Religion is a Major Force in U.S. Foreign Policy
By Andrew Wellner
Allen Hertzke
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One of the most overlooked forces behind major U.S. policy initiatives is the intense lobbying efforts by Evangelical Protestants to push for what has traditionally been a liberal concern - human rights.
According to Allen Hertzke, professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, Evangelical Protestants have provided the grassroots muscle behind the adoption of three major pieces of foreign policy legislation and are intimately involved in the movement to push through a fourth.
These acts are The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, and the Sudan Peace Act of 2002. A fourth act, the North Korean Human Rights Act, passed the House of Representatives this summer and is awaiting passage by the Senate.
“I believe I have stumbled onto the most significant human rights movement of our times, a faith-based quest devoted to advancing human rights, through the machinery of American foreign policy,” Hertzke said.
Though evangelicals provide most of the muscle, the movement has also attracted support from liberal Jews, Tibetan Buddhists, Catholics, B’hais and the Congressional Black Caucus, Hertzke said.
“People who in the press are normally viewed as enemies in the culture war, and who battle over abortion, prayer, homosexuality, and so forth, were walking comfortably with an almost ‘we’ feeling like ‘we’ve got to win this battle,’ together,” Hertzke said.
The news media has largely ignored the movement, in large part because, “there remains a widespread bias, especially in the elite press, which colors the coverage of the evangelical world.”
This bias leads journalists to ignore most developments in the Protestant human rights movement and when coverage is given, Hertzke said, it “was often patronizing in ways unimaginable with other constituencies.”
This new interest in human rights among evangelicals springs from two causes, Hertzke said. The first is the globalization of the Christian church. In 1900, most Christians lived in Europe and North America.
“Today, 65-70 percent of the world’s Christians live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and among evangelicals the percentages are probably higher,” Hertzke said.
Many of these Christians live under regimes whose human rights records are appalling, and when evangelicals in the United States hear about the “suffering church abroad,” they seek means to help.
The second factor that has caused evangelicals to get involved in global human rights campaigns has been that “animated by distress over the drift of American culture, evangelicals are building movable networks of alternative schools, colleges, national associations, publishing houses [and] direct mail organizations,” Hertzke said. This network is the backbone of the grassroots lobbying force that pushed legislation through Congress.
The work of evangelicals through these three pieces of legislation, has led to the elevation of religious freedom to a “first freedom,” to a worldwide crackdown on the sex slave trade and elsewhere, to increasing scrutiny of Sudan’s oppressive Khartoum regime and, if the North Korean Human Rights Act passes, to pressure on one of the world’s most notorious violators of human rights.
“This new faith-based movement is filling a void in human rights advocacy raising issues previously slighted or insufficiently pressed by secular press and the foreign policy establishment,” he said.
Thomas W. Simons, Jr., director of the Program on Eurasia in Transition at Harvard University, and former ambassador to Pakistan, spoke on a much different aspect of foreign policy - the opinion of the United States in the Muslim world.
While the events of September 11 and its aftermath have led many to characterize the entire Muslim world as strongly anti-American, Simon said this view is far too simplistic.
“For Muslims, it has been hard historically to define the West as simply anti-Islamic,” Simons said. The West historically has had such a varied and diverse relationship with the Muslim world that it is hard to define it as the only enemy of Islam. Simons argued that this is still the case.
“I think it’s fair to say that during the de-colonization period, up until around 1970, Muslim attitudes toward the United States remained very nuanced and complex,” Simons said.
In the 1970s, the collapse, through corruption and Egypt’s defeat in the Six Days War of 1967, of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Republican nationalism that had heretofore been the dominant ideology created an ideological vacuum.
This led to the rise of the new ideology, “a strand of Islamic discourse that had been there from the beginning, all the way from the 7th century,” Simons said. “This was the impulse to restore the purity and unity of… the original community of Muslim believers around the prophet and the first four righteous caliphs by destroying the corrupt governments of actual Muslims.”
This new ideology quickly spurred the sitting governments into action and precipitated 20 years of bloody, brutal civil war in the Islamic world. Although Americans may see this as a time when Muslim attitudes towards the West were unrelentingly hostile, the era of hostages in Iran and the massacre of Israeli athletes, Simons points out that this really was a battle among Muslims, “bloodier by far than the plots directed against the United States and Israel.”
Soon, the revolutionaries were either co-opted into the system or dropped entirely out of politics. This continued into the ‘90s, as the radicals of the new ideology “were increasingly marginalized within Islamic society. Osama bin Laden is the perfect example of this, driven out of, denationalized and driven out of Saudi Arabia, driven to Sudan, driven out of Sudan, back to Afghanistan,” Simons said. Terrorism in the 90s was actually in the decline as a political weapon.
Even after 9-11, Simons argued, the Muslim world was not unified in any dislike of America. “Muslims were appalled by 9-11. Islamic radicalism for most Muslims is discredited by it. Even radicals started asking themselves if this is the way to go ... because the retribution in Afghanistan has been so severe. The Afghanistan war is understood, not loved and not supported but acquiesced in by most Muslims,” Simons said.
Iraq may be a different story, “The botched aftermath of the Iraq military victory last spring has gone on so long that it has given time and political space for a rebirth of the radicalism, the Islamic radicalism that had been losing traction for over a decade,” Simons said. “Recruitment is no doubt up ... recruitment for fighting organizations is up, and some of them are going into Iraq.”
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