Saving Faith
Anna Su *
Abstract
This essay is a response to critiques of Exporting Freedom, which traces the American exportation of religious freedom in various laws and treaties enacted over the course of the
twentieth century. I show that the promotion of religious freedom went hand in hand
with the rise of the United States as a global power. The critiques raised specific questions about the distinctiveness of the American project and its underlying Christian
motivations as well as broader ones on methodological and theoretical issues. Among
other things, I argue that, despite its questionable origins, the promotion of religious
freedom need not be discarded.
***
It is a great privilege for any junior scholar to have his or her work evaluated by the foremost figures in a given academic field. I am exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to
have Exporting Freedom the object of such incisive scrutiny by Samuel Moyn, Saba
Mahmood and Peter Danchin, as well as a source of reflection that befits the importance
of the topic of global religious freedom. I appreciate their generous comments as well as
their careful engagement with the arguments of the book. It is an intimidating and yet a
highly rewarding task to rethink some of the themes of Exporting Freedom, to confront its
shortcomings, and be afforded an opportunity to clarify my positions.
The book began as an attempt to understand the ideological processes that led to
the American colonial occupation and eventual grant of independence to the Philippines
in 1946 against the backdrop of an American obsession with the possibility and the paradox
of a democratic Iraq in the aftermath of its invasion. It was rather uncanny to see debates
and arguments appearing in U.S. law journals and legal periodicals in the year 2008 echo
the same constitutional questions over the geographic reach and legal limits of American
power that came up in the aftermath of the U.S. victory over Spain in the Battle of Manila
Bay in 1898. A cursory examination of the major events of the twentieth century showed the
promotion of religious freedom, first as policy, and then later as law, by the U.S. government as a fine thread that ran continuously throughout the American century. It was that
initial hypothesis that drove me to explore the subject in a deeper historical investigation.
In its final form, Exporting Freedom is intended to be a more focused historical study
of American official motivations as well as the immediate sociocultural contexts of laws
governing religious freedom as they appeared in domestic constitutions of places once militarily occupied by the United States, the foundational documents of the international order,
as well as in a contemporary statute that incorporates religious freedom promotion in U.S.
*
Assistant Professor of Law, University of Toronto.
ISSN 2291-9732
Su — Saving Faith
207
foreign policy. The book argues that such promotion of religious freedom by law went hand
in hand with the ascent of the United States as a global power. Moreover, contrary to conventional understandings of religious liberty as a contemporary human right, it was not alalways promoted as such by the U.S. government. In this short essay, I confine my response
and reflection to three distinct themes that were raised in the reviews. First, I address
Moyn’s concern about the distinctiveness, or rather, the lack of it, of the American project.
Second, I look at the embedded twin paradoxes in the account that both Danchin and
Mahmood have raised, namely, the American tradition of religious liberty’s simultaneous
exceptionalist and universalist claims, as well as the link, perhaps inevitable, between religious freedom and different forms of subordination practiced by the United States at home
and likewise championed abroad. And finally, I reflect on the underlying Christian motivations of religious liberty promotion, a concern that still casts a shadow over its
contemporary incarnations not only in the United States but in Europe and Canada.
I. Beyond a Game of Thrones
Moyn raises a fair question on whether the American project in Exporting Freedom, to the
extent that I regard it as illustrative of (that much-maligned phrase) American exceptionalism,
was truly unique. His provocation rests on a characterization of the twentieth-century Pax
Americana as largely an “imperial handoff” from a British empire in decline.1 Religious liberty,
he claims, has always been part of British self-conception as well as its imperial toolkit.2
True, nothing exists in a vacuum, but as that oft-quoted saying goes, “no man ever
steps in the same river twice.” When British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote his infamous poem The White Man’s Burden to coax the United States to take its rightful place as an imperial
power, he was trading on the long-standing prominence of the British Empire in the American national imagination. Though not without tensions, general American enthusiasm for
the empire with the sun perpetually over its shoulders was forged along the lines of a common language, a shared racial history and self-conceptions of superiority and destiny. And
yet, Americans also prided themselves on being the “New World,” a “City upon a Hill,” and
a new nation that had cleansed itself of the afflictions found in Europe.
This dynamic of admiration and exceptionalism vis-à-vis Britain was duly reflected
in how Americans promoted global religious liberty first as a middling Western power and
then later on as a major international player. The United States, like European powers in
the nineteenth century, believed in the civilizing power of commerce, law, and Christianity.
American, British and French missionaries all saw the severely-weakened Ottoman Empire
of the mid-nineteenth century as a fertile field for evangelical work, with enduring results.3
U.S. diplomatic outposts likewise regularly entertained petitions for assistance from perse1
Samuel Moyn, America, Christianity, and Beyond, 3 CAL 195, 199 (2016).
2
Id.
See, e.g., Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conquest of the
Middle East (2009); Joseph Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East: Missionary Influence on
American Policy, 1810-1927 (1971).
3
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cuted religious minorities, frequently cooperating with other Western powers. For instance, in 1863, American consular officials in Tangiers, Morocco, supported the mission of
Sir Moses Montefiore, a prominent figure of British Jewry whose travels were backed by
the British government, to demand the liberty of imprisoned Jews who were falsely accused of the murder of a Spanish official and to extract guarantees of equality for
Moroccan Jews in general.4
But whereas the relationship between missionaries and their governments—
insofar as other empires, and certainly Britain, were concerned—fluctuated according to
an imperial calculus centered on trade, American missionaries were supported throughout,
if grudgingly at the outset, by their own government, as if their objective was as much
theirs as that of the government’s.5 Perhaps because of Britain’s entrenchment as an imperial power and the considerable magnitude of its mercantile interests, it had less leeway
for more ideologically-driven projects. Lord Palmerston was motivated by pragmatic concerns in extending British protection to Jews, particularly to counter French and Russian
influence.6 In Cairo, it was precisely the lack of support from British officials both in the
colony and the metropole that prompted Stanley Andrew Morrison of the Church Missionary Society to turn to the redemptive possibilities of international, rather than
imperial, protection for religious minorities.7
In contrast, American missionaries enjoyed an enviable clout in demanding, and
obtaining, protection from the U.S. government. In Qing China, another site of intense
diplomatic competition by various European empires, American missionaries were, for all
intents and purposes, the U.S. government. In the first Sino-American treaty, The Treaty
of Wanghia, signed in 1844 and essentially following the various unequal treaties signed
with other imperial powers, Caleb Cushing, the U.S. negotiator, included an affirmation of
the Qing opium ban and a formal agreement by the U.S. to hand over any offenders.8
Though mostly observed in its breach, it nonetheless highlighted the importance Americans placed on their self-conscious effort to distinguish themselves from the British. In
fact, initial English missionary disapproval of the opium trade in China ran against entrenched economic interests and the missionaries long suffered from a lack of financial
support from either British merchants or their government.
4 Mr. Seward to Mr. McMath, Dec. 9, 1863, in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States
410 (1864).
5 See Heather Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire 229
(2008); Jeremy Salt, Trouble Wherever They Went: American Missionaries in Anatolia and Ottoman Syria in
the Nineteenth Century, 92 Muslim World 287 (2002). That Woodrow Wilson did not declare war against
the Ottoman Empire during WWI was partly out of concern for the welfare and interests of the American
missionaries in the region.
6
Karine Walther, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921, at 106 (2015).
7 John Stuart, Empire, Mission, Ecumenism and Human Rights: “Religious Liberty” in Egypt, 1919-1956,
83 Church Hist. 110, 123 (2014).
8 Jedidiah Kroncke, The Futility of Law and Development: China and the Dangers of Exporting American
Law ch. 2 (2016).
Su — Saving Faith
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Moreover, in the Philippines, even as Secretary of War Elihu Root and General
Leonard Wood both turned to British books and advice when confronted with the reality
of annexation, in practice they subscribed to the exceptionalist claim that American empire was different. To be sure, the insistence on separation of church and state was
particularly directed against the outgoing Spanish colonial power, but the guarantee of
free exercise both in the Christian and Muslim parts of the country were part and parcel
of this exceptionalist line. In 1916, the U.S. Congress passed an autonomy law for the
Philippines and promised the withdrawal of U.S. sovereignty as soon as a stable government could be established therein.9 Even on the sole basis of rhetoric, no other empire
can claim to have extended such a promise.
From the constitutionalization of religious liberty during its brief conduct of formal
empire well into its promotion of religious liberty in the contemporary moment, the
American project was distinctive in its faith in the law as well as the thoroughgoing Christian impulse that animates U.S. internationalism. Though significantly less so today, G.K.
Chesterton’s description of the United States as a “nation with the soul of a church” rang
true for a large swath of American history with transformative consequences for the rest of
the world. That Protestant Christianity has significantly shaped and influenced American
social and political thought in a way that has remained a puzzle to Europeans can be seen in
how its leaders as well as its people engaged the global order.10 There is no doubt about the
many shared affinities between the American and British empires,11 but note that when it
came to the Covenant of the League of Nations as well as the United Nations Charter, it
was the Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson who pushed for a religious freedom provision
amidst British and French protests, and similarly in the case of the Charter, it was only because of FDR’s insistence that a reference to human rights was included.
Exporting Freedom focuses on a minute but important subset of the subject matter
covered in Andrew Preston’s magisterial book on religion in U.S. foreign relations.12 I focus on religious freedom, not religion writ large, and only insofar as it has been enshrined
in a law, a treaty or some other type of legal document. This choice, which focuses on
government and statecraft, explains why missionaries or Christian nongovernmental
groups are largely absent from the story except to the extent that they were instrumental
during the drafting histories of these laws and treaties. It also explains, if partially, the lack
of interpretive commentary on the changing nature of American Christianity if we consider that religious freedom promotion is a Christian-animated project rather than an overtly
Christian one. However, one can infer from the eventual retreat of the missionary figure,
which has loomed so prominently in American public space in the early part of this century,
the shifting terrain of its religious landscape. Indeed, that would have been a worthy subject
9
39 Stat. 545, c. 416 (1916).
10
Thomas Albert Howard, God and the Atlantic: America, Europe and the Religious Divide (2011).
Paul Kramer, Empires, Exceptions and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule Between the British and United
States Empires, 1880-1910, 88 J. Am. Hist. 1315 (2002).
11
12
Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (2012).
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of reflection especially during the 1970s when religious freedom advocacy in the United
States, instead of being led by missionaries, became the province of various ethnoreligious
groups looking out for their coreligionists overseas.
II. The Two Faces of Freedom
“Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization—one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?,” Mark Twain wrote in a famous biting critique of
imperialism in 1901.13 The same question could be asked of religious liberty using the history depicted in Exporting Freedom. As both Mahmood and Danchin posit in their essays,
the history of religious liberty promotion by the U.S. government is suffused with paradoxes. The first is the exceptionalist claim of religious liberty as a uniquely American
freedom alongside a conception of religious liberty as a universal right and thus valid for
all nations. And second, such practices of promoting or exporting religious freedom
abroad appear ineluctably tied to practices of subordination at home and abroad. Both
these scholars have argued that religious liberty is afflicted with antinomies.14 I agree with
them. To illustrate, I need not go beyond Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy to show that
his concern for international religious freedom sat comfortably alongside a belief in a
global racial hierarchy. A world made safe for democracy comes with a color line. Even in
the context of domestic U.S. constitutional history, it has also been argued—and quite
plausibly in my view—that the actions of the federal government against the Mormons in
the nineteenth century provided an intelligible legal and rhetorical frame that later served
as the constitutional foundation of the American turn to formal empire.15 In this way,
subordination at home extended to subordination abroad.
Perhaps it is nonetheless disappointing that the book does not grapple with the theoretical implications of these observations, but one can only ask a book to do so much. That is
a risk of interdisciplinary work. My aims in putting together a particular synthetic account of
religious liberty in law throughout U.S. foreign relations history are to historicize that principle, to offer my own interpretation of intersecting U.S. diplomatic, religious and constitutional
histories, and to explore how this interpretation fits with other histories of international law.
For instance, it is clear throughout the book that, as Aziz Rana elegantly argues in his own
work,16 promotion and practice of liberties especially in the American context come with a
corresponding subordination or control of others whether at home or abroad. Exporting Freedom sets out, in the traditional mode of historical scholarship, not to present a historically
informed theoretical account but, among other things, to provide material that can hopefully
become a sounding board for other scholars to engage in critical reflections.
13
Mark Twain, To the Person Sitting in Darkness, 172 N. Am. Rev. 166, 167 (1901).
14 Saba Mahmood & Peter G. Danchin, Immunity or Regulation? Antinomies of Religious Freedom, 113
So. Atl. Q. 129 (2014).
Nathan B. Oman, Natural Law and the Rhetoric of Empire: Reynolds v. United States, Polygamy, and
Imperialism, 88 Wash. U.L. Rev. 661 (2011).
15
16
Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010).
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III. To Be Secular and Christian
Religious liberty seems to be under siege on many fronts these days. On the one hand, it
is unfortunately not an exaggeration to say that global religious freedom and religious diversity are in precipitous decline in many places, most clearly in the Middle East but
certainly not limited to that region alone. On the other hand, this is also a crucial moment
in the critical study of religious freedom. Recent contributions by prominent scholars
have taken turns in knocking down religious liberty from its lofty position as one of the
crowning achievements in human history since the Enlightenment. What this means is
that, at a time when there are clarion calls for religious freedom in the face of persecution
and religion-fueled violence, there appears to be a burgeoning academic literature questioning that very turn.
A rough sketch of the main arguments in this literature is warranted. Generally, it
questions the purported universality as well as neutrality of religious freedom as well as
the supposed neutrality of the secular state (insofar as religious freedom is part of its
toolkit) toward religions in its midst. It follows the path laid down by Talal Asad in advancing the view that secularism internalizes the Protestant worldview in subscribing to a
belief-conduct distinction and consequently privileging belief insofar as religious liberty
protection is concerned.17 Both Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Saba Mahmood have analogized current international religious freedom promotion efforts particularly by the U.S.
government to the civilizing missions of the past.18 Finally and most importantly, religious
liberty is likewise characterized as a technology of governance in the constant refashioning
of religion as an object of state regulation.19 Contrary to the conventional view that religious freedom is the answer to the problem of religious strife, it is instead another
problem to be explained.
As Moyn notes, none of those who subscribe to any or all of these arguments
would find the account in Exporting Freedom surprising.20 The book can be read productively in tandem with or can even be considered as part of this literature. And indeed, I
wrote the book not only to document but partly to cast a critical eye on the numerous
ways by which the principle of religious liberty has served American geopolitical interests
and to hold U.S. power to account accordingly. To choose a more recent example, consider how the great, if misplaced, emphasis on restoring religious liberty in occupied Iraq
as if that would vindicate the disastrous plunge into war matched only the hubristic belief
that the country’s democratization would reverberate throughout the region. If the misElizabeth Shakman Hurd, Believing in Religious Freedom, in Politics of Religious Freedom 45, 45-46
(Winnifred Fallers Sullivan et al. eds., 2015); see generally Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline
and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993).
17
Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age (2015); Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, International
“Religious Freedom” Agenda Will Only Embolden ISIS, Religious Dispatches, Nov. 10, 2014
(http://religiondispatches.org/international-religious-freedom-agenda-will-only-embolden-isis/).
18
19
Mahmood, supra note 18.
20
Moyn, supra note 1, at 203.
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take we want to correct is that religious liberty is conventionally viewed as a single, stable,
neutral and universal principle that exists outside particular histories, then the book can be
counted on as one of the many available academic antidotes.
But Moyn also makes an astute observation that the book is not intended to be a
criticism of the Christian and secular West nor is it intended to disentangle secularism
from its Christian baggage. He is right. To the extent that historicizing religious liberty by
looking at the circumstances surrounding its various incarnations in these laws and constitutions is already a form of critique, the book is nonetheless written from the perspective
of a believer in religious freedom and the emancipatory promise that it contains. My perspective and aspiration is certainly informed by my background—raised in a Catholicmajority postcolonial society that had been a laboratory of various imperial powers in the
past with lasting effects not necessarily for the better—but this does not necessarily make
the book a project of Christian (only) self-criticism.21 Whether one subscribes to Spinoza
or Locke should not matter; secular and religious reasons can, separately or together, justify a commitment to the protection of religious freedom as a matter of law.
Still, there is a strong and valid argument for the proposition that a legally enforceable right to religious freedom is impossible (and therefore should be abandoned)
because the law, both domestic and international, will always fall short in capturing the
complexity of all possible aspects of a religion, and in many cases, will recognize one to
the detriment of others.22 It is also a valid point to claim that religions do best when government is not part of the picture. After all, the idea that the state should avoid corrupting
religion is one of the main strands behind the American domestic constitutional tradition
of religious liberty.23 Nonetheless, we live in a world structured by law and oriented
around the nation-state. As with other supposedly inalienable human rights, the right to
religious freedom is most often violated by or vindicated through the medium of state
law. Given these constraints, freedom of religion should be understood as a way of recognizing various dimensions of human life on the specific and bounded terrain of law.24
Is promoting religious freedom then code for spreading Christianity? Not quite.
As Michael Kimmage wrote in his review of Preston’s book, “the American sword of
faith is unlike Constantine’s sword.”25 Historically, it is true that promotion of religious
freedom went hand in hand with the spread of Protestant Christianity. That was certainly
the case in the nineteenth century at the height of all the civilizing missions in various
parts of the non-Western world, and when Islam, Catholicism and Shinto—to name reli21
Id. at 204.
22
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005).
23
Andrew Koppelman, Defending American Religious Neutrality (2013).
24 Heiner Bielefeldt, Privileging the “Homo Religiosus”? Towards a Clear Conceptualization of Freedom of Religion
or Belief, in The Changing Nature of Religious Rights Under International Law 9 (Malcolm Evans et al. eds., 2015).
25 Michael Kimmage, With (and Without) God on Our Side, New Republic, Apr. 29, 2012
(https://newrepublic.com/article/102382/sword-spirit-shield-faith-andrew-preston).
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gions featured in the book—were deemed to be backward because they did not foster
voluntarism in belief in the same way that Protestantism did. But religious freedom is analytically distinct from Protestant Christianity; it presupposed a space that could be,
theoretically at least, filled by any religion. It is worth noting that in the Philippines, Japan
and Iraq, American Protestant missionary work—both mainline and evangelical—did not
yield an enormous number of converts. And the idiosyncratic views of General Douglas
MacArthur, who even entertained the fantasy of converting Emperor Hirohito to Christianity, were not shared by the rest of the American occupation officials in Japan. There is
no question that religious freedom is a legacy of the Enlightenment, and its Christian origins continue to haunt its contemporary promotion. But I suspect that the present
discomfort or even disdain has less to do with the principle’s Christian origins and more
with the perceived (correctly or not) Christian agenda of its most vocal supporters.26 After
all, it was mostly groups and individuals concerned with Christian persecution in the Middle
East and Africa who lobbied for the passage of the 1998 International Religious Freedom
Act by the U.S. Congress. Is the complaint then that it is being used solely to advance sectarian agendas, or that religion in general is being treated as a special category, or both?
In many ways, the book is premised on an attempt to take religion seriously. Religion and religious freedom figured prominently in U.S. foreign relations not only because
it was useful but because it was genuinely, and independently, important for the American
people and certainly, many of its leaders. Religion is no different from other human rights
that are being promoted by the U.S. government. Even granting that the promotion of
religious freedom is often a mask for, or pursued alongside, other more worldly motives—
and there are plenty of examples since the nineteenth century—that does not mean there
is no religious in religious freedom, and yes, I include unbelief as a category worth protecting. If the realist criticism is that religion is usually a smokescreen or proxy for other
values or interests and that privileging it in law or governance ends up excluding others or
oversimplifying the complex roots and causes of a conflict, the same can go the other
way. Treating religion as a mere epiphenomenon can do as much harm or damage as the
other extreme of singularly focusing on religion. A low-hanging fruit here is ISIS. Of
course, there are many factors and explanations behind its rise but to say that Islam has
nothing to do with it would be a grave error. To be sure, there are many pathologies involved when it comes to state involvement with religion, but it is naïve to think that
governments should not or do not have any interest in religion or religious freedom, as
they have been doing just that since the Thirty Years’ War.
The takeaway that I hope Exporting Freedom would convey is not for its supporters
to abandon promotion of religious freedom as an international human right but to consider this history in a way that would enable its advocates as well as those on the ground
who fight on the terrain generated by these existing laws and policies to be more vigilant
regarding its underlying assumptions and critical about its conduct.
26
See, e.g., Christopher McCrudden, Transnational Culture Wars, 13 Int’l J. Const. L. 434 (2015).