Washington National Cathedral

The Sunday Forum: Critical Issues in the Light of Faith

The Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, host

What is the appropriate role of religion in the public square? Cathedral Dean Sam Lloyd and Christian public intellectual Michael Cromartie explore the confluence of religion, politics, and the media in America, and how the media presents religious coverage.

The discussion opens with the sobering topic of religious freedom worldwide. “We do have religious freedom here” in the United States,” Cromartie points out, “but around the world it’s … not taken for granted. Around the world, there are governments that want to control, and even suppress, and sometimes persecute people who have religious convictions that they want to express not only in their private life but in their public life.”

In the late 1990s, Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act. This brought about the creation of an independent agency that works through the State Department, addressing problems that people face when governments worldwide suppress religion. Cromartie is vice chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, or USCIRF.

For the most part, Cromartie says, the United States government tries to work privately to persuade governments to permit greater religious freedom. USCIRF, however, makes public the oppression of people of faith. The commission also maintains an annual list of “countries of particular concern,” or CPCs.

Cromartie says the problem of religious oppression is widespread, but he names a few specific countries where people of faith face particular hardship. “To be a religious believer in North Korea is to be a person who is in prison, or tortured, or brutalized for your faith,” Cromartie says. In Saudi Arabia, certain Muslims are oppressed in addition to people of other faiths. Cromartie cites Vietnam as a country that may be moving toward greater religious freedom as it seeks to develop its economy.

In many places, religion of any kind is officially viewed as a threat. In other places, certain traditions are favored but others are not. Religious believers sometimes pose genuine threats to governments and ways of life, but sometimes the threat is in the eye of the beholder.

Or is it? “When religious freedom occurs, all kinds of other freedoms grow out of it,” Cromartie says. Oppressive governments, or governments simply wedded to the status quo, know that faith causes people to look beyond human institutions and ultimately to challenge them.

In addition to working for USCIRF, Cromartie has spent 25 years working to help Evangelical Christians find effective ways to spread their message publicly in the United States. In his view, the Evangelical movement has matured, found its voice, and developed realistic political goals in recent decades. For Evangelicals—and all believers involved in public debate—Cromartie urges a “posture of humility that tries to persuade the neighbor and not bash the neighbor.”

About Michael Cromartie

Michael Cromartie is vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he directs the Evangelicals in Civic Life and Religion & the Media programs, and vice chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Cromartie is also a senior advisor to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and a senior fellow with the Trinity Forum. He is the co-editor, with Richard John Neuhaus, of Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World (1987) and editor of numerous other books on faith and public life.