The following lecture was recorded during Providence’s 2017 Christianity and National Security Conference.

Jennifer Marshall discusses the relationship between US culture and US foreign policy. She argues that the character of our culture in the United States influences our capacity to lead on the world stage and that international dynamics influence the ability of the US as a domestic polity to direct the course of our culture, particularly with regard to life, family, and religious liberty. Marshall argues that there should be coherence between US foreign policy and the principles and institutions of the constitutional order it exists to defend.

Well, good afternoon. It’s a real honor and pleasure to be here with you today. I am truly encouraged. Congratulations, Mark and Mark, on this excellent conference. I’m encouraged by the kind of conversation we’re having, and there’s so much wisdom, grace, and courage in the foreign policy scholars and practitioners who are here. I hope that those of you who are students will consider joining the guild. It’s a fine one and just really an honor to be in conversation with them.

As Mark mentioned, I am actually in my day job in domestic policy, and so perhaps not properly in that guild but definitely a friend of it. I did study statecraft and world politics at the Institute of World Politics, so good to be back seeing many former colleagues and friends here and interacting with all of you. Since I do deal in domestic policy, it may be a question: what’s the relationship here? Well, I want to make that clear up front that I have always thought that the character of our culture as the United States of America very much influences our capacity to lead on the world stage. That is a connection that is deeply important.

A second aspect is that I am, as someone who focuses on domestic policy, increasingly concerned and have been over the last decade about the ways in which international dynamics are increasingly influencing our ability as a domestic polity to direct the course of our culture with regard to life and family and religious liberty and marriage and these kinds of issues. So my comments are going to focus on that kind of an interaction today.

Now, those of you who are students of foreign policy will know that for decades we have been having a debate in our foreign policy circles about whether we should state the mission of foreign policy of the United States more in terms of our national interests or more in terms of spreading our ideals abroad. I’m not going to speak to that today, just to acknowledge that it’s there and it’s kind of an interminable perennial debate among schools of thought in the foreign policy circles.

But one thing, wherever you come down on that, I think that we should all be clear on is that U.S. foreign policy exists to defend the United States of America. Now that’s obviously true, but it has a deeper meaning than we might obviously think about. We need a clearer idea of what the object of that protection is, what is the United States of America, what does it stand for?

So I’d like to start with what I think is a pretty simple and straightforward idea: that there should be coherence between U.S. foreign policy and the principles and institutions and ideals of the constitutional order it exists to defend. And I’m particularly interested in pursuing that coherence around ideas concerning respect for life, for family, for civil society, and religious liberty.

Now, that coherence, I think, should be evident in our bilateral relations, including our general foreign policy, our public diplomacy, our foreign aid. It should be obvious in the extent to which we engage with multilateral organizations, the United Nations and its satellite organizations, and it should be evident in personnel matters, in our representation of what the United States is abroad. So let me go through each of those, and then I’ll be interested to interact with your questions.

First, overall foreign policy and how we should see coherence with respect to our domestic policy and our national character. Cold wars of ideas will be a constant reality in the national security and foreign policy strategic environment. And that means not only that policymakers must continually assess this strategic dimension but also that our ideas about our own political order must be in good fighting shape, to quote one scholar of foreign policy writing in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Well, we need to reflect on whether our ideas are in good fighting shape, and I would argue that we have some work to do there.

But an added challenge in the global battle of ideas for us as the United States is that in a free society, our general self-concept of our founding principles and institutions is more susceptible to erosion of purpose and meaning than under that same understanding is in more authoritarian regimes, where such purpose and meaning is enforced by the regime.

America is a nation built on an idea, specifically that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. And America’s founders designed a limited government and looked to family and churches and civil society mediating institutions to promote the order and habits that would be necessary for a self-governing people.

In recent decades, we have seen the advance of political platforms that have succeeded in expanding our national government at the expense of that civil society, crowding out family, weakening our neighborhoods, marginalizing institutions of religion. This, in turn, contributes to a lack of shared understanding of the institutions and ideals that constitute our national character. So in particular, the role of religion and religious freedom in America’s order is now very poorly understood.

One reason for that is the idea of the strict separation of church and state that has become prevalent in the last half-century. And this, of course, is an outlook that leads to the conclusion that government should have nothing to do with religion, it encourages the view that religion should be privatized, personal, not having to do with public policy or anything to do with international affairs, for that matter.

A second reason for the lack of policymakers’ understanding about the significance of religion is the assumption that political and social progress will ultimately marginalize religion, and we will progress beyond that and science and other types of perfection will negate the need for religion. Of course, the data does not show that, neither here and especially not abroad. The persistence of religion in human society is quite evident. So a lack of understanding of religion’s continued relevance in our own constitutional order is very likely to create blinders about religion’s significance abroad.

If policymakers approach foreign affairs with a merely materialistic mindset and they’re unfamiliar with a religious interpretive framework for human action and motivation, they’re going to be ill-equipped to assess and to engage effectively with highly religious populations around the globe.

Tom Farr mentions the International Religious Freedom Act, which is approaching its 20th anniversary, and he well assessed the fact that we have a lack of progress on our hands. I would add and amplify a point he made that we have yet to see progress in integrating the International Religious Freedom Office’s assessments into overall foreign policy analysis, and there’s much more that could be done in that regard.

Now, the nomination of Governor Sam Brownback as the Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom is encouraging for sure, and the proposed better alignment of personnel and resources under the Ambassador-at-Large proposed as part of the State Department reorganization that’s on offer right now, these are promising developments as well.

With new leadership, with new alignment, the office and the ambassador should be better integrated into the overall policymaking functions of the State Department. Unfortunately, to date, the office has served mostly as a human rights monitoring agency. But U.S. foreign policy should rely more on the strategic insights that can be drawn from this office’s assessment.

The work of the International Religious Freedom Office should be better connected with foreign policy overall, and it should also be better connected with our efforts on public diplomacy. And let me turn to that at this point.

U.S. public diplomacy aims to impart to foreign audiences rather an understanding and appreciation of American ideals, principles, institutions, and policy. This means that U.S. public diplomacy must be firmly grounded in those principles and ideals, including concerning religion, the American model of religious liberty, and its continued significance of religious practice in our communities. These are defining attributes of the United States, these features characterize America as much as our market economy and our democratic political system.

As the late Michael Novak taught us, often religion has greatly influenced U.S. history, from the earliest settlements to the great social justice movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, even, the vast majority of Americans would say that religion is at least somewhat important to them, and we see faith-based organizations very active in helping those in need, that’s been very evident in the wake of the hurricanes that have afflicted the Gulf this year.

Religious liberty is an American success story. The vibrancy of religious practice here in the United States is a success story that should be told around the world. And one of the major reasons for the success of the American experiment is that it allowed citizens to be able to reconcile their allegiance to the state with their ultimate allegiance to God, without forcing them to abandon that ultimate allegiance or to moderate it.

This habit of reconciling civil and religious authorities, as well as the process of harmonizing interests of competing religious groups, has helped to fortify the discipline of self-government here in the United States. Meanwhile, the moral authority exercised by religious congregations, by families, other private associations, helps to maintain limited government.

The American founders were frequently stating how virtue and religion are essential to maintaining this freedom in society, these are the moral conditions of freedom, they might say. So what does this mean for public diplomacy? Well, it means that the message itself is even more important than the modes and techniques for communicating that message around the world.

In this 21st-century war of ideas, it’s critical that U.S. public diplomacy rely on the bedrock of America’s founding principles. So pop culture, on which public diplomacy in past years has been too often tempted to rely, cannot do justice to American ideals in the fight against potent ideologies that present strong, coherent, and deeply misguided explanations of the nature and purpose of human existence.

We are in a very grave battle of ideas, and we need to take it seriously. In other words, this war of ideas calls for stronger substance than, say, Coca-Cola and Lady Gaga. It requires clear, compelling, coherent articulation of the principles and institutions that define the American order. This is most especially true when we are engaging through our public diplomacy populations who are themselves deeply religious.

U.S. public diplomacy must convey to majority religious communities that adopting a policy of religious freedom can be consistent with p

Under the new administration and with US Ambassador Nikki Haley at the UN, there’s an opportunity for leadership to promote policies respecting life, family, and religious liberty. To effectively advance these policies, the US must advocate for reforms within the UN bureaucracy. A significant concern lies with the UN’s treaty monitoring bodies, which often stretch policy interpretations beyond treaty language.

For instance, the committee monitoring the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights interpreted a right to “sexual and reproductive health” as including a right to abortion, despite the covenant’s text. Similarly, the Human Rights Committee has implied a right to abortion under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, contradicting its explicit protection of the right to life. As the largest financial contributor to the UN, the US has a vested interest in steering the organization back to the core principles of human rights without stretching into liberal social policies.

Personnel decisions are crucial; appointees must align with policies that uphold life, family, and religious liberty. This includes leadership at the State Department and specialized training for Foreign Service officers on these issues. Governor Sam Brownback’s nomination to lead the religious freedom office signals a positive step, but broader reforms are needed across all levels of diplomatic engagement. This includes appointing officials who can effectively represent these values in international forums and delegations. It’s essential to ensure that US positions at the UN and other international bodies reflect and defend these principles, crucial for global stability and domestic order.

Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you. I’ll be happy to answer questions.

Oh boy, in the back. Hi, I’m Miranda again. I’m sorry, I don’t know if I necessarily have a question, but I just wanted to tell you that I really appreciate what you said about our perspectives as Americans on religious freedom and the family unit. It’s interesting how these perspectives influence how other countries perceive us. I’ve never thought about that before, I guess because I just get so caught up in what America is doing. When I think about foreign policy, I immediately think about war and terrorism. I’ve never considered the role that we play, just as an example, and how we deal with these issues sets a precedent with other countries.

So, thank you for pointing that out. I can’t believe I never thought about it like that before. You’re welcome, thank you. That’s great. And think about this: if we don’t think about these things in a concerted way, the global impressions of America, driven by Hollywood and commercial enterprises, may not accurately represent our values.

Mixed messages, right? We would find something lacking in some representations of American society. Ted Mormon, I’ve heard in some instances in some countries, it’s often multinational corporations that tend to be a larger representation of our government and our society than state representation. I’m just curious, what would you say to that in terms of our policy and kind of representing America well through corporations involved in international enterprise? Right, I can’t speak to that empirically. I don’t have evidence one way or the other to the claim. But just watching how corporations have gotten more involved in our domestic policy debates in recent years. Corporations have come out against religious freedom policies in Arizona and Indiana and North Carolina. You’ve heard about some of these controversies, no doubt. I would not doubt that there are some dynamics that happened around the world in some of the same directions.

What I think that says is that there must be a proactive effort on the part of leaders in public diplomacy and other elements of statecraft to think deliberately about using those tools to communicate a perhaps more full and grounded view of the American order. We have to think deliberately about that. This does not happen automatically. And in a social media-driven world, in a globalized communications world, messages move much faster. And I don’t think that our public diplomacy and information efforts have kept up with that. So it’s got to be a deliberate strategy. And I don’t think we’re keeping up with them.

I’m going to ask a slight segue question that I’ve been trying to find an avenue to do so this is gonna work. You talked about military personnel. I’ve loved your material in the past. She’s written for Providence. You should check out that issue on assigning women into direct ground combat roles in the US military. How does that affect the conversation about how Christians might think about national security, military or personnel issues, things like this?

Yeah, so my closing thoughts on personnel were very much in keeping with that. That military personnel decisions matter too. And the recent decision to open all combat roles to women has very significant consequences and repercussions for society that we may not be thinking through as much as we should. In the article that Marc’s referring to, I referred to it as perhaps not breaking a glass ceiling, but more like moving a load-bearing wall of society. And have we counted the costs of that?

So for instance, one thing that particularly concerns me is that there was a case in 1981 that went all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court decided over the issue of male-only Selective Service registration. The desire of the plaintiff was to have everyone register, men and women. The court did not do that and kept male-only Selective Service registration because it said it deferred to the fact that Congress had defined combat roles as only open to males. So the draft policy was consistent with the combat policy.

The change in that, therefore, removes the core argument that the court respected for not opening up draft registration to women. So these are the kinds of cultural consequences that I do not think we’ve had an adequate debate about in the United States. That opening the policy change to open all combat roles to women may lead to court challenges that seek for registration for the draft of all, including women. So that’s the reason I think it fits in the stream of thought that I was trying to spell out here today is that we need to be careful about the kinds of decisions that are made in foreign policy and national security circles, such as empowering the United Nations to do certain things, because that has a feedback loop that then comes to affect our domestic freedom to make our own social policy. Similarly, this opening of combat roles may have a feedback loop that the consequences go much further than the original intention was. So we need to be aware of those replications and repercussions and have a better conversation between domestic social policy experts and foreign policy experts to make sure we’re thinking about those consequences.

Thank you, Jennifer. This was great. I helped work on the International Religious Freedom Act way back when. And I’m talking about personnel. One of the greatest horror stories of that time, and Jean, Jean, you’ll love this too, was that when we were talking about the need for foreign service people to be trained in the culture of Christians in other countries, and the nominee to be the ambassador to China had never heard of a house church before. So in terms of that, what you were saying about helping them to be educated in constitutional rights of our own country, have you talked to any of your other colleagues who work on domestic religious liberty constitutional issues about the need for, like, some kind of task force to push for change in the Foreign Service?

Great suggestion. And I think the time is ripe right now with the State Department reorganization. It’s an opportunity for us to bring this perspective to the table. I do think too that we need to be thinking about better overall education across the federal government about the constitutional order that public servants are pledged to defend and to serve. So yeah, point taken. Very, very good recommendation. And it is sporadic and needs to be more systemic. So I’ll take that as an action item. Thank you.

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Spread the second isms around our country and now we need to get the United States and say that last, what do you mean by circular there? Yeah, I think so. And you point me in the right direction. If not, I think that number one, I think these are much better when we can pursue these in ways that incorporate all our bilateral tools of statecraft and not having to filter through the UN, which is trying to do more often than these basic fundamental human rights. The one thing that’s been ironic to me is the degree to which elite academic circles talk about cultural sensitivity and yet liberal foreign policy, I would say, does not represent that very frequently and does not take into account often the values of the audience to which it’s trying to communicate or engage. So I think, again, these are matters of deep prudence to make judgments about how to advance basic human rights like religious freedom abroad, how to have the equal treatment of all citizens. That’s very important.

So it’s going to this, I would guess to come back to my last point, which is personnel really matters to be able to make those very complex strategic decisions and the implementation of that and seeking the wisdom of other players in this one. I didn’t talk about track to diplomacy, but the idea of religious NGOs engaging peers abroad is sometimes an interesting way to open up dialogue. And I’m, there are people in the room who have invested time in similar things even in the Middle East. So there are many more tools. It takes wise and prudent leadership to put that together into something that will advance the right things and make forward progress without the kind of backlash that would set it off course.

Next.

Hi, Steven Lying, Florida State University PhD student in religious ethics. One of the concerns I guess I have with this idea of linking domestic policy and foreign policy. One of the first things that we’re taught in our program is that nothing is a monolith. And I feel like we have a tendency to sort of create a monolith of American culture. So I’m worried about how we can have a coherent foreign policy when we don’t have a coherent or a unified domestic culture.

Right. Your point that Hollywood sends messages that commercial organizations and messages that might be different from what a lot of people in this room would think is the American message to me and the way I view any sort of tradition like that is that they’re both part of the same tradition and there’s a conflict going on. So can we have foreign policy be coherent until or before we have our cultural wars figured out? Good, that’s an excellent question and perhaps the crux of the matter for the subject that I’m talking about here. I think we need to divide between the discreet policy applications of differing world views, which we see. You know, these are the kinds of things debated in Congress on the nightly news and I think that’s the kinds of things you’re referencing.

I want to distinguish between those things which are at the moment endlessly divisive. I agree with you on that and the kinds of core founding understanding of our American order. And I do think that we need to come to some common understanding of that and we haven’t given enough attention to that. So that’s the level that I’m trying to get at, the DNA of our constitutional order that I think we need to have a lot more consensus perspective about. And I think you could also apply your observation to say we don’t have an adequate consensus about it, but I think we should be pursuing that and seek that is the constitutional order that foreign policy needs to represent. Foreign policy is not just defending a landmass, it is defending ideals and institutions and concepts and principles. And we need to have a clear idea of what those founding ideas are. Yeah, in the middle. Thank you so much, Miss Marshall, for the comprehensive and precise presentation.

My name is Agnes Orsuoha. I’m from South Sudan. So I would like to follow up on the unified domestic culture, taking it from an immigrant and refugee perspective. So when a refugee family, for example, is being resettled in the US and they’re faced with a domestic affair issue, usually, it’s being approached from a litigative manner which ends up in the breaking up of their family and children becoming victims. And the two couples, who knows what will happen to them if they are not strong. And usually when you look into the immigrant family, for example, our children from South Sudan, we have a high number that are now like in gang groupings, hopelessness, and the number is also rising that they’re being put under deportation proceedings.

So you’re deporting people that are creation of your product to South Sudan who did not participate in raising those children in the way of this Hollywood culture.

hen we go back to the core of the family, the Bible or the Holy Bible is all about the essence of family. If we get the essence of family wrong, then we’ll be wondering what kind of Jesus-like life we are trying to lead. What I’m trying to say is there is a need for religious leaders to intervene and to assist us directly with these refugee families, especially if they’re Christians. If there is an issue, I would prefer a church to provide counseling rather than running to court. For example, in South Sudan or other places around the world, if there is an issue within the family, the elders within the family would be the ones to settle it, or the elders within the community, which the refugee and immigrant families lack most of the time when they get resettled.

I am also happy with the removal of the legalization of abortion tied into the NGOs’ aspect in terms of funding. In South Sudan, we have this constant struggle with the international partners regarding family planning. We are only a nation of 12 million, and most of the people are still in diaspora and haven’t returned home. Here you are talking to me about abortion, family planning, and all kinds of things that are against my cultural values. Thank you.

Thank you for sharing that perspective. It’s very helpful. With regard to your comments on immigration, I think, number one, it’s obvious that our country is in dire need of immigration reform, and that is a challenging issue. But I think your comment speaks as well to the issue of how well we are helping refugees and immigrants become a part of American life.

Churches are enormously important. You are absolutely right, and we need to be thinking more about helping people through the transition of finding their way in a confusing culture. We know that the same kinds of crises of confidence regarding our constitutional order, which I mentioned in regard to foreign policy, are also impairing our ability to help refugees and immigrants become a part of American life without feeling like they risk their children’s future because of the cultural forces around them. Churches can be helpful in navigating that, and we need to reflect on that a whole lot more. Thank you for that.

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