Defending the Faiths

Answering the Skeptics

NOT SURPRISINGLY, the stress on religious freedom in foreign policy has encountered detractors. These include not only devotees of realpolitik, but also some within the human rights community itself and within such liberal Protestant organizations as the National Council of Churches.

Some detractors emphasize the negative role of religion--its historic record as a major source of persecution. From the Spanish Inquisition in Europe to the Puritans of New England and the Taliban of Afghanistan, religious institutions, when enmeshed with coercive state power, have harshly oppressed dissenters. But acknowledging this fact does not mean that religious freedom should be less vigorously promoted than other human rights. Quite the contrary. Promoting it will further protect minority faiths from the abuses of state power. Moreover, the stereotype of "Christians as persecutors" rests mostly on a record prior to Western Christendom's contact with, and ongoing adaptation to, the Enlightenment.

Much criticism of the cause also seems to reflect a mistrust of its conservative supporters. William Martin, a scholar normally sensitive and fair to religion, has described the legislative campaign as part of a conservative religious agenda that includes predictions about the coming of the anti-Christ and a fundamentalist paranoia toward the European Union. [4] Then, too, human rights activists have dismissed the issue as "special pleading" on behalf of "certain classes of victims." New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis argued in 1997 that the proposed legislation creates a "hierarchy of human rights" in which religious freedom crowds out genocide, political repression and racial persecution. In a similar vein, the National Council of Churches complains that the policy will promote the cause of Christians to the exclusion of persecuted believers of other religions.

These dismissals are troubling. The centrality of religious freedom in the human rights tradition, along with its support from Jews, Catholics, evangelicals, Anglicans, Tibetan Buddhists and voices from a broad array of other faiths, refutes the charge that the issue is the narrow concern of a single lobby. Indeed, some fundamentalist Christian groups actually have eschewed involvement because the religious freedom legislation invokes UN and international covenants.

The charge of special pleading is particularly puzzling. Would the same critics have considered human rights campaigns on behalf of South African blacks, Soviet Jews, East European dissidents, the Argentine "disappeared", the eradication of female circumcision or the banning of land mines to be special pleading? As Jacob Heilbrunn commented in The New Republic, "This seems a remarkable attitude for a human rights activist, since, by definition, all arguments on behalf of all persecuted groups--racial minorities political minorities, ethnic minorities, etc.--are 'special pleadings' intended to help 'certain classes' of victims." Human rights campaigns on behalf of particular parties are the only kind of human rights campaigns there are. Concerns about special pleading certainly have not stopped Human Rights Watch, for example, from issuing special reports that advocate women's rights, children's rights, gay and lesbian rights, prisoners' rights, indigenous rights, journalists' rights and so on.