James Diddams: Our next speaker I’m happy to introduce is Judd Birdsall, who is a professor of theology and religious studies at Georgetown University. So please, everyone, welcome Judd. 

Judd Birdsall: Well, thank you, James, for the introduction. Thanks to Mark Tooley for the invitation to be here today. Welcome to all of you, especially those who are joining us from out of town. A few years ago, I attended an event at a foreign ministry outside the United States.

The event was in a lovely room, kind of like this one, but without the American flags and the American heroes and the apotheosis of George Washington in the room. But in that room, a senior diplomatic official was introducing a more junior official. And as part of the introduction, he said, she is a member of our foreign ministry’s Christian fellowship group, so she comes to this position, focused on religious freedom, already religiously literate.

And I remember thinking to myself silently in my mind at the time, maybe, but not necessarily. And I wondered what this senior official meant by religiously literate. And I wondered if he would highlight competency in religious literacy when introducing a colleague working on any other portfolio other than, in this case, religious freedom.

So today in my remarks, I want to address three questions that arise from that little anecdote. First, what is religious literacy? Second, how is it relevant to national security and foreign policy? And third, what advantages or possibly disadvantages do we Christians have as it relates to religious literacy in world affairs? 

So first, religious literacy. Take a second to think about that in your own minds. What is religious literacy? What answers or images come to your mind? Maybe you answered very briefly in your own mind that religious literacy is knowing about the beliefs of major world religions. So the Ten Commandments, the Seven Sacraments, the Five Pillars, the Four Noble Truths, stuff like that. And as an aside, if you actually know the Ten Commandments or the Seven Sacraments or the Five Pillars of Islam or the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, you are way ahead of the students that I teach.

At the beginning of every semester, I give my students an unannounced pop quiz with very basic questions about major world religions. And all my students are very bright, they’re talented in lots of ways, but they all fail this quiz, and most of them fail it spectacularly. So I just use it as an ungraded diagnostic assessment for their own humbling, I suppose, and for my own sort of awareness of what I’m dealing with in the classroom.

For instance, in response to the question, what is the holy book of Islam? One student wrote the Toran, which apparently is a fusion of the Torah and the Quran that I haven’t come across yet. Particularly for the Catholics in the audience, in response to the question, list as many of the Seven Sacraments as you can, one Catholic student just wrote, my catechism teacher is going to kill me. Hopefully not, because that catechism teacher knows the Ten Commandments, presumably, and knows the sixth one, thou shalt not kill, and I think Mark LiVecche would agree that not knowing the Seven Sacraments is not just cause for killing somebody.

In response to the question, list as many of the Ten Commandments as you can, one student just wrote, thou shalt not steal, et cetera. Another one wrote, the gist is don’t sin, I think. And another one wrote, don’t cheat on your significant other which must be from a very contemporary Bible translation I’m not familiar with.

So I used the quiz to underscore how little the average American or even Americans at top schools know about these different religions, and yet we so often hear people very confidently pontificating about evangelical voters or Muslim extremists or Buddhist nationalists without having the foggiest idea what evangelicals and Muslims and Buddhists actually believe in. Of course, there’s plenty of evangelicals, Muslims, and Buddhists who don’t have the foggiest idea what their own traditions actually believe and practice. So we need more religious literacy, but what exactly is it? There’s a range of different models that are helpful here.

I find it useful to think of religious literacy as involving three interrelated, mutually reinforcing dimensions. First, understanding religion in general. Second, understanding specific religious traditions in their specific contexts. And third, cultivating the ability to engage across religious differences. So first, religion in general. I’m gonna spend a chunk of time here because it’s so often passed over to get to the five pillars, four noble truths sort of stuff.

The stuff I ask on my quiz. But I think it’s helpful to first zoom way out to consider what is religion in the first place and relatedly, why are we religious? Again, here, there’s many definitions of religion on offer. We’ll never settle that debate.

I won’t in the next 15 minutes. But it’s useful to be aware of some of the broad categories of the debate. Some talk about various characteristics that religions tend to have. Belief in supernatural beings, temples, priests, sacred texts, sacred time, morals, rituals, that sort of thing. And if you have enough of these characteristics, you’re a religion. If you don’t have enough of them, whatever that number is, you’re not a religion.

Some focus on the substance of religion, namely belief in some sort of supernatural to differentiate religion from ideology or philosophy. Others focus on the function of religion, namely community formation, cohesion, political legitimacy, and so on. My preferred approach following Emile Durkheim is to bring together the substance and the function.

So religions are communities built around beliefs in the supernatural. Not a perfect definition, but I think a pretty good workable definition. At some point, we just have to use shorthand words like religion.

Otherwise, we’re using long, descriptive phrases all the time, which gets clunky. So a related question is why do we do this? Why do we build these communities? Why are we religious? Here, again, a variety of explanations. For a Christian explanation, I think of the famous line from Augustine’s Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

So in a sense, we’re created for a relationship with God, created to be religious. And Augustine is making a universal claim here, and that’s exactly what we find. Every known human culture, past and present, has had something like religion.

And we can think of religion as a universal positive adaptation to life. So if religion fosters group cohesion, more cohesive groups are able to withstand harsh environments, outcompete less cohesive groups, their genes get passed on and on and on until you have this universal phenomenon of religion. People who work on religion and international relations often substantiate the importance of their work by citing data from the Pew Research Center, namely that 84% of the world’s population identifies with some religious tradition, and that’s all good.

But we could also say that religion matters because we are a 100% religious species. Even the most committed naturalist or materialist can’t shake his innate religious psychology. We all sacralize certain things and form or join communities of people who share those same sacred beliefs, whether it’s God or nature or the nation or the LA Dodgers or human rights or a politician or athlete or rock star, whatever it is, we sacralize things, we idolize things, and we create communities around those things.

Now, in addition to exploring what religion is and why we’re so religious, in the context of our topic today, religion and world affairs, it’s also useful to explore the assumptions that we hold about religion. For instance, I ask my students to tell me on a scale from one to 10 how significant is religion in world affairs, how politically significant is religion in world affairs, and then also on a scale from one to 10 how good or bad is religion in world affairs, what’s its normative impact in world affairs. Clergy, theologians, leaders of faith-based groups, devout lay folks, tend to view religion as significant and positive, or at least their own faith as significant and positive.

Critics of religion, like the New Atheists, tend to view religion as significant and negative. The subtitle of Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 book, God Is Not Great, was How Religion Poisons Everything. So pretty significant, pretty negative.

Most of my former colleagues at the State Department, they would regard religion as fairly insignificant, at least as it compares to those sort of serious, grown-up material issues like economics, politics, military competition, and so on. And if religion got onto their radar at all, it would likely be as something negative, as a negative force. So a conference on Christianity and national security that might be assumed to be a conference about the threat of Christianity to national security.

Some of my students hedge their bets on these questions and just answer five. Religion is not super significant, not totally insignificant, and maybe it’s a mix of good and bad, and they just hedge and say five. I think there’s a lot of people who think this way.

A lot of people view religion in world affairs as perhaps something akin to nuclear weapons, what we just heard about. I’ve never heard anyone make that analogy directly, but I think people sort of implicitly have that kind of understanding. Nuclear energy is just one of many sources of power.

It can cause great harm, great good. Nuclear energy can electrify a city, it can destroy a city. It has no greenhouse emissions, that’s good, but it produces radioactive material that can be used in weapons, and it has to be stored very, very carefully for thousands of years, and some might argue we’re just maybe better off without it.

Similarly, lots of good and bad has been done in the name of religion, so it has to be regulated very carefully, perhaps restricted very severely. Maybe we’re just better off without it. The problem with this way of thinking is that religion is an enormously complex social phenomenon connected in all sorts of complicated and dynamic ways with everything else in life.

You can’t go out on the street and say, oh, there’s religion just on its own. It’s always connected to language, culture, ethnicity, nationality, politics, law, education, everything else in life. It’s always bundled up with all of those other things, so there’s no possible way to measure how good or bad religion is, and what’s considered good or bad is going to vary a bit from person to person, place to place.

I find it more useful to think of religion as something more akin to water. Again, not a perfect analogy, but like water, religion is just a fundamental universal part of life woven into our daily lives in all sorts of obvious and subtle ways. Yes, sometimes water can be destructive, as we’ve seen this hurricane season, but it makes no sense to ask on a scale from one to 10 how good or bad is water.

It’s just not a question that one would ask. Now here, some folks might extend the water analogy and claim that our particular religious traditions are all parts of the same big ocean, and that view has diplomatic implications. The goal might be to get disparate, perhaps antagonistic religious traditions to see how they are ultimately of the same essence, or ultimately climbing the same mountain, perhaps from different paths, to use a different but related metaphor.

This approach is well-intentioned. I’m not sure it’s right, not sure it’s super helpful. In some cases, it is really important and valuable to emphasize similarities between faiths.

And thankfully, religions do, unsurprisingly, have a lot of ethical commonalities. A religion that doesn’t teach charity, honesty, integrity, wisdom, those sorts of things, is just not going to grow, not going to endure. But at a theological level, and thus at the level of how we imagine the world and our role in it, religions are profoundly different.

And so the task in public life is not to tell religious folks that they’re actually all climbing the same mountain, but to encourage them to find resources within their own traditions for how they can live peacefully and productively with a whole mountain range of different religious traditions. And this view adds, I think, particular importance to the second element of religious literacy, understanding each religious tradition in its particularity and in its particular contexts. And for this kind of religious literacy, there’s lots of great resources out there, books and articles, even YouTube and Wikipedia, which I feel embarrassed to say as a professor, but I say, yeah, go ahead.

Ask ChatGPT and Wikipedia to tell you about the five pillars or the four noble truths. But I always share a warning for one of my favorite proponents of religious literacy, Rainn Wilson, the actor who played Dwight Schrute on the TV show, The Office. I make a lot of references to The Office in my lectures, and I find it has less and less connection with my students.

None of my pop culture references are landing with my students anymore, and I’m feeling very old. But in any case, I think they know who Dwight Schrute was. Several years ago, I attended a talk by Rainn Wilson, the actor, just up the road at American University.

He was talking about his own religion, the Baha’i faith. And the only thing I remember from his talk was his plea, don’t Wikipedia my religion. And my sort of take on that, or my application of that plea is, actually, do use Wikipedia when it’s useful, but don’t just spend a few minutes on Wikipedia reading about the Baha’i faith, for instance, and think you’ve got it, think you sort of understand what it means and feels like to be Baha’i.

There are millions of Baha’i in the world, and like a religion of any scale, the Baha’i faith is a diverse, global community of people who share certain beliefs, practices, histories, hopes, norms, all the rest of it. And those are going to be expressed in some different ways in different contexts. And you can really only capture that sort of lived religion of this case in the Baha’i faith by spending considerable time engaging with Baha’i faith practitioners in community.

And that leads to the third element of religious literacy, the practical knowledge to engage beyond religious divides. This could include the sort of traditional interfaith dialogue, but it can be so much more than that. Within the context of foreign policy, it can involve the capacity to fruitfully work alongside diverse colleagues in a government agency or a think tank or an NGO, where a plurality of perspectives and networks is going to be a real plus.

As a Protestant, I have something to contribute, hopefully, but my Catholic and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu colleagues can add perspectives and draw on networks that I never can, that I never could as a Protestant. And that American Posts abroad, religious engagement can involve partnering with religious groups and faith-based organizations to advance all sorts of shared goals around peace building, conflict mitigation, humanitarian assistance, development work, environmental protection, fighting persecution that we heard about yesterday, fighting trafficking, corruption, and all sorts of impediments that work against human flourishing. So I’m thrilled that last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, unveiled its policy on strategic religious engagement to take this work to the next level.

The Department of Defense encourages and equips its chaplains to engage religious communities abroad, not just administer to their own co-religionists. The State Department has a unit devoted to religious engagement, and multiple U.S. government agencies offer their employees trainings in religious literacy. So more work needs to be done, and perhaps some of you will be involved in this work in the future.

It would be lovely if you were. But I’m delighted there’s already so much good work being done within the U.S. government to enhance our foreign policy professionals’ ability to analyze the role of religion in world affairs and to engage religious actors in pursuit of American foreign policy interests. We could cite any number of countries or issues that illustrate how religious literacy is intensely relevant for foreign policy, but just consider Russia’s war in Ukraine, which we’ve already heard about a bit today.

I’ve heard thoughtful commentators refer to that conflict as a religious war, and others refer to it as not a religious war. And certainly there are a lot of seemingly non-religious factors at play, most fundamentally a territorial dispute, the principle of national sovereignty, NATO and EU enlargement, billions of dollars or euros being spent on aid and weapons and so on. But also, the conflict is saturated with religious ideas and images and institutions on both sides.

The idea of the Russian world, Ruskiy Mir, involves a sacralization of Russian history, Russian identity, Russian territory, Russia’s mission in the world. Our Patriarch Kirill has done a lot to use Russian orthodoxy to mobilize and justify the Russian war effort. On the other side, President Zelensky has talked about Ukraine’s spiritual independence as the Ukrainian government has been cracking down on the historically Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

I’ve heard persecuted Christians from the Russian-controlled territories refer to it as a spiritual battle. So you have lots of religion, lots of religious institutions on both sides, and it would be a detriment to US foreign policy if we didn’t take those factors into account and didn’t engage with key religious actors. Finally, what advantages or disadvantages do Christians have in this work of analyzing religious factors and engaging religious actors?

 If we think back to my opening anecdote, the official who attended her foreign ministry’s Christian fellowship group presumably had three advantages. First, a familiarity with Christianity. Second, an experiential understanding of what it means to be religious. And third, presumably a disposition of taking religion seriously.

And these are all significant advantages. Christianity is the largest, most international, arguably the most politically influential religion in the world. To the second one, an experiential understanding of what it feels like to be religious can help this Christian diplomat understand the motivations of religiously inspired people in other societies.

And to the third, a general disposition of taking religion seriously is important, especially in secular bureaucracies that tend to downplay or ignore religion or treat it as some sort of symptom of underlying socioeconomic causes. But these same advantages can also bring corresponding pitfalls. The Christian diplomat does not necessarily have much knowledge of non-Christian traditions or even Christian traditions other than her own.

She might be prone to treating religions in highly un-nuanced or essentialized ways. For instance, she might be very quick to exonerate Christianity or her brand of Christianity for many accusations of wrongdoing, but very quick to blame other religions, say Islam, for violence or oppression done in its name. In terms of experiential knowledge, assuming she’s Protestant, like myself, she might project her experience of Protestant Christianity onto the religious other. And Protestantism is probably the most individualistic, cerebral, doctrine-oriented religion in the world, and many other religions are much more focused around community and ritual with doctrine relatively unimportant.

 Last, the virtue of taking religion seriously can be a vice if it leads to overplaying religion’s complex, skewing analysis by privileging religious actors, skewing engagement by privileging religious actors over other actors in international affairs. The solution to minimizing attention to religion isn’t necessarily maximizing attention to religion.

Peter Mandeville, who’s a former colleague of mine from the State Department, who’s now the director of USAID’s faith-based office, coined the phrase right-sizing religion, and that’s the idea that religion is not nothing, it’s not everything, but in any given situation, there’s going to be something of a religious dimension that needs to be analyzed, a religious community that needs to be engaged, whether it’s in the context of a violent conflict or a social movement or a political process. And so the task of scholars, analysts, diplomats, students of world affairs is to develop a nuanced, contextualized understanding of the complex, dynamic roles religious individuals, institutions, and ideas might be playing in, say, the war in Ukraine or the global environmental movement or the US election, which I hear is coming up soon. So to conclude, a diplomat that attends a Christian fellowship group, which I did while I was at the State Department, may or may not be religiously literate.

She will likely have some advantages, but also perhaps some potential pitfalls as she considers and engages the religious dimension of any particular foreign policy issue. So my hope is that all of us will leverage the advantages that we have as Christians, avoid the pitfalls that we might face, and cultivate the sort of robust religious literacy that will equip us to produce religion-attentive analysis and to productively engage religious actors in the pursuit of American foreign policy interests.

Thank you so much. 

Q&A

Question: Hi, I’m JJ Hicka from Taylor University. I had a question more about how practically you in your role interact with religion in the State Department.

When Cordwin talks about, you touched on it, this folk religion idea that you can have these pillars of Islam and the Four Noble Truths, but then the actual practice, you have wide varying schools of Islam and all other sorts of faith, and it’s very culturally located and tied together. How do you navigate that when trying to create policies surrounding religion or advise in policies surrounding religion, and knowing that everything is somewhat limited in its scope and cultural interactions? 

Answer: Yeah, that’s a great question, and nice to see someone from Taylor. It’s a place I’ve been a few times. Is this a Taylor table? Okay, well, welcome. Great to have you here. Yeah, great question.

So if you want to engage, let’s say, a Muslim group, and in a particular place, let’s say, Northern Nigeria, you quickly go on Wikipedia, look up the five pillars, and say, “Okay, I’m ready to engage Muslims in Northern Nigeria.” Obviously, that’s not going to cut it. You need contextual knowledge.

Maybe start with Wikipedia, but then you have to do a lot more because, as you point out, every expression of religion is going to be contextual, and often, what we read about Wikipedia, about a religion in general, is not really going to be all that helpful in navigating those relationships in a particular context.

I remember my dad saying that he, my parents were missionaries in Japan, and after four years living in Japan, they then went back to the States for grad school. My dad was at Harvard Divinity School, and he was taking courses on Buddhism and Shintoism, and thought to himself, what he was learning in those classes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had so little to do with what actually goes on in Japan today.

It’s in the background, of course, but so little to do with the day-to-day lives of most Japanese that he encounters. I think the basic point would be to bear that in mind, that you can start with the religious literacy stuff, the obvious stuff, but then you have to go much deeper and actually engage directly with people so you know really how they imagine the world and what shapes them and what motivates them, and it’s never going to be direct from belief to behavior. That’s often how religious people talk.

Why did you build this hospital? I was inspired by the Lord or scripture or whatever. I think that’s part of it, but also there’s a whole range of other cultural, socioeconomic sort of factors that shape how people view their faith, and their faith also then shapes those factors as well, and we have to take all that into account, which makes the work of diplomacy or engagement a lot messier, but I think a lot more fascinating as well. 

Question: Hi, my name is Faith. I’m from Asbury Theological Seminary. I appreciate your office references, but Durkheim, he operates under the assumption that society exists because of religion. There is no society if there is not a religion, and I’ve always found it fascinating on how that correlates with communism because communism wants to eradicate religion, but at the same time, communism still functions as a functional religion, so it kind of goes back to what Durkheim is saying about there has to be an inherent kind of religion for a society, and I just didn’t know what your thoughts might be on that.

Answer: Yeah, well, any question that involves Durkheim and the office, well done. Happy to entertain that one. Yeah, so that when I teach about religion, I highlight the supernatural or the metaphysical or the supra-empirical so that we’re not defining religion so broadly that it basically can be anything and everything.

Lots of different disciplines have this challenge. You think about art, what is art? You can define it really, really narrowly so it’s just pretty paintings, I suppose, or define it so broadly that it’s everything in this room and everything around us all the time. That’s kind of hard to study.

You’ve gotta delimit your subject at some point, and so for me, community plus metaphysical or supernatural belief, I think, is useful. Then my cheeky students say, but how big is a community? Is it one person, is it two people? And I say, if I started the religion of Bertsalism and nobody joined, it was just my own self-delusions, that probably wouldn’t be a religion. It’s not big enough.

So at some point, you become a community. But even as we sort of delimit what religion is, to your point, we don’t wanna lose sight that there’s lots of functional replacements for religion that might not have the supernatural, though with communism, you still have something like the superhuman. There’s a telos to communism.

There’s an order to the world. There’s a progression to the world that is superhuman, if not supernatural. I guess that’s how I would talk about it, yeah.

But to bear in mind, even if you’re not talking about identifiable world religions, there’s still functional religion replacements out there. 

Question: Hello, I’m Rosemary Heath from Liberty University. This is a very specific and practitioner-oriented question. If you don’t have any specific answers, that’s okay. What are some phrases or specific approaches to initiating a discussion about an individual’s religion which de-escalates a situation in which the other party feels under threat? 

Answer: Oh, great question. Wonderful question. Well, one, the most immediate thing that comes to mind is if you’re engaging the religious other, a question that, at least for Americans and for those of us who have Protestant backgrounds, the question that most naturally comes to mind for a lot of us is, hey, what do you believe? But that’s rarely, if ever, the most helpful question to ask because, again, to my earlier point, belief is relatively less important in most other religious traditions. It’s much more about community and ritual and experience.

And also, when we talk about belief or reduce religion to belief, we also, at least implicitly, are treating what is in your head related to the supernatural and how did you get there as if it was an individual cerebral activity, as if someone just kind of looked at the whole range of religious options and said, let me think about all these and I’ll pick that one. Nobody does that. There are particular moments of openness in people’s lives, particularly college, particularly freshman year of college, but in general, people don’t sort of look at the full range of religious options and then study them all with an open mind.

We all come from somewhere. Nobody is from nowhere. So, ask them about their communal setting, what community they are apart of, and what they like about their community. That’s a much friendlier way to get into it.

Another one that comes to mind, now you didn’t ask about the religious freedom issue in particular, but also avoiding terminology that is going to now resonate or even alienate. I worked in the religious freedom office for five years at the State Department. When I was overseas, I rarely used the term religious freedom because its foreign to a lot of people. For some, it’s the combination of two bad words: religion and freedom, two things that both have emotional baggage to them. Slam them together and you have a really alienating word or an unfamiliar word to many people. So, finding culturally appropriate or cognate terms around equality, diversity, inclusion, or whatever it might be could facilitate conversation. Wonderful question. Thank you.

Answer: Thank you so much. I’m an intern from the Religious Freedom Institute. Thank you for sharing your experience in Japan. I’m actually Korean and was raised in Japan, so your experience was fascinating for me.

I want to ask a question about my research that is familiar to the last question. I have a big concern since communism is the most proactive in East Asia, specifically in North Korea and China. As a Korean, I see one of the reasons as the history of the East-Asian political system having dynasties for thousands of years. The dynasties came from East-Asian feudalism, which led to the communism. They are similar. That’s why I’m researching religious freedom in Asia, and I believe religious freedom can block the communization of East Asia. The problem is that Asians are still unfamiliar with religious freedom. So, do you think that the premise of the religious freedom, that we are a religious species with a universal nature, can be significant objections to communist ideas, communist leaders, or East Asian countries that are still unfamiliar with religious freedom?

Answer: Good question. I don’t know if I have a great answer to that one in particular. One thing that comes to mind is that having grown up in Japan I am proud of what Japan has accomplished. Referring again to PEW research, they publish annual data on religious restrictions, which is not a perfect measure for religious freedom violations but restrictions on religion around the world. America is very far from number one in the world. A couple of the countries that are closest to number one, that is having the lowest restrictions on religion, are Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and a few other places in that neighborhood. So, whenever people bring up East Asian mentality, Confucianism, collectivism, or other factors that might be presented as potential barriers to religious freedom, you can point to societies that have successfully navigated that East Asian cultural milieu and found their ways to religious liberty, including being some of the leading countries in the world.

That’s a brief, partial response to some of the questions you raised. Thank you.

Question: Good morning. Lane Kramer from Regent University, a PhD. student. Thank you so much for championing religious literacy. I really think it’s so important as we know our own identity. And you prefaced that this is not enough. We need to not only know our own literacy but do the engagement. You mentioned inter-faith dialogue, and I wanted to ask what you mean by inter-faith dialogue versus multicultural or multi-faith dialogue.

Answer: Well, inter-faith dialogue as in people from different religious traditions talking together presumably about their faith, its commonalities, and differences. It gets a little tricky when you have governments involved because governments don’t have the competency to engage in theological discussions. Perhaps governments can play the role of convening those sorts of things. Different religious traditions engaging one another including on issues related to their differences with governments mostly staying out of it.

And also, in certain settings people roll their eyes at the idea of inter-faith dialogue. In places with much interaction and freedom it is sometimes not all that meaningful or appeals to a very small subset of the population. In other places convening and encouraging those dialogues are enormously important because it may be the first time that antagonistic communities have ever been in the same room together. It happens all the time in liberal democracies. It happens rarely in other places where you have authoritarian governments or majoritarian monopolistic religious groups that make that kind of dialogue hard.

Thank you.