent of blasphemy laws that constrain conversion, but the fear and uncertainty that members of a once-homogeneous society feel at the cusp of entering a now-plural society is real and natural. We have little hope of addressing the issue without first sympathetically acknowledging the human factors driving these laws.

Additionally, how blasphemy laws are defined in the field seems to be uniquely American. The reports that Thames cites from the US Commission on International Religious Freedom seem to assume that religious establishment is prima facie oppressive. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks believed that the establishment of the Church of England provided advantages to minority faiths in that the fight for a seat at the table for religious groups had already been fought and won. Granted, it may be that religious “establishment” in places like Iran is what troubles the commissioners more than a Church of England on life support. Other laws of concern are those relating to speech. The conceptual relationship between free speech and free exercise may be intuitive on some level, but also quite American in terms of legal principle.

Second, it is far too easy at times to place confidence in the tools at the disposal of the United Nations and other international and supranational organizations. The Potomac Declaration, which emerged from the 2019 Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, was accompanied by the Potomac Plan of Action to make sure that it was more than “a list of aspirations.” No matter how well-meaning, the following conversation is still plausible:

UN Representative: I’m sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Stop persecuting religious minorities or else.

World Leader: Or else what?

UN Representative: Or else we will be very angry with you and we will write you a letter telling you how angry we are.

World Leader: Oh, okay.

I am not pointing to this radically simplified hypothetical conversation to belittle what international diplomacy can accomplish and has accomplished. But I do want to highlight that complex problems demand complex solutions. This is one problem among many that hyperspecialization has exacerbated. There are limited tools in the UN toolbox and most of them are easily neutralized by dissenting nations or blocs of nations. Or by foreign aid that is entirely independent of the UN.

I am not dismissing the work of men and women like Knox Thames. On the contrary, given that nations must engage nations, and the UN and other similar organizations provide the venue, I am affirming just how hard and thankless that work must be at times. But I do think that the efforts of these tireless civil servants are made harder by some natural constraints that accompany situations that involve government actors. A nation as large as the United States can rarely speak with a unified moral voice, and the fact that governments cannot be singularly focused on individual issues or priorities is, as Thames reports, frustrating.

Since religion is so inextricably intertwined with other aspects of culture, effective solutions will only come from highly integrative, innovative, and interdisciplinary approaches. Unfortunately, national and supranational governments tend to hamper such approaches. Their grants come with such staggering red tape that grantees must be experts in paperwork rather than in solutions. This can crowd out smaller organizations even if their solutions are more effective.

There is no doubt that religious persecution is a pressing issue in our time and the world needs to engage it on every front. Ending Persecution is a thoughtful and interesting look into a specific way of engaging it. Hopefully, the book will spark many conversations that culminate in creative approaches to solving the “pandemic of persecution” that so many religiously faithful around the world currently endure.

Image by Elena Dijour and licensed via Adobe Stock.