'Protecting Religious Freedom Is a Foreign-Policy Priority of the Trump Administration'
How—and when—will the White House carry out its verbal commitment to protect persecuted minorities overseas
EMMA GREEN
MAY 12, 2017
Vice President Pence stood before a packed ballroom in downtown D.C. on Thursday, looking out on an audience of Orthodox priests, evangelicals, Catholics, and other Christians from all over the world. Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham and head of the international charity Samaritan’s Purse, had convened a world summit on the persecution of Christians. Attendee name-tags hinted at the gruesome details of their lives: Persecuted individuals in the room wore badges that read “PP.” Pence bowed his head with Graham in prayer, and made a promise: “Protecting religious freedom is a foreign-policy priority of the Trump administration.”
Although the White House has made a strong verbal commitment to addressing violence against religious minorities overseas, it is not yet clear how this will play out in the realm of diplomacy. On Thursday, Pence focused on the role of the military in addressing global religious-freedom issues. He emphasized the need to defeat “radical Islamic terrorists,” and specifically ISIS, to protect those who have faced beheadings and other violence in the Middle East. America “will not rest, we will not relent,” Pence declared, “until we hunt down and destroy ISIS at its source.”
The community of policy experts who work on international religious-freedom issues, and particularly those who advocate for persecuted Christians, have been waiting for a message like this for a long time. Behind the scenes, many have been pushing for religious-liberty issues to become a higher priority at the State Department. In the quiet December days after the election, Congress passed a little-noticed law, the Frank R. Wolf Act, to shift the way the State Department handles religion. The law allows government watchdogs to call out people and groups, not just countries, that threaten religious freedom. Most importantly, it underscores that global religious freedom is not just a human-rights issue. The law argues that it’s a core part of U.S. national security.
The administration has echoed this argument, particularly with Pence’s Reagan-esque speech on Thursday. The administration is “reaffirming America’s role as a beacon of hope and life and liberty,” he said, declaring that “America was and is and ever will be a shining city on a hill.” The vice president’s speech was almost like a sermon, observed Johnnie Moore, a former Liberty University vice president who works on religious-freedom issues. It was strong on “evangelical nuance,” Moore said, filled with biblical references; over and over, Pence expressed solidarity with “followers of Christ.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/religious-freedom-trump-administration/526320/
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