Contemporary Authors

• Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2016

1. Exporting freedom : religious liberty and American power LCCN 2015003577 Type of material Book Personal name Su, Anna, 1980- author. Main title Exporting freedom : religious liberty and American power / Anna Su. Published/Produced Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, [2016] Description 286 pages ; 25 cm ISBN 9780674286023 (hardcover : alk. paper) Links Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46139 CALL NUMBER KF4783 .S8 2016 Copy 1 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242) CALL NUMBER KF4783 .S8 2016 Copy 2 Request in Law Library Reading Room (Madison, LM242)

• University of Toronto Law - https://www.law.utoronto.ca/faculty-staff/full-time-faculty/anna-su

  Anna Su

  Assistant Professor
  Jackman Law Building
  Room J470
  78 Queen's Park
  Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C5

  Tel.: 416-978-6242
  Email: anna.su@utoronto.ca
  Anna Su's primary areas of research include the law and history of international human rights law, U.S. constitutional law (First Amendment), and law and religion.

  Anna holds an SJD from Harvard Law School where her dissertation was awarded the John Laylin Prize for best paper in international law. She received her JD and AB degrees from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Prior to coming to Toronto, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy based in SUNY Buffalo Law School, and a graduate fellowship in ethics with the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She worked as a law clerk for the Philippine Supreme Court and was a consultant to the Philippine government negotiating panel with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

  Education
  SJD, Harvard Law School (2013)
  LLM, Harvard Law School (2008) (waived)
  JD, Ateneo Law School (2005)
  AB, Political Science, Ateneo de Manila University (2001)
  Academic appointments
  Baldy Postdoctoral Fellowship, SUNY Buffalo Law School (2013-2014)
  Awards and distinctions
  Connaught New Researcher Award (2014-2015)
  John Laylin Writing Prize in International Law, Harvard Law School (2013)
  Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellowship in Ethics, Harvard University (2012-2013)
  Selected Publications
  Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power (Harvard University Press, 2016)

  "Catholic Constitutionalism from the Americanist Controversy to Dignitatis Humanae", 91 Notre Dame Law Review 101 (2016)

  "Judging Religious Sincerity," 5 Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 28 (2016)

  "Speech beyond Borders: Extraterritoriality and the First Amendment", 67 Vanderbilt Law Review 1373 (2014)

  "Separation Anxiety: The End of American Religious Freedom?" 30 Constitutional Commentary 127 (2014) (book review essay)

  "Woodrow Wilson and the Origins of the International Law on Religious Freedom", 15 Journal of the History of International Law 235 (2013)

  "Religious Law as Foreign Law in Constitutional Interpretation", 11 International Journal of Constitutional Law 74 (2013) (with Adam Shinar)

  ===

  Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power (Harvard University Press, 2016)

  Reviewed in:
  The Nation - Is Religious Freedom a Bad Idea?

  The New Rambler - Religions Among Nations

  H-Diplo - Årsheim on Su, 'Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power'

  The Immanent Frame

  Religion & Human Rights

  Politics, Religion & Ideology

  Book Forum:
  Critical Analysis of Law

  LSE US studies centre blog

  Religion in American History blog

  Book Q&A:
  5 Questions for Anna Su on her new book "Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power"

  "Catholic Constitutionalism from the Americanist Controversy to Dignitatis Humanae", 91 Notre Dame Law Review 101 (2016)

  "Judging Religious Sincerity," 5 Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 28 (2016)

  "The Extraterritorial First Amendment" in Vicki Jackson & Federico Fabbrini eds., Constitutionalism Across Borders in the Struggle Against Terrorism (Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming, 2015)

  "Speech beyond Borders: Extraterritoriality and the First Amendment", 67 Vanderbilt Law Review 1373 (2014)

  "Separation Anxiety: The End of American Religious Freedom?" 30 Constitutional Commentary 127 (2014) (book review essay)

  "Woodrow Wilson and the Origins of the International Law on Religious Freedom", 15 Journal of the History of International Law 235 (2013)

  "Religious Law as Foreign Law in Constitutional Interpretation", 11 International Journal of Constitutional Law 74 (2013) (with Adam Shinar)

  Is Religious Freedom a Bad Idea? Scholars have taken to attacking religious rights, but their target is secularism as a whole.

• University of Toronto Law / cv - https://www.law.utoronto.ca/utfl_file/count/cv/su_cv_4.10.2016.pdf

  Anna Su
  Falconer Hall, 84 Queens Park, Toronto ON M5S 2C5
  Phone: +1 (416) 978-6242 | Email: anna.su@utoronto.ca | Twitter: @riceysu
  Academic Employment
  University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, Assistant Professor of Law (2014- )
  Education
  Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, USA Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) (2013)
  Awards: John Gallup Laylin Writing Prize in International Law (2013) Dissertation: “The Law on Religious Liberty and the Rise of American Power”
  Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, USA
  Master of Laws (LL.M.) (2008) (fulfilled program requirements)
  Ateneo Law School, Makati City, Philippines Juris Doctor (J.D.) with honors (2005)
  Awards: St. Thomas More Most Distinguished Graduate award Second Honors Silver Medal (Dean’s Honors List 2002-2005)
  Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) in Political Science (2001)
  Book
  EXPORTING FREEDOM: RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AND AMERICAN POWER (Harvard University Press, 2016)
  Reviewed in: The Nation; New Rambler Review; Critical Analysis of Law (subject of book roundtable)
  Articles
  Filartiga v. Pena-Irala and the Rise and Fall of Universal Civil Jurisdiction (work-in-progress)
  “Catholic Constitutionalism from the Americanist Controversy to Dignitatis Humanae,” Notre Dame Law Review (2016)
  “Judging Religious Sincerity,” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion (2016)
  “Separation Anxiety: The End of American Religious Freedom?,” 30 Constitutional Commentary 127 (2015)
  “Speech Beyond Borders: Extraterritoriality and the First Amendment,” 67 Vanderbilt Law Review 1373 (2014) “Woodrow Wilson and the Origins of the International Law on Religious Freedom,” 15 Journal of the History of International Law 235 (2013)
  “Religious Law as Foreign Law in Constitutional Interpretation,” 11 International Journal of Constitutional Law 74 (2013) (with Adam Shinar)
  “Divided We Stand: The Case for an Islamic State in a Federal Philippines,” 54 Ateneo Law Journal 86 (2009)
  Book Chapter
  “The Extraterritorial First Amendment,” in Federico Fabbrini and Vicki Jackson eds., Constitutionalism across Borders in the Struggle against Terrorism (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016)
  Fellowships and Grants
  University of Toronto Connaught New Researcher Grant (2014-2015)
  State University of New York (SUNY) – Buffalo Law School, Baldy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2013-2014) Harvard University, Edmond J. Safra Graduate Fellowship in Ethics (2012-2013)
  HLS Clark Byse Fellowship (2011-2012)
  HLS Graduate Program Fellowship (2008-2011)
  HLS Summer Academic Fellowship (Summers 2010-2012)
  Page 1 of 2
  HLS Summer Public Interest Fellowship (2009)
  Ateneo Law School Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship (2004-2005)
  Clerkship
  Supreme Court of the Philippines, Law clerk to Chief Justice Artemio V. Panganiban (2006-2007)
  Shorter Writings
  Secularism at Home and Abroad, Book Panel on Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, The Immanent Frame, February 2016 http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2016/02/23/secularism-at-home-and-abroad/ Should the U.S. Government Support an Islamic Reformation?, 19 August 2015, Aeon Magazine https://ideas.aeon.co/questions/should-the-us-government-support-an-islamic-reformation
  What is Religious Freedom Good For?,NEXUS magazine, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Sept 2015 http://www.law.utoronto.ca/news/nexus/nexus-archives/nexus-springsummer-2015/what-religious-freedom-good The Good News According to Hobby Lobby, Religion & Politics, 2 July 2014 (http://religionandpolitics.org/2014/07/02/the-good-news-according-to-hobby-lobby/)
  Legal Experience
  Government of the Republic of the Philippines, Office of the Presidential Adviser to the Peace Process, Legal Consultant on Constitutional Matters to the Government Negotiating Panel with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (July 2009-June 2010)
  Gisha-Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, Tel Aviv, Israel, Legal Intern (Summer 2009)
  Zambrano & Gruba Law Office, Manila, Philippines, Junior Associate (Oct 2005-May 2006)
  Office of the Solicitor-General, Philippines, Intern (Summer 2001)
  Selected Talks/Presentations
  Book Talk, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power
  Department of History, Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, LA, May 11, 2016 (scheduled) “International Legal History Day,” Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, April 14, 2016
  Keller Center for the Study of the First Amendment, University of Colorado-Boulder, March 15, 2016
  Invited discussant, Studying Religion in Times of Crisis, National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute, June 28, 2016 (scheduled)
  Invited discussant, The Past and Future of Free Exercise, The Federalist Society and The John Templeton Foundation, San Francisco, CA, June 24-25, 2016 (scheduled)
  Catholic Constitutionalism from the Americanist Controversy to Dignitatis Humanae, Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Dignitatis Humanae, Notre Dame Law School, South Bend, Indiana, November 6, 2015
  Judging Religious Sincerity, Annual Law and Religion Roundtable, Georgetown Law Center, Washington DC, June 25-26, 2015
  What Is Religious Freedom Good for?, Joint Interdisciplinary Colloquium, Human Rights Under Pressure –Ethics, Law and Politics, Freie Universitat Berlin/The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Berlin, Germany, May 11, 2015
  Languages
  English, Filipino, Modern Standard Arabic
  The Nation Strikes Back, Book Review of Cultural Defense of Nations: A Liberal Theory of Majority Rights by Liav
  Orgad, The New Rambler Review, April 2016
  Page 2 of 2

• Harvard University Ethics - https://ethics.harvard.edu/people/anna-su

  Anna Su
  Assistant Professor, University of Toronto Faculty of Law
  Anna Su
  Anna Su's primary areas of research include the law and history of international human rights law, U.S. constitutional law (First Amendment), and law and religion. Her research has appeared in the Vanderbilt Law Review, the International Journal of Constitutional Law and the Journal of the History of International Law. Anna holds an SJD from Harvard Law School where her dissertation was awarded the John Laylin Prize for best paper in international law. She received her JD and AB degrees from the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Prior to coming to Toronto, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy based in SUNY Buffalo Law School, and a graduate fellowship in ethics with the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She worked as a law clerk for the Philippine Supreme Court and was a consultant to the Philippine government negotiating panel with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
  WEBSITES
  University of Toronto Faculty of Law
  GRADUATE FELLOW
  2012-2013

• Religion in US History - http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2016/03/5-questions-for-anna-su-on-her-new-book.html

  5 Questions for Anna Su on her new book "Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power"
  Categories: AUTHOR INTERVIEWS, CHRISTIAN INTERNATIONALISM, HUMAN RIGHTS, LAUREN TUREK'S POSTS, NEW BOOKS, NEW BOOKS IN RELIGION, RELIGION AND FOREIGN POLICY, RELIGION AND LAW
  Posted by LAUREN TUREK
  1 comments

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  Lauren Turek

  Anna Su is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. She is an expert on international human rights law, U.S. constitutional law, and law and religion, and has written several articles on religious freedom and American foreign policy making during the early twentieth century. The following is a recent conversation we had about her important new book, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power, in which she "charts the rise of religious freedom as an ideal firmly enshrined in international law and shows how America’s promotion of the cause of individuals worldwide to freely practice their faith advanced its ascent as a global power."

  Q1. Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power draws attention not only to the long history of American efforts to promote religious freedom abroad through foreign policy, but also to the important role that these U.S. efforts played in shaping current international law aimed at protecting religious freedom worldwide. Can you tell us about the central argument you make in this book? What core message do you hope readers will take away from reading it?

  A1: The main argument of the book is that religious freedom promotion was part and parcel of the rise of the United States as a global power. It also shows that many of our international laws on religious freedom have American origins. It is a critical book in many ways because for one, it pushes back on the claims of neutrality and universality of international human rights norms, of which religious freedom is one. But it also complicates the usual story that religious liberty promotion was simply a disingenuous ideological mask for the pursuit of material power. As I show in the book, there’s always a bit of both interest and principle at work, and the reason is that religious freedom is genuinely important for many Americans and remains to be a distinctive part of American national identity. I also hasten to add that religious liberty is obviously very much contested throughout domestic American history, but those debates did not travel when religious freedom is promoted abroad.

  No doubt there are many antinomies, problems and contingencies involved in the promotion and protection religious freedom as a human right today, several of which are structural thanks to the way secularism has structured and conditioned the way we engage in modern politics (see for example the recent work of Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age). The takeaway however is not to throw out the whole religious freedom project altogether. I don’t think we can afford to do that in the current historical moment. To say that there has been a decline in global religious freedom is a massive understatement. And governments have and should have a role in addressing that problem, along with others. So yes, the book is a cautionary tale but it is not meant to be a tale of despair. We should be more critical about our own assumptions and vigilant about our own conduct, but that’s not an excuse for inaction.

  Q2. You note in the introduction that the central question that drove the book was: "Why did the United States seek to promote free exercise of religion and separation of church and state during its colonial project in the Philippine Islands at the turn of twentieth century, an attempt it repeated, uncannily enough more than a century later in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq?" (8). Indeed, those two historical incidents provide the bookends of your six historical case studies: the Philippine-American War and its aftermath; the negotiation of the Covenant of the League of Nations after World War I; the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, American planning for the post-war period, and the foundation of the UN Charter; the U.S. occupation of Japan and drafting of the Japanese constitution; the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, Helsinki Final Accords, and U.S. human rights policies in the 1970s; and the inclusion of religious freedom provisions in the 2004 Transitional Administrative Law in Iraq.

  Why did you choose these case studies and what thread links them together? Are there other historical moments that fit into your broader narrative that you would have like to have included or are these specific incidents particularly illustrative?

  A2. One of the recurring, and rather amusing, first reactions I get whenever I give a short description of the book is the question: “And nobody has written about this yet??” The implication is that there is nothing surprising about these case studies or the general findings of the book. And it’s largely true. In a way I didn’t choose these case studies, they chose themselves. I began with the U.S. colonial occupation of the Philippines because that’s what I knew best, coming from the Philippines myself. But then Iraq was a natural bookend because it was so recent. In fact, it seemed so recent that a historian friend of mine joked that I was doing journalism, not history. Once I knew religion and religious freedom was quite important in the U.S. colonial project in the Philippines, and that it similarly had an outsized role in the invasion of Iraq, it was not a stretch to suppose that there’s a lot in between that would connect these two events.

  Originally, the plan was to write about how and why the American idea of separation of church and state got exported around the world. Had I stuck to that path, one of the case studies would have been the American role and influence in the drafting of the Dignitatis Humanae, one of the many important documents that came out of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and which marked a major shift in Roman Catholic doctrine with respect to its position on freedom of conscience and religion. Not only did it recognize that a human person has a right to religious freedom, it also did away with previous understandings that Catholicism had to be established by the state in order to protect and promote religious truth. Eventually, I had to set that aside because I am constrained by my focus on law and lawmaking. (And it eventually ended up getting written as a separate short paper)

  In the end, the current structure worked better because it supports the main argument of the book that religious freedom promotion went hand-in-hand with the ascent of the United States as a world power, or at least until 2003 or thereabouts. Although there is still some debate in scholarly circles as to when the US really emerged as a world power, I think nobody would contest that 1898 was a significant turning point in US foreign relations. And with each major global conflagration in the twentieth century, the US worked its way up to global ascendancy, eventually replacing Great Britain at the top. Compared to Andrew Preston’s amazing book Sword of the Spirit, the book focuses on religious freedom, not religion writ large in US engagement abroad. And this is the thread on which the entire book hangs. Law here is an application of US power, whether it be religious freedom in a constitution, or religious freedom promoted abroad because of a U.S. statute. Basically you have certain prevalent understandings of religious liberty which are then translated and transposed into law intended for another peoples in another society or for a huge part of the world. What are the problems with that kind of scenario, what kinds of conversations do they open up or close down? These were some of the background questions underlying the project.

  Q3. Given your guiding question and the case studies you selected, I am curious: do you think there is a historical relationship between religious freedom policies and democratization? If not, what explains the linkage between these two ideas in the minds of American policymakers throughout the twentieth century?

  A3. Absolutely. It is striking how we now associate democracy with irreligiosity as if they are natural bedfellows but that was certainly not the case before. For the longest time, democracy and religion were inextricably tied together, and religious freedom was a natural outcome of that partnership. Alexis de Tocqueville of course was famous for his classic analysis of religion as a powerful and indispensable force in American democratic life. “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot,” he wrote. Fast forward a century later, and that connection could not be any clearer in the 1939 State of the Union address of President Franklin Roosevelt where he makes the linkage among religion, democracy and international good faith as pillars of modern civilization, the world in the cusp of a second world war as the background. Freedom of religion was one of the Four Freedoms, and internationalized by way of the declaration by the United Nations comprising of twenty-six governments fighting the Axis during the war.

  But to say that religion is important is not the same as there is one religion that is being promoted. Many Americans are Christians but it is not Christianity that is being promoted abroad as part of democratization but religious liberty. Granted, there are certain Christian-oriented assumptions behind these understandings of religious liberty as the book itself illustrates, but there is a discernible difference between promoting religious freedom and promoting one religion. If you look at U.S.-occupied Japan for example, the American goal was to break the Shinto monopoly and allow other religions to flourish which would be a safeguard against the emergence of any religious-nationalist forces similar to what made war possible in the first place.

  Today, religious freedom is still considered part of the liberal-democratic package that is more or less the standard in most constitutional settings throughout the world, but it has lost its religious underpinnings. That is not to say it is good or bad, but it is simply a reflection of the broader changes with respect to the place of religion in public life especially in the United States.

  Q4. This is a book that holds obvious appeal for historians, political scientists, and scholars of law and religion, as well as for practitioners of various stripes, including policymakers, analysts, and those working in international law. Which audiences were you thinking of when writing Exporting Freedom? How did your intended audience (or audiences) shape your approach and the material you elected to discuss?

  A4. When I arrived in the United States for graduate school, among the most debated questions were whether the Bill of Rights extended to the foreign nationals held captive in the Guantanamo Bay prison, and whether Islam was compatible with democracy in the context of Iraq. It was also a time when the separatist movement of Muslims in the Philippine south was in its heyday. During the course of research for an unrelated graduate school paper, I found out that Filipino Muslims made repeated requests to the United States to grant them their own independence and to not include their territory in the soon-to-be independent Philippines in 1945, but these requests were not heeded.

  Because I am a lawyer by training and education, I gravitated towards the legal aspects of these topics. And while there were many books about the US occupation of the Philippines none were really focused on religion, so I wanted to write something that will combine all these topics together. So I focused on the drafting processes of national constitutions produced during periods of US military occupation, and including other similarly foundational documents with regard to the international order.

  I wanted the book to be an academic intervention on many fronts – law and history to be sure, but I also wanted it to be relevant to policymakers. At the most general level, I sort of hoped that Americans can make historically informed decisions because, whether for good or ill, there are consequences for those who are outside its borders but nonetheless find themselves within the orbit of American power without much alternative. Religion is one important issue, but there are certainly many others.

  As with everything else in life, there are tradeoffs to this kind of approach. The temporal scope of the project might be broad but the scope of the research question was narrow enough: religious freedom instantiated as law. My emphasis on official understandings of religion and religious liberty and how those were reflected in religious freedom in these various laws made it manageable for research purposes. Among other things, I looked at the papers of the officials involved; the Congressional Record is an amazing treasure trove (though it might take some time getting used to before one can get excited about it); and the State Department FRUS is an indispensable resource. However, this top-down approach also meant that the stories of how these laws affected people on the ground or how other non-governmental actors such as various Christian groups figured in the story would have to await another book.

  Q5. Finally, what are you working on for your next project? I am sure our readers will be excited to hear about what you're working on now!

  A5. At the moment, I am shifting my focus to another area in the history of international human rights. There is a legal doctrine called universal civil jurisdiction which permits victims of the most serious violations of international law to bring tort claims for damages in any national court or tribunal, regardless of the location of the conduct or the nationality of the victim or wrongdoer. I am interested in exploring the foundations of that doctrine and to set its various uses in historical context. Although thousands of pages in (mostly) legal journals have been devoted to the topic, it has not attracted (yet) any historical treatment. This is very much an early stage of the project so I cannot offer more beyond this overview. One thing I am sure however is that I will find my way back again to matters of law and religion soon enough.

  Thanks for the opportunity to talk about the book!

  Thank you so much for sharing these great details on Exporting Freedom, Anna! I look forward to seeing further discussion unfold in the comments section.

5/9/17, 3)28 PM
Print Marked Items
Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power
ProtoView.
(Mar. 2016): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.protoview.com/protoview
Full Text:
9780674286023
Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power Anna Su
Harvard University Press
2016
286 pages
$39.95
Hardcover
KF4783
Through six historical episodes spanning a century of US foreign policy, Su describes the outward-looking story of American religious freedom and the transnational legal regime it generated. As American geopolitical power rose, promoting religious freedom ceased to be limited to diplomatic overtures on behalf of persecuted believers elsewhere, she says, and the US government began participating directly in the drafting of international laws and national constitutions, and in some cases their implementation. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power." ProtoView, Mar. 2016. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA451264960&it=r&asid=70d5138e7aec847e905fb505f42cca03. Accessed 9 May 2017.
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"Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power." ProtoView, Mar. 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA451264960&it=r. Accessed 9 May 2017.

• h-Net
  https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/reviews/127387/årsheim-su-exporting-freedom-religious-liberty-and-american-power
  Word count: 2731

  Årsheim on Su, 'Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power'

  Author:
  Anna Su
  Reviewer:
  Helge Årsheim

  Anna Su. Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. 286 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-28602-3.

  Reviewed by Helge Årsheim (University of Oslo)
  Published on H-Diplo (May, 2016)
  Commissioned by Seth Offenbach

  Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power is a great read. In the style of fast-paced political dramas, the book tells the story of US promotion of religious liberty abroad through six dispersed snapshots, mixing close-ups with broader perspectives on a global scale. Traveling from colonial enterprises in the Philippines to peace conferences in the wake of world wars, Anna Su takes the reader on a journey from the standoff between détente and engagement policies in the 1970s to the postwar occupations of Japan and Iraq. In more than one way, this book helps historians better understand religious liberty promotion just as Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia (2010) helped improve historians’ understanding of the history of human rights.

  Su introduces her approach to religious liberty by observing that while the recognition of the freedom of religion in the Bolivian constitution in 1906 “started out as a diplomatic effort to protect the rights and liberties of US citizens traveling abroad,” it nevertheless “ended with a constitutional provision guaranteeing religious freedom for all inside Bolivia” (p. 1). This quote summarizes and encapsulates the ways in which her six historical examples are framed and presented: across the examples, a variety of US foreign policy initiatives to promote religious liberty throughout the long twentieth century are examined and duly criticized for colonial arrogance, bias, or partisanship at the outset, only to be somewhat rehabilitated towards the end through painful learning processes. The fundamental ambivalence between the promotion of religious freedom as an inherently contested political process and the redeeming potential of a robust legal framework that could end or at least limit the scope of religious persecution runs throughout the book.

  While Su is clearly critical of the many initiatives presented by US politicians to promote religious liberty, she is also clear that this “past wreckage” carries important lessons for how to discuss the topic today (p. 10). Dismissing parallels between the role of religious freedom in the “civilizing” projects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the present-day promotion of religious freedom, Su stresses that “the liberalism of empire is not the same as the empire of liberalism, no matter how hard we want to make them so” (p. 161).

  Underscoring the difference between the imperialism of old and the present-day human rights enterprise, the initial chapter on the creation of constitutional guarantees securing religious freedom in the US colonization of the Philippines is scathing in its critique. Tellingly entitled “A White Man’s Burden,” the chapter amply demonstrates how the promotion of religious liberty in the Philippines served utilitarian political aims, securing the effective governance of the archipelago while also pandering to domestic debates on American self-understanding as a noncolonial power and the international stature of the nation as “a benevolent apostle of liberty and progress” (p. 34).

  The constitutional experiment in the Philippines and the effort to create a workable concept of religious liberty featured a variety of classical colonial tactics, from the deployment of government commissions to map the situation on the ground, to the signing of treaties with local leaders to lend an air of legitimacy to colonial rule. The most fascinating aspect of the narrative about the Philippines, however, is the influence of the strained relationship between Catholics and Protestants, both internally in the United States and externally in the US diplomatic relationship with the Vatican. These relationships were marred by suspicions and anxieties stretching back to the very self-understanding of American statehood being founded on religious dissent and a clear separation of church and state. This relationship and its influence on the interpretation and implementation of religious liberty at home and abroad has not been sufficiently researched in the literature, and Su should be commended for bringing attention to it. A chapter on the drafting of the religious freedom provisions in the Japanese constitution following World War II similarly brings out the utilitarian motivations of the United States acting as an occupier seeking its own interests in the creation of legal provisions for other nations. Unlike the Philippine example, however, Su seems more positive towards these provisions, as they provided Japanese people with “essential trumps against government encroachments” (p. 109).

  In chapters documenting the roles of US presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt in securing legal guarantees for religious freedom after successive world wars, the narrative shifts gears, entering into near-biographical mode. Wilson and Roosevelt are portrayed through personal quotes from secretaries, wives, friends, and physicians, offering glimpses into their mindsets, Wilson playing the role of the idealist, Roosevelt the pragmatist. Unlike scholarship on the Filipino constitutional experiment, the literature on Wilson and Roosevelt and the role of the United States in the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations is large and from a variety of different scholarly fields, and most of the information presented in these chapters has been chronicled in some way or form by others, although the influence of these presidents on religious freedom has so far not received sufficient attention.

  Among the more novel items is the claim in the chapter on Wilson that his attempts to remove religious strife and intolerance as sources of war “in fact brought about the modern international legal regime on religious freedom” (p. 37). While much of the chapter documents the missionary zeal of Wilson and his wish to create a new declaration of independence for the world (p. 42), the relationship between these visions and the modern international legal regime on religious freedom is not entirely clear. Su is certainly correct that the religious freedom provisions of the mandate system and the minority treaties helped an international legal regime for the protection of religious freedom “emerge” (p. 58). But this is not the same as claiming that Wilson’s efforts “brought about” the modern international legal regime--if anything, the regulations securing the freedom of religion in the mandate system were primarily carried over to the UN Trusteeship Council, which under the UN Charter was given the responsibility to encourage respect for human rights in the territories under its mandate. While similarities of form can certainly be identified, there is no more evident causal relationship between the mandate and minority systems and the modern international regime than there is with the clauses in the 1885 Berlin Treaty, which also secured the freedom of religion, as Su points out.

  Indeed, the very institutionalization of the mandate system and the minority treaties, both of which were furnished with rules of implementation, monitoring, and adjudication, are a far cry from the modern international legal regime, whose machinery of implementation only took its first, hesitant steps in the mid-1970s with the establishment of the UN Human Rights Committee, and still remains a largely voluntary mechanism whose monitoring bodies have no available sanctions or remedies. Arguably, the very lack of institutionalization is the sine qua non of the modern international legal regime on religious freedom, and can be seen as one of the primary engines of US and other states’ willingness to promote this and other rights on their own.

  The chapter on Roosevelt likewise features an unusual approach: in the annals of religious freedom scholarship, Eleanor Roosevelt usually plays a larger role than her husband due to her involvement in the negotiations leading up to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. For that reason, the inclusion of a substantial analysis of Franklin Roosevelt’s approach to religious liberty is to be welcomed, not least due to his decisive influence on the run-up to the inclusion of human rights in the UN Charter, without which the UDHR would never have seen the light of day. Su paints a rich picture of the negotiations leading up to the Dumbarton Oaks conference, pointing to the deployment of religious liberty throughout the public speeches and statements by Roosevelt as a strategic device to secure domestic support for his proposed United Nations (p. 64). Somewhat surprisingly, however, she contrasts his view of religious liberty as a “core component of democratic order” and a “pillar of peace” with “the contemporary human right we know today” (p. 62). Surely, few theorists of contemporary human rights would disagree that the protections of religious freedom and other rights as spelled out in international legal instruments are conducive to, if not indicative of good governance, the rule of law and the democratic order. In this particular respect, Roosevelt’s pragmatism, under which the protection of religious freedom is viewed as a component of democracy, seems considerably more apt for our troubled times than the flaming idealism of Wilson.

  The view of religious freedom as a key aspect of democracy also propelled the concept to center stage in the larger ideological battles of the Cold War, as one of the primary tools in the propaganda war between the United States and the Soviet Union. In what is arguably among the strongest and most incisive chapters in the book, Su chronicles the 1970s aftermath of President Harry Truman and his administration’s “carefully orchestrated and nurtured … national moral and spiritual offensive against the Soviet Union, using religion as the main weapon” begun in the late 1940s (p. 114). In this narrative, the passage of the Jackson-Vanik (JVA) amendment to the Trade Reform Act in 1974 and the adoption of the 1975 Helsinki Accords (HFA) are portrayed as symptoms of the official concerns for religious believers in the Soviet Union expressed by members of Congress dating back to the anticommunist crusades of the 1950s and 1960s.

  Whereas the JVA introduced morality into foreign policy by making trade agreements conditional on the recognition of the right to emigrate, the HFA legitimized the idea that human rights were a matter of international concern. Both differed sharply with the official policy of détente, under which shared interests in trade and international security among the superpowers trumped ideological convictions and meddling in internal affairs. The HFA in particular has had a tremendous impact on the promotion of human rights beyond the confines of international treaties, as the adoption of the agreement spawned the creation of international, domestic, and nonstate organizations dedicated to monitoring the implementation of its provisions. Major international human rights actors like Human Rights Watch, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and the handful of European Helsinki committees all trace their ancestry to the HFA.

  The final chapter brings the narrative into our near-present, and explores the intertwinement of the adoption of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) in 1998 and the 2004 Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) of Iraq, which set out to blend the principles of Islam and democracy “with an explicit guarantee of freedom for all individuals to their own religious belief and practice” (p. 137). Su is certainly right to conclude that the TAL represents one instance in which the old and new ways of promoting international religious freedom have come together, as it sought to sideline Islam to promote democracy while also inserting religious freedom provisions derived from international human rights treaties via IRFA (p. 157).

  Chronicling the rise of IRFA, Su dismisses the charges made by critics of the act that unilateralism undermines international cooperation and that singling out specific rights creates an “irrational” hierarchy of rights (p. 147). Surprisingly, at least given the considerable ambiguities explored in earlier chapters, she observes that “a unilateral approach, whether by imposition of sanctions or other means and if used properly, might aid the internalization of these norms by forcing political attention to it,” and that the promotion of religious freedom can “cultivate” other freedoms like free speech and public assembly (p. 148).

  It is certainly true at the structural level that neither unilateralism nor singular rights promotion in themselves are bound to fail, but the failure of the US Department of State to use the unilateral approach offered by IRFA “properly” against egregious violators of religious freedom like Saudi Arabia has been repeatedly decried even by the most enthusiastic sponsors of the bill. Similarly, the definition of religious freedom in IRFA article 2(a)(3) specifically leaves out the limiting clauses of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) article 18(3), under which the freedom of religion or belief can be subject to limitations that are “prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.”[1] While this omission removes the crucial balancing act required for the right to engage constructively with other rights, article 3(11) of IRFA expands the remit of religious freedom violations considerably, as it identifies egregious rights violations like torture, detention, enforced disappearances, and the denial of the right to life, liberty, and security as “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”[2] This view is at odds with most international monitoring bodies, which would tend to see these violations primarily as particularly severe violations of the rights in themselves, regardless of religious identities or points of view.

  It is also surprising that the more conceptually oriented criticism leveled against religious freedom, IRFA, and related initiatives briefly touched upon in the introduction to the book are not addressed more explicitly in this chapter. While unilateralism and rights hierarchies are certainly important misgivings against any act of rights promotion, the epistemological, historical, political, cultural, and legal challenges of promoting religious freedom abroad can hardly be overestimated. In no small measure, this is due to the ambiguity and ambivalence of the term and concept of religion: within the academy, the search for a unifying concept of religion has long since been abandoned by most scholarly communities, which have settled for more situational and contextually sensitive approaches under which the exact determination of the term varies with the contextual constraints of different settings, historical experiences, and rights discourses.

  Transposed to the monitoring of religious freedom, these contextual constraints practically invalidate unified views of what the right may or may not cover, the means by which it is violated, and the remedies most pertinent to put a stop to them. Even the United States and numerous European states, which are more often than not aligned in their views of human rights, tend to disagree on the proper borders between exemptions for religious communities and the scope of antidiscrimination laws. The development of the “margin of appreciation” doctrine of the European Court of Human Rights in its religious freedom jurisprudence is another example of the tremendous contextual constraints of litigating on religion; the tortured, consensual language of the Human Rights Committee’s General Comment no. 22 (1993) on the interpretation of article 18 of the ICCPR, under which both state-church arrangements and blasphemy laws were tacitly accepted, yet another. The very ambiguity of religion as a concept, a social identity, a set of beliefs, and an institutional reality create specific problems with the promotion of religious freedom by singular states that are not easily overcome.

  Taken together, the six chapters in Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power present an intriguing account of how and why US politicians have sought to promote religious liberty abroad, offering fresh perspectives on processes that have not been properly addressed in the scholarly literature on religious freedom. However, although I agree with Su that the slow realization of religious freedom should be built on “continuing deliberation, contestation, and mutual recognition” (p. 162), I am not entirely convinced that the state-driven promotion of singular rights is the best way to achieve these objectives.

  Notes

  [1]. https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20999/volume-999-I-14668-English.pdf.

  [2]. http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/2297.pdf.

  Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=46139

  Citation: Helge Årsheim. Review of Su, Anna, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. May, 2016.
  URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46139

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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  Book Review Forum: Exporting Freedom, Religious Liberty and American Power by Anna Su

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  In Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power, Anna Su contends that the US has promoted religious liberty alongside the expansion of its military and political power across the world. In this Book Review Forum, we present two reviews of Su’s new book, which were submitted separately and written independently.

  Exporting Freedom, Religious Liberty and American Power by Anna Su. Harvard University Press, 2016.

  Exporting Christianity: Why “Religious Liberty” Cannot Be Neutral Toward Religion – Gene Zubovich, Washington University in St. Louis
  How American power has also pushed American ideas about religious liberty – Megan Pearson, University of Southampton
  Exporting Christianity: Why “Religious Liberty” Cannot Be Neutral Toward Religion

  Gene Zubovich is impressed by the book’s range of case studies which span more than a century of US nation-building. While he praises the book’s depth, he also argues that greater attention to how the understanding of the idea of religious liberty has changed, especially in recent decades, would have enhanced its narrative.

  The promotion of religious liberty is intertwined with the expansion of American military and political power abroad. This is Anna Su’s central contention in her brief and convincing account of the uses and abuses of religious liberty by politicians and military leaders in the United States. Her book, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power, focuses on the legal understanding of “religious liberty” as the United States conquered and rebuilt nations (in the Philippines, Japan, and Iraq) and helped develop international legal frameworks (the League of Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Helsinki Accords). Through an impressive range of case studies from the late 19th to the early 21st centuries, Su shows that state actors imposed a distinctly American view of religious liberty on a complicated global religious landscape.

  Part of the difficulty the United States faced was in applying blunt concepts—free exercise and, especially, disestablishment—to a varied religious landscape. Before government officials could apply religious liberty abroad, they first had to render legible a variety of practices that stubbornly refused to comply with American expectations. For example, in the Moro region of the Philippines, folk Muslim practices combined ecclesiastical and political functions. American colonial officials transformed the Moro sultan into a religious leader and divested him of his secular authority. The Japanese emperor, who also embodied both religion and politics, became a secular political leader under the guiding hand of General Douglass MacArthur during the American occupation after World War II.

  The practice of Shinto was considered a non-religious practice under Japanese law, akin to a civil religion. So American occupation forces had to first understand it as a religion before it could be disestablished. Similarly, Soviet Jewry needed to be imagined as a religious group before religious liberty could be extended to it (Jews were understood to be a nationality in the USSR). In these ways, the United States remade the world in its own image.

  Exporting Freedom is an important, thoroughly-researched addition to the growing criticism of religious liberty. The term “religious liberty” normalizes and universalizes the assumptions of Protestant Christianity, several scholars have argued. It encourages policymakers to view conflicts as religious when they are also cultural, ethnic, and economic in nature. For these reasons and others, religious liberty is “impossible”, Winnifred Sullivan argues, and something we should move “beyond” according to Elizabeth Shakman Hurd. But Su stands out among this group of scholars in her optimistic insistence that “the laws on religious freedom can transcend the aims” of previous efforts (p.10).

  Freedom featured

  Credit: Spyridon Kagkas (Flickr, CC-BY-SA-2.0)

  Greater attention to the changing understanding of religious liberty over time would have added nuance to what is already a thought-provoking book. In Exporting Freedom, the meaning of religious liberty changes very little from the colonization of the Philippines in the 19th century to nation-building in Iraq in the 21st. Given the well-studied change in meaning of religious liberty in the US itself over the same time period, it is surprising that the idea remains so flat in the book’s narrative.

  To better understand the changing meaning of “religious liberty,” it helpful to note that the vast majority of the decision makers Su discusses were members of ecumenical Protestant denominations, a small subsection of American Christians that became increasingly liberal in outlook during the twentieth century. This overrepresentation, which Su does not say much about, can be seen in the sheer number of Episcopalians discussed in Exporting Freedom, including Leonard Wood, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur, and Edward Stettinius, Jr.

  This demographic overrepresentation ended by the 1970s, when more evangelicals and conservative Catholics and Jews were in positions of power. In broad terms, the defense and understanding of religious liberty passed from religious liberals to religious conservatives over the course of the twentieth century. Religious conservatives continued to insist on linking religious liberty to missionary activity, the inferiority of non-Christian religions, and a vociferous anti-secularism—ideas which had been largely discarded by religious liberals before the 1970s. This shift is central to understanding the changing meaning of America’s advocacy of religious liberty abroad.

  It is worth questioning whether religious liberty can overcome its historical baggage, especially its anti-secularism. Given its historic ties to missionary activity, its use as a weapon by both presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman against America’s irreligious enemies, and its embrace by the Christian Right in recent years, it is no exaggeration to say that “religious liberty” has always been intertwined with the goal of promoting religion.

  In this light, it is no surprise that religious liberty has become the new mantra of the American Christian Right. Su is correct to observe that religious conflict across the world is an important concern today. But so is the tension between religious conservatives and their critics, both in the United States and abroad. For this reason, it is worth searching for a principle more capacious than religious liberty, which can protect religious minorities without mobilizing the state on behalf of religion. Perhaps it is time to retire the term after all.

  How American power has also pushed American ideas about religious liberty

  For Megan Pearson, the book provides illuminating insights into the US’ policies across seven episodes, from the Philippines in the late 19th century through the Cold War and to US’ current conflict with Islamic fundamentalism.

  In Exporting Freedom Anna Su, an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto has written an extremely interesting book about the United States’ actions in promoting religious freedom abroad as part of its foreign policy during the twentieth century. She uses seven episodes across the century to illustrate this, from the US actions in the Philippines following the war with Spain in 1898, through the establishment of the League of Nations, to the Cold War and ending with Iraq and the problem of Islamic fundamentalism. In focusing only on the right to religious liberty, a right which occupies a prominent position within American political and legal thought, rather than human rights as a whole, Su is able to provide illuminating insights into the US’s attitudes and policy in each of these situations. This episodic focus also creates a snapshot of continuity and change in each situation and allows a number of themes to arise consistently throughout the book.

  Firstly, there is the issue of what we mean by religious freedom. After all ‘religious freedom’ may be bit like motherhood and apple pie – no-one could oppose it, but that very popularity makes it a highly contested concept. Religious freedom to do what? And for whom? An individual right or a communal one? As the author states: “Although [Leonard] Wood [the Governor-General of the Philippines) believed in religious freedom, it was freedom that came in a particular size and shape” (pp. 32). To a greater or lesser extent this is true throughout. Its meaning is only made more complex, as she demonstrates, by the American emphasis given to the separation of church and state: a problem when this runs contrary to cultural views on the significance of a particular religion as the disparate examples of early twentieth century Philippines and post-war Iraq demonstrate. Is it an intolerable compromise to accept that the Iraqi constitution symbolically declares Iraq to be an Islamic nation if this does not affect the rights of non-Muslim minorities? If not, is this simply realpolitik, or a nation state’s legitimate understanding of religious freedom given its history and culture? As she demonstrates, it is possible to critique a one size fits all model without falling into incoherent cultural relativism. In a different context, that of post-WWII Japan, an even more fundamental issue of what counts as a religion at all is raised. Is state Shintoism a religion, and therefore conceptually entitled to protection or merely a dangerous promoter of nationalist ideology?

  Church and state featured

  Credit: Rachel Patterson (Flickr, CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0)

  A further theme is the American involvement in the juridification of international religious freedom and its change from being a mere matter of political morality to an enforceable legal right, culminating internationally in the UN Declaration of Human Rights and, more recently domestically through the US International Religious Freedom Act 1998 (IRFA). Su makes clear American ambivalence on this: of course such legal protection binds not only others but the US itself and therefore provides a mechanism for criticism and, on one view, an intrusion into state sovereignty. At times, as she notes, outright hypocrisy runs alongside this. After all the US may have been keen to promote religious liberty during the 1950s but it simultaneously refused to address internal racial discrimination.

  Alongside these conceptual questions, Su weaves together the stories of domestic and international pressures. One such domestic change is the greater inclusivity of ‘respectable’, promotable, religion, from mainline Protestantism alone to the inclusion of Catholics and Jews, although as the recent popularity of Donald Trump demonstrates, there remain limits in some parts of US discourse. There are also other stories here, including the differences in opinion between different political actors such as the President and Congress, the influence of domestic public opinion on policy and the changing willingness of the US to become involved in international affairs.

  While each of the episodes described has been dealt with elsewhere in more detail, this book is far more than the sum of its parts. Together they illuminate an under-considered aspect of America’s foreign policy and one which is only likely to become more prominent, given the seemingly intractable rise of Islamic terrorism.

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  Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of USAPP– American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.

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  Exporting Law, Exporting Freedom
  Categories: BOOK REVIEWS, MONA ORABY'S POSTS, RELIGION AND EMPIRE, RELIGION AND LAW, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
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  The third post in our ongoing review forum on Anna Su's new book, Exporting Freedom, comes to us from Mona Oraby. You can read earlier entries by Michael Graziano and Jeffrey Wheatley. Look for our final post in the series next week.

  Mona Oraby

  Exporting Freedom complements a recent spate of scholarship that queries the timelessness and neutrality that is often attributed to the right to religious liberty. Drawing on historical case studies that span twentieth century U.S. foreign policy, Anna Su charts the emergence and promotion of religious freedom first as natural law, and subsequently as a human right enshrined in national constitutions and international law. Su argues that American religious freedom promotion abroad is part and parcel of U.S. global ascendancy.

  The book is a significant contribution to our understanding of how “the malleability of religious freedom enabled its invocation abroad to be articulated and made salient within particular historical and institutional contexts” (4). Su not only excavates the political and intellectual milieu in which American discourse on religious freedom took shape. She also explains the modes through which this discourse figured into three U.S. military incursions: the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, post-World War II Japan, and Iraq after the 2003 invasion. By foregrounding the interstice between discourse and imperial power, Su opens up a productive inquiry into religious liberty’s distinctly American provenance.

  If Exporting Freedom casts religious liberty and American power in a new light, it falls short of articulating a broader claim about the centrality of law to the U.S. export of both Protestant values and secular liberalism. After all, religious liberty was not exclusively deployed as a discursive tool, but as a legal instrument that curtailed preexisting power structures and reorganized local religious traditions. In all three case studies mentioned above, the career of religious freedom promotion followed a categorically legal course. American officials drafted constitutions as a means to achieve occupation goals. They increasingly sought to codify the disestablishment of church and state first in order to civilize subordinate populations, but always to secure U.S. material and moral interests. To her credit, Su demonstrates that religious freedom protections became entrenched in national constitutions and the panoply of international legal instruments we are familiar with today. However, she does not theorize the significance of this multi-jurisdictional spread of religious freedom as law. How, we might ask, has the constituent relationship among law, religion, and freedom changed over time?

  The U.S. colonial experiment in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century points to the imbrication of these concepts early on in Exporting Freedom. Using a constitutional framework, the U.S. government sought to promote religious pluralism and simultaneously limit forms of religious worship it deemed antithetical to its civilizing mission. The U.S. colonial administrator of the Moro Province, John Wood, remarked that Filipino Muslims and Catholics practiced “an unruly amalgam of local customs” (32). Su further tells us that “[a]lthough Wood believed in religious freedom, it was freedom that came in a particular shape and size. He praised Jesuit missionary work in the Moro Province…because he considered the principles of the Christian religion conducive to the observance of law and order and respect for authority” (32). Given that the book provides rich historical evidence for a robust theory of what law does in the context of military occupation, it is curious that Su asks but never answers whether it is significant that religious freedom is law (161).

  Viewed from this perspective, U.S. ascendance is characterized by the global propagation of law and constitutionalism, American-style, of which religious freedom promotion is but one component. The histories of the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) and the post-2003 Iraq Transnational Administrative Law (TAL) are cases in point. As Su explains, “[b]y enacting the IRFA into law and ensuring that adequate religious freedom guarantees were written into the Iraqi TAL, the U.S. government brought together its old and new ways of promoting international religious freedom” (157). The old way consisted of unilateral standard setting, often by military force. The new mode interprets and implements these standards, which are supported by a variety of domestic and international legal mechanisms.

  This line of thinking extends to other realms in which law’s productive capacity is used to legitimate U.S. projects of global domination. Prisoner abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, Baghram Air Force base outside of Kabul, and Guantanamo Bay are haunting examples of how U.S. officials have bent legal definitions of what constitutes torture in order to sanction harsh interrogation techniques and extraordinary rendition. And just two years ago, the Obama administration expanded the scope of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force law to justify the killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. The point here is that it is no coincidence that American discourses on ‘defending religious freedom’ and ‘eradicating terrorism’ are tied to national security interests. Such interests are being realized through the force of law with alarming frequency.

  The ongoing centrality of law to American power thus casts considerable doubt on Su’s assertion that “the slow realization of religious freedom is and should be a profoundly political act, one that is built on continuing deliberation, contestation, and mutual recognition” (162). Exporting Freedom may be “[f]irst and foremost a cautionary tale [that] illustrates the ambitions and limits of what religious freedom promoted as law by an external actor can achieve,” (10) but the book’s elite-centric view does not suggest how the ideal of religious liberty can be instantiated otherwise.

  Mona Oraby is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University.

• New Rambler Review
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  Religions Among Nations
  By LAEL WEINBERGER

  Review of Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power, by Anna Su

  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016

  Americans reading the news around Christmas of 2015 encountered a flurry of references to global religious freedom. On December 23, President Obama issued a statement in which he joined “with people around the world in praying for God’s protection for persecuted Christians and those of other faiths.” Particular concern was directed to the persecution of Christians in the Middle East by the Islamic State (ISIL). But the president didn’t stop with prayers for the persecuted. He offered prayers for the Americans “engaged in our military, diplomatic, and humanitarian efforts to alleviate their suffering and restore stability, security, and hope to their nations.” The concern, not just for global religious freedom, but specifically about what the United States can do to promote it, appeared in other statements. On Christmas Eve, the Washington Post published an op-ed calling for greater American action to help these persecuted Christians, coauthored by senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio and Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore. The following week, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an appeal for the State Department to recognize the persecution of Christians by ISIL as genocide.

  This combination of religious freedom with American foreign policy is no new fad, but probably few current policymakers are aware of quite how long a history it has. In her new book, Exporting Freedom, University of Toronto law professor Anna Su uncovers the deep roots of America’s interest in religious freedom as foreign policy. Su examines a series of case studies spanning more than a century in which religious liberty played an important role in American foreign policy. In Su’s account, religious liberty was a principle that American policymakers sought to promote—and one with considerable instrumental value too. Su offers a historical account that convincingly argues that religious liberty was relevant both to idealists who cared about liberal principles and good government, and to realists who cared about power and efficient governance.

  When America became a world power is a matter of some debate. Some historians would date it from American industrialization after 1865; others think World War I marked the key turning point. Many scholars date America’s emergence as a world power from the Spanish-American War in 1898. For the United States, the most important long-term consequence of this war was the acquisition of the Philippines. Su starts her story here and demonstrates that religious liberty became an important issue for American foreign policy very early in this country’s engagement with the world. It was to the Philippines that United States made its first attempt to “export” religious freedom.

  The development of American policy in the Philippines nicely illustrates the way that American idealism and realism became intertwined around the issue of religious liberty. Religious zeal helped motivate and justify the acquisition of the Philippines in the first place: for the predominantly-Protestant United States (including President McKinley), the majority-Catholic Philippines appeared to be a great mission field. On principle, addressing church-state relations was also a priority for policymakers like Secretary of War Elihu Root and colonial governor (and future U.S. president) William Howard Taft. In their eyes, Su explains, the path to good government started with undoing the “unholy mix of church and state” entrenched by three centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines.

  But sincere as these political principles may have been, there were also immediate political reasons for Americans to address church-state relations in the Philippines. The Filipino rebellion against Spain was motivated in part by grievances with the Spanish-affiliated church hierarchy. When the American occupiers themselves faced a similar insurgency, Root and others thought that addressing complaints about the church hierarchy might aid in pacifying the country. This strategy played out dramatically in a controversy over church land ownership (known as the “friar lands question”). The church had claimed many of the best lands in the country, creating widespread resentment in the Philippines. American administrators would gain some much-needed goodwill if they could facilitate a more equitable redistribution of land. But they were constrained, not only by the terms of the treaty the United States had made with Spain, but also by public relations concerns back home: American Catholics had long worried that the occupation was essentially anti-Catholic, and the wrong move with the friar lands would be interpreted as confirming their worst fears. For a solution, President Theodore Roosevelt sent Taft to the Vatican for unprecedented negotiations. The talks were inconclusive, but paid long-term dividends in gaining papal favor and assistance. As Su explains, Pope Leo XIII ultimately created a new, autonomous Philippine church hierarchy and “effectively endorsed . . . the establishment of American colonial rule” (25). Even when forced to negotiate directly with the Catholic Church, the American commitment to separation between church and state provided the necessary ideological space within which the colonial administration could maneuver between diverse religious constituencies at home and abroad.

  Religious freedom was similarly useful for the American administrators dealing with the Muslim Moro population in the Philippines. Americans originally tried to maintain amicable relations with the Muslim population by allowing the Moros considerable autonomy. But some of the practices allowed by the religious laws in the Moro province—most notably slavery—were objectionable to Americans, and indeed threatened to undercut the “civilizing mission” that ostensibly justified the American presence in the Philippines. Military governor Leonard Wood took an aggressive approach to liberalizing the civil law in the Moro region, while also insisting that he was respecting the religious liberty of Muslims to practice their faith. “Slowly but surely,” Su writes, Wood pushed apart the once-fused religious and civil authorities. The sultan was allowed to retain religious but not civil authority, while the Moro government was “turned into a secularized bureaucracy” (32). Again, adherence to religious liberty provided Americans with a useful tool for negotiation, by which they could claim to respect the Moros’ religion while still pushing them toward an American model of liberalization.

  In the Philippines, a policy that emphasized religious liberty and the separation of church and state made sense. It was true to a longstanding American tradition of religious liberty, a principled ideal that Americans could feel good about exporting. It was also a valuable tool of governance, the implementation of which could strengthen American rule. This is the basic pairing of idealism and realism that continues in each of the subsequent historical episodes covered in Exporting Freedom, though in different circumstances and with a different balance between the two each time. The case studies illustrate the variety of contexts in which religion mattered for American foreign policy. Woodrow Wilson tried to get religious liberty protections included in the Versailles settlement after World War I and Franklin D. Roosevelt motivated Americans to pay attention to the rise of totalitarianism in Europe by invoking “freedom of worship” in his speeches leading up to World War II. American occupation forces wrote religious freedom into the Japanese constitution after the war, and a combination of congressional actors and State Department negotiators made religious freedom an issue in American relations with the Soviet Union in the 1970s. In her final chapter, Su takes the story almost up to the present, reviewing the American effort to ensure that religious freedom was recognized in Iraq’s constitution.

  After reading Su’s engaging narratives, I think readers will be convinced that religious freedom has been important to American foreign policy and policymakers. But it is a challenge to generalize much beyond that. Certainly, it did not matter in the same way in each case. The centrality of the issue to policymakers varied widely. Sometimes it was of central concern to policymakers. In post-World War II Japan, figuring out how to decouple “church” and state was a high priority—in a nation that had divinized an emperor and linked nationalist ideology with Shinto religion.

  At other times, the importance of religious freedom was more peripheral. Franklin Roosevelt found it rhetorically useful to invoke religious freedom in order to get Americans to pay attention to events in Europe. “[L]ook ahead and see the kind of lives our children would have to lead,” Roosevelt warned in his 1940 State of the Union Address, “if a large part of the . . . world were compelled to worship a god imposed by a military rule, or were forbidden to worship God at all . . .” (67). Concern about religious liberty did not play a major role in wartime policy, though it would reemerge as an issue of interest in postwar planning (as one among many human rights issues).

  If there is any pattern, it is that religious liberty receives the most attention from policymakers when it has the greatest instrumental value from a realist perspective. In the Philippines and in Japan, the status of the Catholic Church and of “State Shinto” (respectively) had immediate relevance for Americans seeking to govern a country. Fascinating as these incidents are, perhaps the more intriguing questions are raised by cases in which religious liberty serves a less immediate instrumental purpose—such as Woodrow Wilson’s effort to include strong language about religious liberty in the Versailles settlement, or the grassroots efforts that shaped the Congress’s passage of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998. In these cases, what motivated the interest in religion? Is religious freedom law and policy more or less effective when it is crafted in the broad and general terms of, for instance, IRFA, or when it is designed to deal with a very immediate and concrete problem, such as the governance of the Moros in the Philippines? Su does not directly address these questions, but these are just a few of the intriguing issues raised by her juxtaposition of these historical episodes.

  Su also doesn’t try to answer questions about how policies played out on the ground—for instance, how important was Roosevelt’s invocation of “freedom of worship” for promoting American engagement in World War II? In the 1975 Helsinki Accords, how much did the reference to religion inserted by American negotiators really matter for Soviet dissidents and human rights monitors? Throughout the book, Su carefully limits her inquiry to focus on the actions of policymakers in the American government. Such a limit was necessary to keep the book a manageable length. But it leaves a big question lingering in the minds of readers—how exactly did the policy of “exporting freedom” (specifically religious freedom) actually work on the ground? How, in other words, has it affected the lives of individuals in the Philippines and the Soviet Union and Iraq? Hopefully, more historians of law and religion will tackle this question in future years.

  One of the strengths of Exporting Freedom is Su’s balance between critical and sympathetic analysis. For Su, the development of religious liberty as American foreign policy is a story of “imperialism” in the most general sense—the result of “seeing the world from a position of power and acting accordingly” (5). Often, historians invoke imperialism as a means of critique: to say that an ideology or policy or law partakes of imperialism is to expose power relationships and raise questions about fairness and justice (or lack thereof). Su is a critical historian and throughout the book she keeps issues of American power and privilege in sight. America’s global promotion of religious freedom was not a story of simple idealism, but was indeed one of power. And there are episodes in which readers will be troubled by heavy-handed imposition of religious liberty policies by Americans on other groups or countries.

  But Su does not allow this healthy critical awareness to lead her into cynicism about religious freedom as a principle. She never reduces religious liberty into a simple cover for power politics or a purely instrumental tool of governance (though at times it was both). As a good historian, Su recognizes that people have multiple motivations. She recognizes that, even amidst a cast of characters worried about power and influence, there were (and are) real believers in the value of religious freedom who sincerely sought (and seek) to promote it, sometimes through American foreign policy, as a crucial component of a good society. Su’s account of religious freedom and American foreign policy is sympathetic without being naïve, and critical without being cynical.

  In a world where America remains a superpower, and in which persecution of minority religions is all too common, the question of how to promote religious liberty worldwide won’t be going away anytime soon. Scholars and policymakers grappling with this issue would do well to consider some of the American experiences over the last century. To this end, the history recounted in Exporting Freedom could not be more timely.

  Posted on 1 February 2016

  LAEL WEINBERGER is a J.D./Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago Law School and University of Chicago Department of History. Follow him on Twitter @LaelWeinberger.

• SSRC
  http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2016/08/10/exporting-freedom-religious-liberty-and-american-power/
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  Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power
  posted by Daniel Philpott
  Exporting Freedom The United States is unique among nations in claiming a heritage of religious freedom and a mission to spread it overseas. This is difficult to dispute. What has become hotly disputed is how this is to be regarded.

  An “orthodox” view holds that the United States has played a special role—a providential part, as some would have it—in carrying a universal message of religious freedom to the world. First, American colonies were havens for religious refugees; then the American founding was a milestone for constitutional norms of religious freedom; then, over the subsequent two centuries, the United States became a haven for religious people unwelcome elsewhere: Baptists, Mormons, Mennonites, Muslims, Amish, Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others.

  So convinced Americans have been of their ingenious experiment in religious liberty that they have sought to spread it overseas. As Anna Su tells the story in her new book, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power, the U.S. extended religious freedom through its colonial occupation of the Philippines in the early twentieth century; its advocacy of the League of Nations after World War I; its efforts to shape international norms in the United Nations system and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the aftermath of the Second World War; its occupation of Japan after the same war; its formulation of a human rights policy in the 1970s; its International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), passed by the U.S. Congress in 1998; and its occupation of Iraq after its war there in 2003. In the orthodox view, all of these episodes were a straightforward promotion of American principles.

  In recent years, this view has come to be challenged by a “revisionist” view held by scholars who, as Su puts it, “have begun to question the right’s claim to timelessness, universality and neutrality” (for my own review of this school, see here). Led by political scientist Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, anthropologist Saba Mahmood, and legal scholar Peter Danchin, this school of critics holds that religious freedom and the view of religion on which it is based is not universal but rather particular to the West and its history of Reformation and Enlightenment. Following the late French philosopher, Michel Foucault, they portray the United States’ promotion of these principles as little more than a neo-imperialist “project” that manifests American power. Proponents of this view make up the lion’s share of statements in a forum hosted here at The Immanent Frame.

  One can imagine a middle ground that eludes both the orthodox view’s idealism and the revisionist view’s reduction of religious freedom to power. Call it “power plus purpose.” In this view, the United States promotes religious freedom through its “preponderance of power,” to borrow the title of a prominent work in U.S. diplomatic history, and promotes religious freedom selectively according to the contours of this power, but does not promote religious freedom simply as a tool of its power. It is broadly in this middle zone that Su’s “complementary . . . new vantage point” is located.

  Her essential argument is that the United States established the international legal regime of religious freedom—consisting of both international conventions and national level law—through imperial tendencies, meaning asymmetric exercises of power. “International lawmaking,” she argues, “was not anathema to but rather facilitated and continues to provide a framework for [the United States’] global ascendancy.”

  Su, however, does not situate herself among Marxians, or American Realists, who view principles as little more than legitimations of economic or geostrategic interests, or Foucauldians, for whom principles of religious freedom would be forms of “knowledge-power.” Power alone cannot account for how U.S. religious freedom policy has been transformed, evolving from a colonialist civilizing mission to a component of spreading democracy to an element of a human rights policy. “Ideas matter,” Su declares as the “first and foremost” conclusion of her historical analysis in the final chapter. “Religious freedom forms part of that ever-changing, tractable, and yet comprehensive prism with which U.S. officials view the world inasmuch as it provided a means to achieve their purposes,” she elaborates. In setting forth her theoretical commitments in the introductory chapter, she avers that “the domestic American experience of religion and religious freedom was the font on which U.S. officials drew for their ideas on the ground abroad.” She also stresses the biographies of policymakers. She looks upon international religious freedom law as “an expression of American liberal ideology and handmaiden of its rise to world power.”

  Towards this mixed pursuit of power and purpose, Su’s normative sympathies are mixed. While she finds “hope and empowerment” in human rights language, she is suspicious of the “universality and neutrality” of religious freedom, which she believes is “no less protean, no less a political project, than other human rights.” Each of the episodes she documents, she believes, “illustrates the ambitions and the limits of what religious freedom promoted as law by an external power can achieve.” More strongly, she concludes that “perhaps the most important lessons to be found” lie in the “past wreckage” of this policy, and “not its dreams.”

  It is from these commitments that Su offers an original, nuanced, ideologically balanced, and colorful history of America’s promotion of religious freedom overseas since the early twentieth century. In the Philippines, the United States came to possess a colony despite its self-image as a liberal nation founded on self-determination. Needing to justify its holding both to the American public, which harbored a deep streak of anti-imperialism, as well to Filipinos, the United States took up religious liberty and lodged it in Philippine law.

  At the end of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson was largely responsible for ensuring religious freedom’s place in the minority protection treaties and the mandate policy of the League of Nations. Likewise, it was President Franklin Roosevelt who brought religious freedom into international discourse during and after the Second World War, first making it one of the “four freedoms” that served as U.S. war aims, then promoting it into the architecture of the United Nations system, and finally, giving religious freedom such prominence among international officials that, after his death, it would be included prominently in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In occupying Japan after the war, the United States wove religious freedom into Japanese law, including its constitution, as part of its effort to build democracy there.

  In the 1970s, religious freedom found a prominent place in the nascent human rights policy of the United States, especially through the Jackson-Vanik Amendment and the Helsinki Final Act. One of the unforeseen consequence of this policy is that it catalyzed domestic groups into greater involvement in religious freedom. After the Cold War, it was domestic lobbying that set in train the momentum that led to IRFA in 1998. Here, Su tells an admirably balanced story, avoiding the common criticisms that IRFA was a project of the Christian right (in fact, by the time of its passage it was supported by a diverse religious coalition) or that IRFA established a hierarchy of rights (in fact, it gave attention to a neglected right). She tells a similarly balanced story of the Bush Administration’s efforts to incorporate religious freedom into Iraq’s constitution and to prevent an Islamist regime during the U.S. occupation of Iraq following the war of 2003.

  What Su’s efforts yield is the first systematic account of the promotion of religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy. While she offers generalizations in the first and last chapters, her theoretical touch is light in the middle historical chapters, allowing the reader to take in the narrative of personalities, events, and ideas that shaped the export of religious freedom without denying the backdrop of power that made it possible. Exporting Freedom is thus an excellent source for anyone involved or interested in today’s debates on the place of religious freedom in the foreign policies of the United States and other Western powers.

  In two respects, though, the broad balances that Su strikes might be adjusted. Her stress on power is most convincing in episodes where the U.S. has occupied a country: the Philippines, Japan, and Iraq. In other respects, though, religious freedom seems distinctively disempowered and explainable almost solely by purposes. Since Congress elevated religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy through IRFA, religious freedom has suffered the fate that human rights normally do in U.S. policy: it is trumped by trade, the war on terrorism, and other more traditional interests. Veteran religious freedom watcher Thomas F. Farr opined in 2008 that religious freedom had become “quarantined” in the State Department human rights bureaucracy and ought to be expanded into a “core component” of U.S. foreign policy. This has not happened yet. Religious freedom officials spend their time instead documenting and addressing the persecution of Bahá’ís in Iran, Muslims in Gujarat, India, and Christians in Pakistan—all causes only loosely connected to U.S. power.

  Second, Su’s doubts about the universality and neutrality of religious freedom warrant being tempered. Whether religious freedom is a universal human principle is a philosophical and even theological question that cannot be answered by the history of U.S. foreign policy alone. The fact that religious freedom has been a policy of the world’s most powerful nation does not render the principle a mere manifestation of this nation’s power or purposes or rule out it being a natural human right. Religious freedom was articulated centuries before the founding of the United States or even the onset of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the movements that allegedly incubated the principle for American appropriation. Scholars like Timothy Samuel Shah and Robert Wilken have located the human right of religious freedom in the thought of the first centuries of the Christian Church (see here). Jewish, Catholic, and Islamic justifications for religious freedom are available, as are more philosophical defenses of the concept. There are grounds then, for thinking that religious freedom is far wider in its validity than the power and purposes of the United States. Whether this is actually the case is beyond the scope of this generally superb new book.

  Tags: International Religious Freedom Act, religious freedom

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