Category: Student Events

July 2, 2021: Evangelicals and US Foreign Policy by Dikshita Venkatesh

Faith and religious beliefs have been extremely influential in guiding political decisions and foreign policy considerations. Since the late 1900s, US foreign policy in the Middle East has been deeply rooted in Evangelical ideals. To understand the extent of influence, it is important to delve into who evangelicals are and how they are different from mainline protestants.

The term evangelical takes its roots from the Greek word euangelion which refers to the ‘good news’ or ‘gospel’. This ‘good news’ or ‘gospel’ deals with the idea of Jesus Christ being the savior of humanity.[i] Thus, a person or an organization that believes and furthers this ‘gospel’ is an evangelical.

Further clarity on this community was provided by David Bebbington in 1989, through his Bebbington Quadrilateral[ii], which defined evangelicals based on their beliefs. According to the Quadrilateral, there are four beliefs that are central to evangelicalism:

• Biblicism: Obedience to the Bible and believing that it is inerrant in terms of how it portrays the nature of God and the world.
• Crucicentrism: The belief that following Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation of humanity.
• Conversionism: The belief that redemption can only occur by converting to Christianity or following Jesus Christ.
• Activism: The belief that one’s faith or the ‘gospel’ should reflect in one’s public life through social reform efforts.

This Quadrilateral has been useful in distinguishing evangelicals from mainline Protestants. Mainline Protestants have a more modern and adaptable faith.[iii] First, they don’t see the Bible as an inerrant word of God, rather as a document that contains various important truths which are subject to interpretation. Second, while they agree with the fact that Christ is the way to salvation, they are more tolerant to the idea that there may be other ways to redemption— based on one’s faith and religious practices. This belief further portrays that they do not consider conversion to Christianity to be very important. Lastly, they believe in furthering their faith, and not the ‘gospel’ per se.

Based on these beliefs, there are three areas of foreign policy that are of most importance to evangelicals— Israel, humanitarian assistance and religious freedom— out of which, Israel was identified as the most significant concerns for evangelicals.

This is because evangelicals consider Israel as a significant part of the Christian messianic tradition. That is, they consider the return of Jews to Palestine “as the first step in the advancement of the messianic timetable” or Christ’s second coming.[iv] Furthermore, they believe that the US has a “special role and mission in God’s plans for humanity: that of a modern Cyrus, to help restore Jews to Zion.”[v] Thus, a combination of both these beliefs forms the bedrock of evangelical support to Israel and contextualizes the long-standing relationship between the US and Israel. Over the course of this relationship, Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid.[vi] It has received more funds than “Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan combined, more than the counter-insurgency efforts in Vietnam and more than all of Europe under the Marshall Plan.”[vii]

Furthermore, Israel has enjoyed sustained prioritization in American foreign policy, irrespective of the administration in power.[viii] For instance, during the 2012 Presidential Election Campaigns, Mitt Romney made it a point to visit Israel between his trips to the UK and Poland, instead of visiting rising powers like India and China. Subsequently, John Kerry—as the US Secretary of State—chose to focus on rekindling talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, when there were other pressing matters such civil war in Syria, the war in Afghanistan, the rise of China, to name a few.

Lastly, humanitarian assistance and efforts to initiate religious freedom form part of ‘activism’, discussed above. However, these activities are being used to further evangelical domestic goals such as abortion. For instance, the Global Gag Rule prevents foreign NGOs, receiving US aid, from discussing abortions with constituents.[ix]

Thus, the domestic and geopolitical aims of evangelicals has been impacting US foreign policy considerations in a very conspicuous manner.

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[i] Green, John. “Evangelicals – Evangelicals V. Mainline Protestants | The Jesus Factor | FRONTLINE.” PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jesus/evangelicals/evmain.html.

[ii] “What Is an Evangelical?” National Association of Evangelicals. Accessed July 30, 2021. https://www.nae.net/what-is-an-evangelical/.

[iii] Green, John. “Evangelicals – Evangelicals V. Mainline Protestants | The Jesus Factor | FRONTLINE.” PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jesus/evangelicals/evmain.html.

[iv] Ariel, Yaakov. “Messianic Hopes and Middle East Politics: The Influence of Millennial Faith on American Middle East Policies.” VOL. IX – N°1 | 2011 Religion and Politics in the English-speaking World: Historical and Contemporary Links. https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/4165?lang=en.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Hubbard, Kaia. “3 Charts That Illustrate Where U.S. Foreign Aid Goes.” U.S. News. March 24, 2021. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2021-05-24/afghanistan-israel-largest-recipients-of-us-foreign-aid.

[vii] Miller, Paul D. “Evangelicals, Israel and US Foreign Policy.” Survival 56, no. 1 (2014): 7-26. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00396338.2014.882149.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Redden, Molly. “‘Global Gag Rule’ Reinstated by Trump, Curbing NGO Abortion Services Abroad.” The Guardian. January 23, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/23/trump-abortion-gag-rule-international-ngo-funding.

June 4, 2021: The Rise of Hindu Nationalism, Islamophobia and Foreign Policy by Max Mellott

US-India relations have been on a steady upward trajectory for the last several decades, accelerating over the last five years in the face of a rising China. A curious episode during Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s December 2019 visit to Washington, however, reveals some of the ways that the BJP’s commitment to the project of Hindu nationalism constrain its foreign policy. Jaishankar refused to meet with Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), citing her support for a resolution calling on India to respect freedom of expression in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir and her history of statements calling for India to improve the state of human rights and religious freedom in the country.

The refusal to meet Jayapal, a key member of the majority party and one of the few Indian-American members of Congress had real consequences. House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Elliot Engel (D-NY) cancelled the committee’s meeting with Jaishankar, and it resulted in a flurry of news reports and op-eds drawing attention to India’s human rights short-comings and question the trajectory of the US-India relationship. While Jaishankar is generally considered a pragmatic, technocratic member of the Modi government, his very public stand defending the BJP government’s moves to crush dissent in Muslim-majority Kashmir reflects the centrality of Islamophobia or the ‘othering’ of Islam to the BJP’s theory of national unity and governance, which cannot be cast aside to meet its foreign policy goals.

Since the birth of a nationalist independence movement, figuring out what defines and unites Indians has been an often surprisingly difficult question to answer. Historian Ramachandra Guha identified five main axes of conflict in post-independence India: caste, language, religion, class and gender, and any ideology that seeks to govern across India needs to find a way to bridge, or at least manage, these divisions. For Hindu nationalists, looking to build a single pan-Indian Hindu identity to manage these conflicts and hold political power, Islamophobia has been central to their rise to national political power.

Othering Islam became so central because the creation of a single, unifying, Hindu identity was not something that was as obvious as it might seem and was a potentially alienating concept even for presumptive members of the Hindu nation, never mind Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, followers of Adivasi religions, or indeed, Muslims. Among Hindus, for the hundreds of millions of low-caste or casteless people, a Hindu nation threatened to reinforce their subjugation, reversing decades of economic and political gains. For women, a Hindu nation similarly threatened to reverse growing legal, economic, and political power. Across linguistic lines, the close association of orthodox Hinduism with the Sanskrit literary cannon and modern spoken Hindi similarly threatened the status of languages like Tamil or Telugu. Furthermore, these separate axes of identity (caste, language) themselves proved to be powerful mobilizers of political support. As a result, Hindu nationalism spent decades after independence as a relatively marginalized, if internally well organized, political force.

Islamophobia, along with Hindu-themed mass media and the collapse of the Congress party’s organization, was one of the key ingredients for Hindu nationalism’s rise from the margins to the center of national power. The key event marking Hindu nationalism’s arrival as a national political force was the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, an incident of mob violence inspired, incited, and very likely directed by the institutions of the Sangh Parivar, the incarnation of institutional Hindu nationalism. The Hindu nationalist narrative emphasized Hindu suffering at the hands of foreign Muslim invaders for eight hundred years from the Ghaznavids to the Mughals, represented by the Babri Masjid, and promised that India could be returned to a supposed pre-Islamic Hindu golden age, represented by the temple to Ram to be erected in its place.

The engineered mob violence at Ayodhya presaged a rise to power for the Hindu nationalists that has consistently returned to rhetorical, legal and at times physical assaults on Muslims and other religious minorities and their membership in the Indian national community. These assaults have ranged from accusations of spreading coronavirus or using marriage to force Hindus to convert in a ‘love jihad,’ to threats to deport Muslim migrants and the revocation of the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, to deadly proliferation of ‘cow protection’ vigilantism and periodic episodes of mass violence, such as the 2001 Gujarat riots or the 2020 Delhi riots. Even as some leaders of the BJP have emphasized a message of economic development over social tensions, Islamophobia and assaults on minorities have rarely been more then a wink and a nod away, ready to be trotted out whenever it seems to be politically advantageous, such as during the recent state elections in West Bengal and Assam.

For the BJP’s foreign policy, these domestic necessities have important implications. India’s relationship with its Western partners, who have institutional and legal commitments to religious freedom such as the US’s International Religious Freedom Act, are likely to be consistently troubled by periodic episodes of concern and disagreement. These episodes could be quite serious. In areas like technology development and regulation that are of primary strategic importance, concerns over the way that technology is deployed to suppress dissent or target minorities might limit the depth of cooperation. When India needs to request political favors through national legislatures, it may find that it has burned precious political capital.

Even if these episodes are unlikely to derail their broader strategic alignment, they do limit the depth of possible policy cooperation, particularly in areas less directly touched by geo-strategic concerns, like education, migration, or even economic and development policy. It also means that India is unlikely to fully come around to the Western way of thinking on human rights, pitting India’s government against large swaths of Western civil society. In the context of competition with China, where airing concerns over human rights, and in particular China’s treatment of its own Muslim minority groups has become a key flashpoint, it is not clear that India and its partners in the Quadrilateral security dialogue or in Europe can see eye-to-eye.

India also has key relationships with Muslim majority-countries to worry about. For example, India enjoys strong economic and security relationships with the Persian Gulf states, based on the flow of Indian migrant workers to the Gulf and energy resources and remittances back to India. India has also collaborated closely on issues ranging from space exploration to joint military exercises. Like with the West, the logic of these economic and strategic relationships might overwhelm any concerns over religious freedom, a flurry of criticism and public outrage over the riots in Delhi targeting Muslims in the Gulf points to the limits that the BJP’s othering of Muslims places on the depth of India’s relationships to the Gulf.

Still, Islamophobia and the targeting of minority rights are not always a loser abroad. Some relationships, like India’s close defense and trade relationship with Israel, are unlikely to be significantly shaken by concerns around Islamophobia and might even be deepened as a Hindu nationalist India makes common cause based on the supposed security threat posed by Muslims. In its immediate neighborhood in its relationship with Sri Lanka, long strained by tensions between the island’s Sinhala and Tamil populations and the Buddhist Sinhala chauvinism of Sri Lanka’s government, an attempt to limit the autonomy of Muslim minorities after the Easter Bombings of 2019 represents a rare moment of narrative convergence between the two states. In these cases, and potentially others, the deep-seated othering of Islam by Hindu nationalists might actually create common ground, rather then be a source of division.

Islamophobia has been at the center of the BJP’s rise to power and the Hindu nationalist project more generally. It has been one of the movement’s most important tools to attempt to overcome the obstacles of caste division, language status and even religious differences, by identifying Hinduism with a common narrative of subjugation at the hands of Muslims followed by the restoration of a ‘lost’ Hindu golden age. This narrative cannot be easily jettisoned, and it will continue to constrain India’s foreign relationships as long as Hindu nationalism is an ascendent political force. Only when other narratives and institutions are strengthened as ways to manage India’s internal conflict can it be overcome, a task that is likely to be slow and painstaking at best.

May 7, 2021: French Secularism by Jared Shackelford

What is religion’s role in the state? What is the state’s role in religion? French society has long fluctuated between extremes on both sides, with the state sometimes exerting strong influence on the religion that its citizens practiced and conversely demanding that they keep their beliefs entirely private and out of public life. As far back as the Middle Ages, French nobility competed with the Pope for influence over French Catholics, with King Philip IV going so far as to arrest and imprison Pope Boniface VIII after his attempts to exert further control over French state affairs. By 1789 and the French Revolution, Catholicism was still the official state religion of France, but with certain special privileges and increased autonomy for French clergy. The Church’s revenue in France was estimated to be up to 150 million livres, an immense sum. French clergy owned about six percent of French land, operated schools and hospitals, was entitled to collect the tithe (or one-tenth of agricultural production), and was exempt from direct taxation on its earnings.^[1] 

At the beginning of the French Revolution, the French monarchy was nearly bankrupt. King Louis XVI was forced to call the three estates of French society (nobility, clergy, and everyone else) in order to gain much needed funding. After the three French estates were called and began enacting sweeping reforms over nearly all aspects of French society, the clergy agreed to give up the tithe and allow the French government to control future funding. While the revolution was chiefly about reforming and then overthrowing the existing political order, many revolutionaries were also fighting against the excesses of the church.^[2] Eventually, the revolutionary National Assembly nationalized all church land in France. By July 1790, the new French government approved the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which redrew dioceses to match state political boundaries, created a new pay scale for the clergy and allowed citizens to elect their own priests and bishops. The government also decreed that all clergy must swear loyalty to the government or give up their salary and position. These measures were highly inflammatory and contributed to the outbreak of a huge rebellion in the Vendee region that ultimately resulted in over 240,000 deaths.

As the revolution continued and repression against French clergy became increasingly severe, the revolutionary government created their own religious equivalents for French citizens to follow. The Cult of Reason was an attempt to replace Christianity with a belief system centered on the personification of Reason, enlightenment ideals and the perfection of mankind through logic and freedom. Many French churches were redecorated with busts of famous enlightenment figures and were scenes of “festivals of reason”. Robespierre also created the Cult of the Supreme Being. Robespierre believed in the existence of a god, and further believed that the French needed some form of religion in their lives in order to be virtuous, good citizens. In practice however, the short lived Cult of the Supreme Being was little more than a personality cult for Robespierre himself, meant to cement his hold on power.^[3]

After Napoleon Bonaparte seized power and ended the Revolution, he negotiated a return of the Catholic Church to French society after agreeing to the Concordat of 1801 with Pope Pious VII. While it did not make Catholicism the official French state religion again, it declared that Catholicism was the “religion of the great majority of the French”. The Church gave up its claims to property that had been seized by the French government, acknowledged that the French state could nominate bishops, but gained the right to veto nominations. While Napoleon himself was not particularly religious, he recognized the utility of increased social cohesion gained from ending state attacks on the Catholic church.

In 1881 and 1882, Minister of Public Instruction Jules Ferry introduced laws that mandated public and free secular education under the French government. This was the beginning of modern French state secularism (or laïcité ) and the beginning of the end of the Catholic Church wielding significant power in France. Several years later, the Law of 1905 officially established the separation of the French government and any church. It abolished Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801 and ended the system of “recognized religions”.^[4] These two laws paved the way for the modern secularism practiced by the French government. In theory, the policy of “laïcité” allows the French state to wash its hands of religion completely. If the government does not favor or even acknowledge any religion, it can theoretically serve all of its citizens in a more equal and fair way.

However, there are some in France today who feel persecuted or excluded because of this policy. In 1989, three young Muslim girls were dismissed from school when they arrived to class wearing the hijab.^[5] While the majority of French citizens saw this as French Muslims’ refusal to fully integrate into French society, many Muslims felt that they were being excluded from French society due to religious differences.^[6] Many Muslims felt further ostracized after a 2010 law that banned the wearing of all facemasks in public places, which notably included the burqa and niqab. Another law, since overturned, banned the burkini, or the female full body bathing suit meant to promote modesty.^[7] There have been multiple attacks by Muslim terrorists in France in recent years. In 2015, gunmen killed 12 and wounded 11 more in an attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office after it printed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. A French teacher was beheaded in October 2020 after showing his class similar cartoons. French conservatives have also used laïcité to target Islam broadly and increase their own electoral success.^[8]

While both the United States and France embrace religious freedom, it comes from fundamentally different directions. Patrick Chamorel argued that the United States offers a freedom of religion, where a citizen is theoretically welcomed whatever their creed.^[9] American courts may interpret laws more flexibly when they have to do with matters of personal religious belief (perhaps the use of hallucinogens during Native American ceremonies).^[10] This is a sharp contrast to France, which has instituted measures that ensure a freedom from religion, where one is free to worship in the privacy of their own home but where that religion has no place in public or governmental affairs.^[11] Finding a balance between respecting religious minorities and maintaining France’s secularism and liberal values will almost certainly remain a divisive French political issue in the future.

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^[1] https://www.historytoday.com/archive/french-revolution-and-catholic-church

^[2]https://www.brookings.edu/research/muslims-and-the-secular-city-how-right-wing-populists-shape-the-french-debate-over-islam/

^[3] https://ageofrevolution.org/200-object/the-cult-of-the-supreme-being/

^[4]https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/coming-to-france/france-facts/secularism-and-religious-freedom-in-france-63815/article/secularism-and-religious-freedom-in-france

^[5] https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/islam-and-laicite/

^[6] Ibid

^[7]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/08/26/frances-top-administrative-court-overturns-burkini-ban/

^[8] Brookings, Muslims and the Secular

^[9] American Purpose

^[10] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/french-views-of-religious-freedom/

^[11] Ibid