The State Department’s 2017 International Religious Freedom Report was released yesterday. Issued under the direction of Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, with guidance from other senior officials in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), the report serves as a guide to the work yet to be done on this issue in many places around the world.

The places that one might expect to be covered in detail (North Korea, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, etc.) featured discussions of the major persecution taking place within their borders. Yet countries less well-known as religious persecution hot spots were featured too. For example, the report notes that in Burkina Faso, several individuals were killed and others threatened “if they did not start teaching the Quran in schools instead of the regular curricula,” and the discussion of the Comoros observes the strict enforcement and preference for Sunni Islam in law. Muslim/Christian interreligious conflict continues to simmer at a lower level in a number of sub-Saharan countries, in some worse than others. Discomfort and conflict persists within these communities when one is seen as having the upper hand in government or society. While the concerns in these countries are often relatively less serious, it is important to address them before they flare up into larger, more destabilizing situations. And regardless, all religious freedom violations, however small, deserve to be addressed as a matter of principle.

Human rights and humanitarian concerns drive much of the State Department’s reporting on international religious freedom that we see reflected in the 2017 report. Very often, in each country’s section of the report, there is a note stating that the U.S. embassy or its officials in that country hosted meetings or met with religious or government leaders to raise religious freedom concerns. While this attention is good and helpful, there is much more to the story of religious freedom. Not least in this story is the emerging proof of religious freedom’s benefit to security and economic prosperity — proof that is not being raised by our diplomats and foreign policy professionals, whether in Foggy Bottom or around the world.

As long as religious freedom is seen merely as a humanitarian issue, governments and leaders who see nothing in it for themselves will be reluctant to address it, and we will be resigned to continue the worldwide backsliding on religious freedom that has occurred in recent years. But when the United States seriously and systematically begins to show others around the world that religious freedom is in their interest — their security and economic interests — we can begin to make headway.

Raising religious freedom as a human right is the right thing to do. But we have only achieved so much with this approach. If we increasingly explain the many benefits of religious freedom to those who otherwise wouldn’t care about it, they may begin to see a real shift towards protecting it. Whatever else, doing what we can to protect religious freedom for the maximum number of people around the world is always the right thing to do.

Originally published here.

Chaplains: Bringing God to Our Troops and Legislators

Ninety percent of Americans say they believe in a higher power, with 56 percent stating their belief in the God of the Bible. In a nation where religious belief is this widespread, one would think that the chaplaincy of our government and military would not be controversial.

According to some, however, having chaplains minister to our lawmakers amounts to a violation of “church-state separation.” As FRC’s Travis Weber has pointed out in a recent op-ed, this assertion is an oft-repeated misreading of the Constitution, which contains no legal separation of faith from the public square:

In July 1950, during the Battle of Taejon early in the Korean War, enemy forces cut off and trapped a number of wounded U.S. troops who could no longer move across the difficult terrain. One Army chaplain, Herman Felhoelter, provided physical and spiritual care even as North Korean soldiers approached. After ordering the medic assisting him to flee, the chaplain continued to minister to the wounded up until the moment he was shot along with his men.

Felhoelter’s story is only one among many throughout the distinguished history of our military chaplaincy. For 247 years, the U.S. Army has provided for chaplains in order to facilitate the free exercise of religion by those serving in our armed forces — such as those who lay wounded and dying on the Korean Peninsula that day. Who knows what spiritual care and comfort they drew from Chaplain Felhoelter as they took what they likely knew were their last breaths?

Continue reading at the Sun-Sentinel’s website.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.