Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion

Beth Hurd’s book is not only necessary reading for anyone studying religion and foreign affairs but also for all those concerned with the ways that religion shapes and is shaped by U.S. politics. The book is full of insight and a pleasure to read!

Integral to any free, liberal society is the right to religious freedom, and so social scientists and religious scholars have attempted to craft an understanding of this basic right. How should religious freedom be practically applied? What types of laws should governments legislate in order to protect this right, and how should the laws be crafted? What are the bounds of religion and religious freedom? In her book Beyond Religious Freedom: the New Global Politics of Religion, Dr. Elizabeth Hurd attempts to address these questions and lay a path forward for how scholars, public officials, and religious leaders should continue to think about religious freedom. Hurd offers exceptional insights on the topic of religious freedom in that she challenges the traditional notions of religious freedom by rejecting the established bounds of what is considered “religion” and suggesting an intersectional approach to religion. The book originates in the fields of international relations and religion studies by describing the historical and political origins of the relatively recent efforts of global actors – mostly from wealthy states in the global north – to bring religion into global politics. It examines the underlining assumptions of these projects and describes how they construe notions of “religious freedom, religious tolerance, and the rights of religious minorities.” Chapter 2 of the book describes the idea of the “two faces of faith,” which Hurd borrows from the former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. This canonical idea of religion is that there is bad religion and good religion. Bad religion is the type of religion that needs to be monitored and controlled by governments and civil leaders in order to prevent it from slipping into violence. Good religion is a tool for seeking the “common international good.” Good religion is expected to help mitigate the appeal of extremist, bad religion by offering an appealing alternative. Governments and civil society organizations are expected to work with good religion to build successful humanitarian programming and human rights campaigns. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 give the reader a picture of how the global north’s conception of religion has manifested itself in global politics through “constructs of religious freedom,” “religious tolerance and religious engagement,” and “religious rights” respectively. Chapter 6 describes how scholars, public officials, and religious leaders can escape from the northern paradigm of religion and begin to think “otherwise about religion.” The book ends with an appeal to liberate religion studies from the confines of religion studies departments and political science departments to the broader social sciences, humanities and beyond. Hurd makes the case for an intersectional study of religion, arguing that, for example, knowing that someone is a Methodist tells you very little about that person. Being uniquely innovative, Beyond Religious Freedom is able to accomplish the task by offering scholars new methods of thinking about and studying religion: expert religion, lived religion, and governed religion. Previously, religion was thought about in terms of religious, secular, and sectarian, which Hurd argues unnecessarily boxes in religion and actually inhibits a fuller and complete assessment of religion. Hurd’s new paradigm for thinking about religion allows for the total assessment of religion from the absolutely and unquestionably religious to the messy and maybe-not-even-religious aspects of religion. Expert religion is religion as understood by those who create “policy-relevant knowledge” about religion i.e., scholars, think tanks, etc. Lived religion is religion according to the people who practice religion. It is the lived experience of people who interact with religion on a frequent basis. Governed religion is religion defined by people who possess political or religious power and are able to define the confines of religion be it religious-secular boundaries or religious-religious boundaries. Along with the emphasis on intersectional analyses, this new paradigm offered by Hurd gives scholars, public officials, religious leaders, and those with an interest in religion a fresh method to explore religion and politics from any perspective. Hurd does leave a more developed employment of “thinking otherwise about religion” to be desired by the reader. The book does not do much more work than establishing that such an approach would be credible and useful to knowledge production. Much of the book is dedicated to the historical and political foundations for the pervasive religious, secular, sectarian paradigm for studying religious freedom. For this reason, further research is necessary that employs the methods propagated by Hurd in this work. Beyond Religious Freedom, is a well written and thorough exploration of the history and politics of religious freedom projects globally and adequately expresses how these projects are a product of a conception of religious freedom that has originated in America and Europe. It makes a compelling case for knowledge producers, those in power, and practitioners alike to examine their current ideas about the confines of religion and its interactions with other categories of society. Hurd disassembles the notion of tidy religion and reveals the truly messy nature of religion – crucial for nuanced study. This book is worth reading is you are a scholar, policymaker, government or public official, religious leader, or are simply interested in religion.

Given humankind's propensity to simplify things for the ease of mental consumption, we are accustomed to imagining religion as having a concrete and self-evident definition. However, the term “religion” is not universally representative, even though it has come to be considered as such. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, in her new book from Princeton University Press, Beyond Religious Freedom: the New Global Politics of Religion, challenges this assumption.Populations and governments historically alternate between periods of enlightened thought and often oppressive religiosity and theocracy. Governments have moved into new territory by undertaking to define and actively defend what is termed “religious freedom,” for believers and nonbelievers alike. Given this fact, in spite of a plethora of heterodox views and practices along a continuum of belief, Beyond Religions Freedom undertakes an exploration into what is meant by “‘religion’ as an explanatory category,” and subsequently, a reconsideration of “how we look at religious freedom and religious persecution.”In the introduction, the reader is confronted with this fact that is so obvious, it is jarring to realize we have largely been oblivious to it; the term “religion” is not so sweeping as we have given it credit. It truly defies definition and cannot possibly represent the disparate multitude of belief systems, lived practices and ethnic associations worldwide.In the preface, Hurd gives us actual numbers as a sample of the distortion and propaganda leading to, and from, advocacy for religious freedom and religious rights when “a politics defined by religious difference, privilege (sic) forms of religion favored by those who write laws, control resources, and govern societies, and marginalize other modes of belief, being and belonging.” The number she adduces is from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. In an effort to showcase supposed prejudice against Christians, they recently published the number of Christian martyrs as 100,000 annually when, arguably, the number of people who actually died because they were Christians, was just a tiny fraction thereof.In her introduction, she goes on to give us a concise overview of her process and conclusion. In order to understand the “drive to operationalize” religion and the consequences thereof, she develops three related arguments. First, she considers how constructs of religious rights are being packaged into political projects and delivered around the world. Second, she analyzes, through the lense of history and politics, the attempt at incorporation of a concern for religion, as a supposed self-evident category, into global politics. Third, she explores the relation between international projects relating to religious rights and the social, religious, and political contexts in which they are deployed. She focuses on the lacunas created between sanctioned religion and lived religion.Hurd separates the idea of religion into three separate admittedly somewhat “arbitrary and porous,” but nonetheless very helpful categories: expert religion, lived religion and governed religion. Aided by these heuristics, she objectively “seeks to open the study of religion and global politics up to a broader social and interpretive field.” The conclusion she draws is that “neither religions nor religious actors are singular, agentive forces that can be analyzed, quantified, engaged, celebrated, or condemned--and divided between good and bad. To rely for policy purposes on the category of religious actor is, rather, to presume a certain form of actorship motivated by religion that is neither intellectually coherent nor sociologically defensible.”Hurd begins her discussion with an interesting dichotomy known as the “two faces of faith,” the idea that religion is simultaneously the problem and the solution. Using the Sahrawi refugees in Southwestern Algeria as a real life example, she highlights some programs that strive to protect “peaceful religion” and project it internationally and other programs, even sometimes the same ones, which strive to suppress “intolerant religion.”She then breaks down what can be meant by international religious freedom, how it manifests, especially in North America and Western Europe, as an institutionalization of external religious rights promotion, and the consequences thereof.Next, she moves into religious engagement, including deploying chaplains as well as engaging certain and specific religious institutions and éminences grises and not others. The argument is that government-sponsored religious outreach activities are not, and cannot be, evenhanded efforts to bring religion back in “to international relations to compensate for its alleged exclusion or to secure its free exercise.”An extended case study of the Alevis of Turkey, “explores the implications of adopting religion as a category to draw together individuals and communities as corporate bodies that are depicted as in need of legal protection to achieve their freedom:” minorities under law. The creation of this category “creates a world in which citizens are governed as religious subjects, contributing to the consolidation of a social order in which groups are distinguished by perceived religious differences creating apostates and insurgents on the margins of legal religion.”The final chapter looks beyond religious freedom; it delves into religious violence, intergovernmental efforts to contain it and the folly thereof; and it again proposes thinking otherwise about religion. “The religion that is chosen for protection under modern law, the religion that is subjected to state and international legal administration, does not, and cannot, exhaust this vast and diverse field of human goings-on.”Hurd is an academic and her overall style reflects that. Her dialectic is necessarily repetitive as she builds her case. Far from tiresome, this reinforcement helps the reader navigate and absorb the text. She also enables perspective and better comprehension and elicits empathy, by substantiating her arguments with real life examples.Religious freedom is important but implementation is confounding. Can and should governments just step out of the way and let people have their lived experiences, or do minorities need protection and, if so, how is that accomplished without promoting one group while marginalizing others? Are distortions meant to curry government sympathy and favors, like the inflated numbers of the CSGC, avoidable? What about the problems caused by multiple and diverging exogenous categorizations of complex groups like the Alevis? Since the global religious landscape is so vast, encompassing autochthonous and imported religion, strict orthodoxy as well as fluid syncretism, belief and nonbelief, and cultural traditions and practices that defy definition, incorporating politics, art, media and popular culture, what is “religion” anyway?Hurd’s thesis is a vital one and in need of further investigation. We should be stepping back and asking the proper questions, the questions Hurd rightfully proposes we must; “Which activities in the vast sea of human affiliations and actions are designated as religious and primed for engagement, partnership, and dialogue, and which are not? Whose version of which religion is under scrutiny? Which authorities speak in its name, and on whose behalf? What is the relationship between these authorities and the individuals and communities in whose name they allegedly speak? How do researchers account for the practices of individuals that may have tense or nonexistent ties to such institutions or authorities? Conversely, how do researchers consider those who have ties to many simultaneously?”Much of the world, either due to complacency or ignorance, has unconditionally accepted “religion” as a category no longer in need of analyzation and Western “religious freedom” as a panacea. Hurd illuminates quite clearly the inherent danger in persisting, guided by this illusion. Anyone concerned with truly protecting the rights of all humankind must read this book and pass a copy to their government representative.