One of the premises of America’s foreign policy establishment, entrenched in the State Department for at least a generation, is that faith is the enemy of rational diplomacy. Under this assumption, religious belief must be tightly controlled or rendered irrelevant: It can play no constructive part in foreign policy objectives. The attacks of 9/11, of course, seemed to validate this view. Religious orthodoxy, of any variety, came to be seen as the source of xenophopia, extremism, and violence. So did the faith-based presidency of George W. Bush. In the overheated imaginations of his critics, Bush was a Christian “fanatic” whose crusading foreign policy threatened global peace and security.
A year and a half into his own presidency, Barack Obama has done little to challenge this secular narrative of American diplomacy. His gestures toward religion—the recent decision to fill a diplomatic post promoting religious freedom, for example—exhibit only the Obama penchant for style over substance. The rise of Islamist radicalism should have launched a transformation in strategic thinking about the role of faith in driving political and cultural change. It did not. The problem, as recent studies suggest, is that American foreign policy is impoverished by an “uncompromising Western secularism” which makes the danger of religious extremism more likely.
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