BERKELEY, Calif. \u2014 The interfaith coalition that formed in the 1990s to lobby for religious liberty in China was so large and so diverse that even the New York Times noticed it.<\/p>\n\n
One petition included two Catholic cardinals and a dozen bishops, Evangelical broadcasters, Eastern Orthodox bishops, Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Baha\u2019is, Orthodox and liberal rabbis, Scientologists and Protestant clergy of a various and sundry races and traditions. One Times article noted that these were signatures that \u201crarely appear on the same page.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
But there\u2019s the rub. This was already old news.<\/p>\n\n
Many of these religious leaders had already been working for a year or more on what became the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, landmark legislation that made religious freedom a \u201ccore objective\u201d in all U.S. foreign policy, noted political scientist Allen Hertzke of the University of Oklahoma, speaking at a conference called \u201cThe Politics of Faith \u2014 Religion in America.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
This bill, he said, was the opening act in \u201cbroader, faith-based quest\u201d to weave moral content into the fabric of American policies around the world, while liberating religious liberty from its status as the \u201cforgotten stepchild of human rights.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
President Bill Clinton signed the International Religious Freedom Act on Oct. 27, 1998, and in the decade that followed this same interfaith coalition backed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, the Sudan Peace Act of 2002 and the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004.<\/p>\n\n
This coalition was \u201cmade up of groups that usually fought like cats and dogs on other issues, but would join together to work for religious freedom,\u201d said Hertzke, speaking at the University of California, Berkeley, long known as Ground Zero human rights activism. <\/p>\n\n
These leaders would work on religious-liberty issues over morning coffee and bagels, before returning to their offices where they usually found themselves in total opposition to one another on abortion, gay rights, public education and a host of other church-state issues. Nevertheless, their coordinated labors on foreign-policy projects \u201cproduced trust and relationships that had never existed before,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n
The question is whether this coalition\u2019s ties that bind can survive tensions created by the current White House race and renewed conflicts over religious and cultural issues in America.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThe kinds of energies generated in these kinds of social movements are hard to sustain,\u201d said Hertzke, after the conference. \u201cThere was always the concern that fighting over the familiar social issues would siphon away some of the energy that held this remarkable coalition together for a decade. \u2026<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThe fear is that if people feel really threatened on the issues here at home that matter to them the most \u2014 like abortion \u2014 then they will not be able to invest time and resources in these human-rights issues around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
One reason this interfaith coalition never received much credit for its successes, he said, is that journalists usually focused on the efforts of conservative Christians to oppose the rising global tide of persecution of other Christians. This media preoccupation with the \u201cChristian Right\u201d often warped news coverage of broad, interfaith projects to protect the rights of all religious minorities.<\/p>\n\n
In many cases, the results were inaccurate, biased and patronizing.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThus, abusive treatment of Christians abroad was labeled \u2018persecution\u2019 \u2014 in quotation marks.\u201d Expressing similar grammatical doubts, a \u201cgrassroots group was described as gathering to pray for \u2018what it calls\u2019 Christian martyrs,\u201d noted Hertzke, in his chapter in \u201cBlind Spot: When Journalists Don\u2019t Get Religon,\u201d a new book produced by my colleagues at the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life.<\/p>\n\n
In one New York Times article, he noted, Christian activists seeking the release of prisoners were described as writing letters to countries \u201cwhose names they cannot pronounce.\u201d Another article described efforts to end the civil war in Sudan as a \u201cpet cause of many religious conservatives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
This was a strange way to describe a movement that, at its best, combined the social-networking skills of evangelical megachurches with the pro-justice chutzpah of Jewish groups, the global reach of Catholic holy orders and the charisma of Buddhist activists in Hollywood.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cWhat we found out was that human rights are part of one package,\u201d said Hertzke. \u201cIf you pull out the pin of religious freedom, it\u2019s hard to support freedom of speech, freedom of association and other crucial human rights. \u2026 Religious freedom is a rich and strategic human right.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BERKELEY, Calif. \u2014 The interfaith coalition that formed in the 1990s to lobby for religious liberty in China was so large and so diverse that even the New York Times noticed it. One petition included two Catholic cardinals and a dozen bishops, Evangelical broadcasters, Eastern Orthodox bishops, Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Baha\u2019is, Orthodox and liberal rabbis, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[132,443,720,727],"class_list":["post-1514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blind-spot","tag-human-rights","tag-religion-news","tag-religious-freedom"],"yoast_head":"\n