[On Thursday, January 30, the US Institute for Peace (USIP) and the International Center for Religion & Diplomacy (IRCD) hosted a conversation reflecting on the history and legacy of religious engagement in peace-building, moderated by Palwasha Kakar, Acting Director, USIP, Religion and Inclusive Societies Program. The following are our takeaways of high points of that program and is not intended as a verbatim transcript. The entire program may be seen here.]
Keynote Speaker, Douglas M. Johnston, Ph.D. (Founder and President Emeritus, International Center for Religion & Diplomacy). It is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of book Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, edited by Dr. Johnston. The bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union had suppressed many religious and ethnic antagonisms that continued under the surface. Dr. Johnston had seen people with spiritual motivations successfully alleviate conflicts, even end wars, with no one aware because it was done in secret. The book examined the possessive of role of spiritual/religious factors in a series of case studies of the role of spiritual factors in preventing and resolving conflict while advancing social change base on justice and reconciliation.
A Lutheran minister named Frank Buchman, head of “Moral Rearmament” saw that it would take a reconciliation between the French and the German people on a personal level to prevent yet another repetition of history. So he and some colleagues purchased a hotel on the edge of Lake Geneva and over a period of three years brought together thousands of French and German people–preachers, teachers, labor leaders, the movers and shakers of society. That’s when German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman met, became friends, and later jointly gave birth to Jean Monnet’s European Coal and Steel Community plan which later morphed into the European Community and, now, the European Union.
Where this approach works is where there is already an approximate alignment of economic and security factors, and a religious third party can bring a breakthrough at a higher level of trust. For example, Jimmy Carter wrote, “Each of the principles at Camp David recognized peace to be a both a gift from God and a preeminent human obligation. As the mediator of the talks, I am convinced that to have overlooked the importance of religion for both Sadat and Begin would have resulted in a failure to understand these two men. Such a failure could have had a pervasive and incalculable impact.”
Former Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Lee Hamilton has written, “Faith-based diplomacy speaks to the heart, mind, and spirit of the combatants, to those things that they hold most dear, not simply to the intellectual or material issues that dominate the practice of realpolitik. In so doing it provides a transcendent capability that under the right circumstances can resolve difference when all else has failed.”
For the benefit of audience members who may play a role in the Trump administration, Dr. Johnston quoted from Religion, Terror and Error: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Challenge of Spiritual Engagement in which Gen. Anthony Zinni wrote, “This a visionary approach that … expands the definition of smart power. From my two decades of experience in the Islamic world I am convinced that the vast majority of Muslims would embrace this approach as a means of clearly expressing their beliefs and enabling them to understand ours. The common elements of the three great Abrahamic religions have yet to be tapped as a means of reconnecting societies that have gone off-track in their relationship and which need means to reconnect that go beyond the security, economic, and political approaches that have failed to resolve the pressing issues that divide us.”
In 1999, five years after the book was published, we formed International Center for Religion & Diplomacy to incorporate religious considerations into the practice of U.S. foreign policy. Over time that has worked to good advantage. We would send interfaith teams to trouble spots in which at least one member of the team was of the religion of the people with whom we were interacting on the ground. Each situation is unique, but every one calls for empathy and for what we called “organic suasion,” trying to build peace from within. Pakistan best illustrates what these terms mean. They sought to reform the madrassas, including those that gave birth to the Taliban, to change the pedagogy to create critical thinking skills among the students and to expand the curriculum to include physical and social sciences and to emphasize religious freedom and human rights, especially women’s rights. In eight years they were involved they engaged 2,900 madrassa leaders and faculty from 1,600 madrassas and the indigenous NGO which succeeded them has brought those number sup to 28,000 leaders and 12,000 madrassas. Johnston attributes the success to three factors. First, the project was structured for the madrassas to take ownership of the effort, not as something from outside. Second, they were inspired by their own heritage, that in the middle ages the Islamic madrassas and universities were peerless institutions of learning that led to later Western academia. Finally, they responded to appeals to Islamic teachings, for example the Qur’anic assertion that God created people as different nations and tribes so they may compete with one another in good works.
At one workshop a Taliban commander invited Johnston to speak to the senior leadership of his group in a frontier mountain province. Facing Afghan Taliban commanders who had crossed the border and local religious leaders, Johnston said they had come to build on common beliefs. As the discussion became heated one commander rose and said to Johnston, “I cannot talk to you unless you become a Muslim.” Johnston replied, “to be a Muslim means to submit to God. We all submit to God so we are all Muslims.” Everyone laughed, and the discussion resumed. Months later Korea asked the center if there was anything they could do to free Korean missionaries who had been captured by the Taliban. Thanks to the connections from that earlier meeting the missionaries were freed.
Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is to do the hard work to understand why the other party sees things the way they do. In releasing hostages from the Taliban we found once we got past the veneer of hostility they became committed advocates for what we were trying to achieve.
David Little, Ph.D. (Professor Emeritus, Harvard Divinity School and Former Senior Scholar, Religion, Ethics, and Human Rights, USIP). The spirit of nationalism was often intertwined with religion and ethnicity and with potential violence. Peace and human rights are often linked in human rights documents. Nationalism was the consequence of the breakup of medieval systems. Religion seems to be an important part of the self-identification of people in the formation of nation states. Religious nationalism privileges particular groups. Often, but not always, ethno-religious biasing contributes to violent conflict. A contrasting form of nationalism is civic or liberal nationalism which incorporates human rights under the law including freedom of religion and thought. This was usually an ideal. Liberal democratic states rarely go to war with one another although they do go to war with nondemocratic states. Even where violence has moderated, the fundamentals in a number of areas like Iraq, Sudan, etc., remain. One outlier is Ukraine. The serious efforts of the political leadership were thwarted by an authoritarian ethno-religious outside actor, Russia. In all cases there were some actors who could see the connection between human rights and their own traditions. Israel, India, and Iran are examples of persistent problems, but we must not forget the United States as a case where the problem is arising.
Kirsten Evans (Former USAID Director of the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships under the first Trump Administration). I do not represent the current administration. I am proud of the work we did in the 45th administration. We had a renaissance on the engagement of religious actors around the globe. Strangely USAID was an area where this was less true despite the prominence of faith-based partners. The two conversations on international religious freedom and on religious engagement became polarized. In 2019 we sought to show how religious freedom and religious engagement can reinforce one another and are really a single conversation. We wanted to promote the conversion internally. Many feared that they would get into a dangerous territory relating to separation of church and state. Faith-based partners felt they were subject to higher scrutiny and were often overlooked. They were concerned they might be placed in a position of promoting policies at odds with their religious convictions.
Peter Mandaville, Ph.D. (Former USAID Director of the Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships under the Biden Administration). During his tenure at USAID they issued the first policy statement from any government agency on the importance of religious engagement. The majority of that policy was crafted under Kirsten Evan’s tenure. They then tried to turn the process into a technical discipline integrated with the agency’s other functions. America is uniquely placed to engage with religious actors. He would like to see us leverage the religious engagement policy more effectively,
Questions of religious engagement were more difficult at the State Department than at USAID. They only thought of religion in terms of religious freedom. Some progress was made on climate change for example. Three core challenges: the unnecessarily difficult relationship between the two conversations, challenges generated by the establishment clause, and the fact strategic rivals some considered as antithetical to religion are actually making geopolitical uses of religion that are complicating how we do this work.
Martine Miller (Interim President, ICRD). Recently a plethora of organizations have developed in this space. Often centers of conflict ripple across borders. Religious actors we don’t normally see as peace-builders sometimes step forward to respond. They will form interfaith counsels to deescalate violence or even escort people home. In Libya, traditional religious actors took on the role of seeking to have Libyan society see itself as a single society rather than one divided by regions. The biggest conflict was between traditional religious actors and young people. They solidified their role after a common space was created to bring them together. The role of women of faith has been significant.
Johnston. When another nation state poses problems our first impulse is to dehumanize them. We need to change this. Another aspect yet to be implemented is to appoint religious attaché to those countries in which religion is important. Religious leaders need to come together and develop a framework on which political leaders can build. Without religious freedom stability suffers.
Evans. Our biggest global adversaries in the world today, if not atheists, are religiously binary, theocratic, and authoritarian.
Johnston. An overriding national security threat is the marriage of religious extremism with weapons mass destruction. Engaging conservative members of those religious communities is the best approach for they are the ones to which the extremists will listen.
Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D.
Minaret of Freedom Institute
minaret.org
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