Religious freedom is a core value for most American Christians. What can we do to live it out? Should we support it only for our fellow Christians, or for everyone, everywhere?

Knox Thames joined us to discuss his new book, Ending Persecution: Charting the Path to Global Religious Freedom. Nicole Bibbins Sedaca of Freedom House, which champions democracy and freedom globally, shared insights from the global front lines of religious liberty.

This conversation was part of our “Faith, Freedom, and Flourishing” series in partnership with the Pepperdine School of Public Policy.

Thank you to our co-host, Notre Dame Press, for their support of this event!

Online Conversation | Knox Thames + Nicole Bibbins Sedaca | September 7, 2024

Cherie Harder: Good afternoon, and welcome to all of you joining us for today’s Online Conversation with Knox Thames and Nicole Bibbins Sedaka on “Ending Persecution.” We’re delighted that each one of you is here with us today. And I want to especially welcome our international registrants from all over the world, from at least 16 different countries that we know of, ranging from Armenia to Uganda. So welcome from across the miles and across the time zones. And if you haven’t done so already, drop us a note in either the Q&A or the chat feature to let us know where you’re joining us from. It’s always fun to see the worldwide community tuning in.

If you are one of those first-time guests or are otherwise new to or unfamiliar with the work of the Trinity Forum, we seek to provide a space for leaders and thoughtful laypeople to wrestle with the big questions of life in the context of faith, and to offer programs like today’s Online Conversation to do so. We hope today’s discussion will be a small taste of that for you today.

Our guests today are two of the nation’s foremost experts in human rights and religious freedom, who have argued that one of the most important and pressing challenges of the 21st century is addressing the often-ignored pandemic, sweeping the world, of religious persecution. They’ve sought in their respective spheres to increase awareness of how wide and deep such repression extends, what can be done, and why addressing such challenges is vital for both human flourishing and even for global stability.

Knox Thames is an international human rights lawyer and advocate who has dedicated his career to promoting human rights, defending religious minorities, and combating religious persecution. Over his 20 years of service in the US government, which has spanned the Obama, Bush, and Trump administrations, Knox has held a variety of key positions advocating for religious freedom, both at the Department of State and two different US foreign policy commissions. He now serves, as Pete noted, as a senior fellow at Pepperdine University and a senior visiting expert at the US Institute of Peace. He is also the author of the newly released—I think it was out just September 1st—work, Ending Persecution, which we’ve invited him here today to discuss.

And joining him is Nicole Bibbins Sedaka, who serves as the acting president of Freedom House, an NGO which works to protect human rights, promote democratic change, and act as a catalyst for freedom around the world. Before joining Freedom House, Nicole Bibbins Sedaka served as the deputy director for Georgetown University’s Master of Science in Foreign Service, as well as a professor of practice there, and served for over ten years at the Department of State working on human rights, religious freedom, and counterterrorism. She also serves as a senior fellow at the George Bush Institute and sits on quite a few boards.

Nicole and Knox, welcome. It’s great to see you both.

Knox Thames: Thank you so much.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: It’s great to be here and great to be at the Trinity Forum and with two great thinkers in this space.

Cherie Harder: Well, really looking forward to this. And just as we start out, it’s always kind of helpful just to get a sense of what we’re talking about. Knox, in your book, you described religious persecution as a pandemic which has swept around the world, and so would love to hear from you—and really from both of you—about what we’re talking about here. What is actually going on and where are we headed? And, Nicole, I’ll note that Freedom House includes a map that shows just the extent of repression, both speech and press repression, but also religious repression. It seems like it’s growing. So, Knox, where are we and where are we headed?

Knox Thames: The 21^st-century reality will be the reality of persecution. Every faith community somewhere is experiencing violence, discrimination, or abuse because of what they believe or don’t believe. I’ve been in this field for over 20 years, primarily in various diplomatic roles representing the United States. But in this time, we’ve seen the Pew Research Center come forward with some remarkable statistics that really give evidence to what we’ve always felt. First, they annually compile a list of government and societal restrictions, and they found that almost two thirds of the world lives in places that restrict the free practice of faith. So two out of every three people live in societies with very narrow lanes of permissible religious activity. And if an individual wants to change lanes, challenge the lanes, leave the road altogether, they face a world of hurt from their neighbors or their governments, or both.

And combined with that, though, Pew has also found that levels of religiosity are incredibly high globally. While religion seems to be a spent force in Europe, and we know in the United States there’s a growing group of “nones,” of people who just sort of are agnostic, global trends are going the other direction. And Pew has found that 84 percent of the global population believes in God or a higher power. They look to something beyond themselves to give their life purpose and meaning and direction.

And so you take this incredibly high and persistent level of restrictions on the free practice of faith with growing interest in the divine, in the ultimate questions of life, that is a recipe for human rights violations, suffering, and the kind of drivers that lead to the instability we’re seeing in so many countries around the world. And that’s why, partly, I wrote this book, was to put forward some new ideas to try to address this pandemic before it gets even worse.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: If I could just jump in on that, I agree with every word that Knox said. You have an extraordinarily large percentage of the world’s population that does believe in a divine power, believes in a religion, and participates on a regular basis in some sort of worship, and all of them, all faiths, are facing some sort of persecution around the world. It is an absolutely extraordinarily important issue that we look at. It’s part of a larger crackdown that we’re seeing in many authoritarian countries, particularly where authoritarian governments are going after people, people of faith, people in other parts of civil society, because they perceive threats from different parts of society and they want to persecute those who are most vulnerable, those who are a threat to their power, or those who in some way are in opposition to their authoritarian regime.

But when you think about it, just the percentage of people—well above 80 percent of the world’s population believe in some sort of faith that is larger than them—and all of those faiths facing it, it really is something that we have to take very, very seriously. And it’s something that really is part of bringing, as you said at the beginning, Cherie, stability. Because when you have that degree of persecution around the world, and you have people who are then mobilizing in opposition to that, it is a hugely destabilizing force to have that type of oppression globally.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. That is fascinating. One of the things that struck me, as— you know, we often think about religious persecution happening in places that are either terrorist or communist. But, Nicole, you mentioned authoritarianism just now. And, Knox, in your book you talk about four different categories of religious persecution, or at least states that allow it or encourage it. And they’re all quite different. And they include not only the terrorist states, which is, you know, fairly straightforward, but authoritarian societies like Nicole was saying, and also democratic societies, which may be less intuitive. I was hoping you could talk to us a little bit about what those four categories are, and how religious persecution might look differently in each of the categories.

Knox Thames: When you think of religious persecution, it sounds monolithic, but as I’ve seen over the years, and what I wanted to further define in the book, is that there are different categories, different typologies, and if we’re going to devise effective responses to meet the challenge, it’s not a one-size-fits-all response. So as you said, I identified four different categories of persecution. The first is authoritarian. And this is the classic example of China, which I talk about in the book, bringing the full force and weight of the state against religious communities that they deem unworthy or illegal. So the genocide that they’re perpetrating against Uyghur Muslims, the crushing of Tibetan Buddhists, the driving underground of the Catholic and Protestant churches. And that’s sort of the classic form. That’s probably the one that first comes to mind.

The next one, though, is extremism as a form of persecution, where here you have religious leaders in a society that will stir up mobs, will raise a group to attack another community, their place of worship, their village, their town. Here I spent a lot of time talking about Pakistan, about what’s happening to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, Christians, and Hindus.

And that sort of leads into the third type, which is democracy. And this is where a majority community uses the power of the ballot box to transform their beliefs into law, and then enforces those beliefs against religious minorities or dissenting members of their own community. Here I look at India and Nepal, two neighboring countries that are democratic. Yet you see the forces of revanchism, of nationalism, polluting and diluting the secular approach to governance that they’ve had with horrible implications for religious minorities.

And then the last form is terrorism. And here ISIS is front and center. I spent a lot of time focused on Iraq, what we tried to do at the State Department during ISIS’s occupation of northern Iraq and the victimization of Yazidis and Christians.

And I think it’s important that policymakers see the differences, the nuances. But these are also not boxes with real hard lines. Literally, one form can bleed into another. Extremists in society can trigger an authoritarian response. Authoritarian pressure can lead to terrorism. So the book also has corresponding chapters that put forward ideas for how to intervene, to get upstream of these violations so that we can be preventative in our action and not reactive.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: I think it’s wonderful that Knox has broken that down, because it really is not a monolithic phenomenon. And it’s really important that we have these types of typologies in order to have responses that are going to be most effective in dealing with them. I’d pull out two points, which are really, really crucial of all the information he shared. One is that threats are coming both from state actors, from governments, and non-state actors. And that’s really important because quite often we point just to one or just the other as really the root of the problem. But we are going to have to have a really complex and multifaceted response to think about how do you deal with what is a problem that is felt the same, possibly, by people, but is really very, very complex in how it’s manifested.

I would also unpack this issue of democracies. It’s really important that we look at where are we seeing religious persecution in democracies as well? I think the two examples, India and Nepal, are excellent examples. And what we often hear from people who say, “Well, isn’t a democracy about majority rule?” It absolutely is about majority rule. But we always say “majority rule and protection of minorities.” And that’s the real fullness of democracy when it is in its best form. Which means, yes, people do come to power through the ballot box and are able to rule, but it really is the protection of those who are religious minorities, who are political minorities, who are people who are not necessarily in the majority or in the ballot majority that have to have full protection in order for us to really say that a democracy is at its strongest. And when the minorities are not protected, it’s a very, very stark warning sign for us that that democracy is weak or that democracy is in decline, because when minorities can no longer garner that protection, because a majority group is in power, then the democracy is really at risk.

Cherie Harder: You know, that’s fascinating, Nicole. And I know that your work at Freedom House, that essentially the state of religious freedom and the state of democratic governance is closely linked. And I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about that and whether religious freedom can be protected in non-democratic states.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: It’s very, very difficult. I mean, Knox’s book gives us quite a good roadmap on what we need to do, but I think first is really to shine a light on the extent of the problem. I mean, the fact that we have a UN Security Council member in China that is actively waging a genocide against a minority religion in its country should just be a shock to all of us. And what we also know is when a country has that type of treatment at home against any sort of groups, including minority religious groups, we know that they are not the actors that bring stability and protection of rights around the world. So it should be concerning to all of us when we see that level of persecution.

I think it’s also something which we need to look at all of the tools in our toolbox and say, are we willing to stand—whether it’s with sanctions, whether it’s with political rhetoric, whether it is with a delay in partnerships, or some other measures—are we willing to stand for those people who quite often don’t have a strong voice because they are living under the thumb of an authoritarian regime? Are we willing to use the power that we have in democracies, in countries that right now are free, in order to stand with them? There’s a lot that we can be doing. Quite often we’re turning a blind eye, and we’re assuming that things will either get better, or we’re assuming that what happens in a state is really the purview of the state, and not something that we can or should do something about.

Cherie Harder: Yeah. You know, I want to go back to a point that both of you alluded to, which has to do with repression inside a state and the popularity that can attend that. Knox, you talked a lot about Pakistan and the fact that the repression of minorities there is a fairly popular thing for authorities to do. Virtually all—well, not all—but most faiths, most religions, make exclusive truth claims. And at a time when there’s, especially when there’s instability, it is all too easy for leaders to cast themselves as being a defender of the faith by ostracizing or repressing those of different faiths. And so, I guess one question for both of you—maybe we can start with you, Knox—is how does one go about essentially trying to inculcate support for religious freedom, as that seems to assume a pluralism that is not necessarily globally shared?

Knox Thames: I mean, that is the $64,000 question, to date myself with that cultural reference. How do you convince the masses that diversity is a good thing, that pluralism is advantageous, that just because someone looks differently or believes something different, that they’re not a threat, they’re actually an equal citizen? Here, there’s a couple of different ways that the United States can approach this. One, you know, diplomatically, is ensuring that we’re a consistent voice speaking up for the persecuted, shining a light, but then also following through with consequences. I think we’re reaching the point where we need to all consider how much do we value our values as a country, and are we willing to insist that they be carried forward in our foreign policy with friend and foe? And some of the things in the book that I highlight is the gap between what we say is important and then how we actually interact with countries. And I want to just pause for a second and note, I’m very proud of how the United States advances human rights and religious freedom. We do more than any other country, bar none. And that’s something as Americans, we should all be proud of. But good isn’t good enough, and we’ve got to close that credibility gap.

And then, secondly, is engaging these societies, especially in a democratic sense, because I would find it so hard when you’re engaging diplomats representing a democracy that had some regressive laws on the books, and you raise concerns. And the diplomat was basically saying, “Hey, our leader ran on this platform of exclusion and hatred, and he’s delivering to his constituents.” That means we’ve got to think about how do we talk about this more broadly? And that’s education, teaching kids, teaching tolerance to kids to inoculate them from the virus of hate, emphasizing the histories of diversity. There’s layers of history. Every society is more diverse than they often wish to admit. And then also insisting that minorities be protected when victimized. Because that’s another form of education. You know, if people can get away with a crime, it creates a climate of impunity. So it’s top down and bottom up. And we do a lot of good things, but we just need to really put our shoulder to the wheel and find the resolve to do more.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: I think Knox is exactly right on that. And it is about having a foreign policy that very much reflects the values of our country and democratic values. I’ll also add to everything that he said, with just a pragmatic argument, also, of why religious freedom brings stability in countries. If you have a country where in one period one group is allowed to persecute, torture, imprison, mistreat, exclude one group, I can promise you, in just a few years, that will turn around and you’ll see that type of revenge action, whether it’s from a minority group or a group that becomes then the majority another time. And what you then have is a cycle of violence, and you have a cycle of instability. And when you have a protection of all faiths, you have people being able to live in their full true selves, practice their religion, be able to live and still have a protection for their own religion, and that the existence of another religion doesn’t inherently threaten that. In fact, it brings a stability which we don’t see when we are allowing faiths to persecute others. It’s a very, in many ways, it’s the opposite of what one would think when you do believe in an absolute truth and you say, “Well, that’s the true north of my life.” But at the same time, by religious freedom, you are protected in order to be able to pursue that absolute truth, while also saying, I’m not going to add instability to a country and a society by starting that cycle of persecution that never, ever ends with more flourishing in a positive and healthy way.

Cherie Harder: One thing I can imagine that you have heard, both of you—a lot of pushback that has come from really across the spectrum—which is that some of the ideals that you just articulated, they sound wonderful. We in America have certainly enjoyed incredible blessings because of the freedom of religion that has been enshrined in our Constitution and which somewhat counterintuitively has actually allowed and catalyzed faith to flourish. But there have certainly been those on the left and also, increasingly, those on the right who have said, “That sounds a lot like you’re exporting an American value, not a universal value,” and essentially attempting to impose our own system on very different nations that may not share that value or may not have the cultural conditions that seem to be compatible with allowing it to flourish. What do you say to objections like that, that we’re essentially just exporting our own American way of life dressed up with idealistic language?

Knox Thames: When I was at the State Department, of course, that was a constant retort. And we would always point to the universal standards that the family of nations have agreed to uphold. So the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of them have article 18 that defines freedom of religion, what it means, what it obligates: freedom to have any faith or none, freedom to change faiths, to meet together alone or in community with others, to educate your children in the faith. And so we would say, look, this is an American value, yes. And that’s why we’ve put so many resources behind promoting this right. But this is a right that the international community has recognized. Going back to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948, when she oversaw the drafting of the Universal Declaration, it was a multicultural, multinational effort. It wasn’t an American effort, although we were very much involved.

But at the same time, I would say, while we’re not forcing countries to do this, I do think we should be stronger about “these are our values, and if you want to draw closer to the United States, you should start to mirror these values.” And too often I’ve been frustrated with administrations, Republican and Democratic, who while paying lip service to the importance of religious freedom, for short-term realpolitik calculations, will give all those away because we need country X for reason Y that’s the issue du jour. And we see how that creates long-term problems that ultimately come back to cause instability globally and problems for us domestically sometimes, like we saw in 9/11. So I think we should be much firmer on “if you want to be a partner with the United States, have a durable relationship, these are our values. This is who we are. We’re not asking you to change your way of life, forcing you, but if you want to come closer to us, we think this has been a great way, an effective way, to run a society that increases human flourishing,” and to use the carrot of partnership as a way to entice more countries to mirror our very good approach.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: I would just add to that, you know, in all of my travels—and I’m sure, Knox, you have traveled a great deal with the US government—and all of the people I’ve talked to and spoken to in so many different countries, no one has ever said, “You know what? I would really love for the government to bust down my door and stop me from worshiping. I would love to have my holy book taken away. I would love to have my children be inculcated in a religion that I don’t actually believe in. I would love to be forced to worship.” There’s nowhere in the world that I have heard people say that they would love the persecution that they feel. And so what that tells me is the document that Knox referenced, that is the Universal Declaration, is actually felt universally. People may not want to admit that there are universal values in that sense, but people live them and they do really want to be protected against the persecution and be able to live and worship.

And so I think starting with that very human reality that we share across the board gives us an entree to, yes, talk about [how] we are coming from the United States, these are values that we share in the United States. But to also say, as a human being who has the most innate desire to be able to worship or choose not to worship but to make that choice themselves, that is something that is universal, and it is a response that democracies, that the United States and other governments, are able to have to what we know we’re hearing from so many people in civil society.

And I think the challenge that I would have also is, if we know that there is that longing, if we know that there is that what we’re hearing from civil society around the world, in the United States or in other democracies, we have a choice. We can sit silently and say, “That’s your problem.” That is it. And then 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, when someone then asks, what did you do when you knew that was going on? The question is, did you act or did you not act? And I would say it’s in the spirit of the United States, it’s also in the spirit of most faith communities to say, how can we engage to help those people who are suffering?

Cherie Harder: You know, just thinking about the implications of what both of you have said— Knox, you have a chapter in your book about, I think you call it the cultural climate of extremism. And right now there have been enough technological, communication changes and the like where it just seems like we are perfectly poised to essentially continue to polarize, continue to divide, and for there to be more distrust and the like, and that there’s real not only profit to be gained, but power to be gained in polarizing your community or your country, in picking winners and losers and defenders of the faiths and heretics. And I’m curious how both of you are thinking about the very real challenge that social media, our technological climate, and communication tools poses to essentially your work continuing to inculcate a widespread universal respect for freedom of conscience across difference.

Knox Thames: Yeah. I say in the book that religious persecution is as old as human history. And I could have added, “and so is the mixing of religion and politics.” And, you know, there are unscrupulous people who will look to use holy scriptures to twist them or to apply them in a way that advances their political goals but gives it the sheen or the tint of religious dogma. And that becomes incredibly difficult to unwind and to deal with when you’re encountering those situations. Again, this gets back to the importance of education, getting upstream of this, not trying to react to it when things start to go boom, but actually get on the other side of the boom, as they say in the military, and be proactive through education, through bringing communities together.

And Nicole just touched on this, and I completely agree, the importance of working with religious leaders, that their voice can carry in ways that no government official, elected or authoritarian, can. And if we can find those people of goodwill and good faith, not asking them to water down their beliefs, to say that all roads lead to heaven, to recognize there are deep theological differences about ultimate truth. But while we agree to disagree agreeably, we will stand together to defend the rights of people to hold those differing beliefs. And that’s the part that we’re starting to see movement in that direction. You know, Pope Francis with Fratelli tutti, Sheikh bin Bayyah with the Marrakesh Declaration. There are efforts.

Again, these are good things, but we need to do better than that, than we are. And so how do we leverage the power of faith leaders with these megaphones that can go far and wide and really touch people at the heart level? I think that’s the next frontier that we, in the religious freedom advocacy community, really need to explore and try to find those partners.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: You know, we are living in an increasingly polarized world, and certainly the United States feels that very, very severely as we are pulling towards ideological extremes. And we’re also beginning to internalize that there’s just black-and-white ways of thinking about things, and you’re either all this or you’re on the other side of the world, which is not actually the way most people experience things. I think the really important thing that we’ve been trying to highlight is also what religious freedom and democracy have to learn from each other. When you look—and I think Knox and I have spent a lot of time with the International Religious Freedom Summit every year—and you look and there are evangelical pastors and there are Catholic priests and there are Jewish rabbis and there are imams and there are people of no faith and there are people Baha’i—everyone in that room—who are fighting deeply and sincerely for the protection of the space of somebody else who radically disagrees with them, who has totally different views on salvation, on Savior, and every other possible idea. But yet they’re fighting because they recognize that the protection of their space and the ability for them to worship freely is not a zero-sum game by virtue of having somebody else’s space protected. In fact, it is a protection of their own. And what it teaches us is that we will be able to be both authentic in our own worship, but also be able to share the truths about whatever we personally believe when we create the space for others, as opposed to trying to close the space.

I don’t know anyone who ever converts to another religion or converts to another political ideology because someone squeezed them into it, but rather that freedom and that openness, to be able to share those ideas and have all of the ideas protected is where we’re able to both share and come with all of our true identity to a pluralistic society. And I think that’s something that the United States has an opportunity right now to model to other countries, but also to reflect on this moment for ourselves and how we’re creating that space to disagree with people and to be fine with that disagreement and the protection of freedoms despite those disagreements.

Knox Thames: Yeah. One of the things I mentioned in the book, just to jump in real quick, is this concept of a “conflict entrepreneur.” Like, they are actually benefiting from stirring up things, from causing hate and angst. And to your question of social media, I think we’re all struggling to figure that out. That is a wickedly difficult problem. How do you preserve free speech, but also sideline or minimize these voices that are just in it for the clicks? But again, this is, I think—. Not to be all doom and gloom, though: the network that Nicole mentioned is actually incredibly positive. That in the last ten years, we’ve seen religious communities coming together to speak up for religious freedom for everyone. We’ve seen governments, we’ve seen parliamentarians. And so really, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say for the first time in human history, we have people and governments and faith leaders speaking up for persecuted individuals in other countries from other faiths. And that’s a good news story. That’s hopeful. We just got to keep making sure it continues to grow to meet the challenge of the day.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: Let me also add, because we’re having a conversation and we have such a wonderful diversity of people who are listening: we’re talking about, you know, United Nations and nation states and leaders. But I also want to bring it down that each of us has an opportunity to live out what we’re talking. And social media, as you just asked, Cherie, is the place all of us have some sphere of influence, whether that’s my five followers or my 50 million followers. We have a sphere of influence that we have a choice of how we show up and engage in dialogue. And quite often people say like, “Oh, you’re just trying to water it down and really not allow me to be as fervent in my views or my faith or my political ideology.” But the reality is, is we are most true to our convictions when we argue them in a way which hits people’s ears with the integrity to the argument that we’re making, as opposed to what we quite often see on social media, which is the vitriol and all of the hatred.

And so what I’ve challenged both my students in the classroom and my colleagues, and I gave a talk yesterday, I said, “We should show up on social media and all of our different places in a way that honors the content that we are hoping others will follow and others will believe.” And to do that in a way, if we model the values, many that we draw from our faith but many of which we draw also from being in a democracy, that is how we can also reshape much of the culture that exists and all of the vitriol that we choose to consume or be part of.

Cherie Harder: That is great. And we’re going to go to questions from our viewers in just a second. But before we do, I’d love to ask both of you, just picking up on what you just said, Nicole—we can start with you. You both have been in this space for a few decades, you know, working for essentially the protection of religious freedom abroad as well as at home. You’ve been doing this work as committed people of the Christian faith, which makes exclusive truth claims, in a secular and pluralistic context. And I’d love to hear from both of you how your faith has informed or animated or otherwise affected your work in this area. Nicole, maybe we can start with you.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: You bet. As a believer in the Christian faith and a follower of Jesus, I do believe that it is really important that we show up as ambassadors in our workplace, but that we also recognize that loving our neighbor means meeting them where they are, respecting their faith, respecting the space that they believe in, and both being true to our values very much, but also respecting what other people believe in.

I think for me, very much, the field of religious freedom is the place where I feel like people can be most authentic in their faith views, but also can truly love the other and truly create the pluralistic space for other people to believe differently. I also think that’s what draws me to the democracy field, because I really fundamentally believe that democracy is the system, when it works best, where we are creating space for people to live fully and follow the true beliefs that they have authentically, but also that there is a protection of another person if they don’t believe that, that they can live side by side. And obviously all of us have an opportunity to share our faith, have an opportunity to speak about our faith, but it also protects each of us to worship and protects a person to choose not to or to choose to worship differently.

Knox Thames: Yeah. Thank you for that question. You know, for me, it’s really about Christ’s teaching of love of neighbor. Looking at Luke 10, this parable of the Good Samaritan, you know, he was asked, “What does it take to inherit eternal life?” The teacher of the law was trying to stump Jesus. And, of course, it was a lawyer trying to stump the Son of God. But, you know, he answered with, “What does the law require? Well, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” And then [the teacher of the law] tries to be clever and asks, “Well, who’s my neighbor?” Then the story of the Good Samaritan is told, and it had this huge twist that is lost on 21st-century Christians, probably, or at least American Christians, or maybe, speaking for myself, just me—that there was a racial and religious difference, that the Samaritan was viewed as the other, a different religious trajectory, a different ethnicity. And they were hated by Jews at the time. And so for the hero of the story to be someone who crossed over these religious and ethnic lines and risked his personal safety—because he didn’t know where these attackers were on the lonely traveler—and to spend his own resources to make sure that he was taken care of. And then the command is to “go and do likewise.”

That’s really been the challenge, you know, as I very inadequately try to follow the teachings of Jesus, try to carry forward. To love others is to make sure that they enjoy the God-given right of freedom of conscience. And while I’d love for people to join our faith community as a Christian, I know they won’t. And if they don’t, that’s literally their God-given right. And I will still continue to love them and be their friend, and to hope for their well-being for them and their children. And I think that’s another way to have a quiet testimony of God’s love. So it’s a host of things. But I think that’s the challenge, is what does it mean to love neighbor when there are these big religious differences? And I think we’re called to reach out across that divide and to help anyone who’s facing persecution because of their beliefs.

Cherie Harder: Great. So we have had a number of questions come in from our viewers. And just as a reminder to all of you joining us, you can not only ask a question, but you can also like a question. And that helps give us an idea of what some of the more popular questions are. So one of our first questions comes from an anonymous attendee who asked, “Is religious persecution ultimately a different phenomenon, different than other types of persecution, such as those based on race or gender?” I’ll throw that one to you, Nicole.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: There’s a yes and a no to it. In some places we see that there are authoritarian leaders or illiberal leaders that will go after anyone who is different or anyone who doesn’t line up with them. And it’s particularly threatening when there is a group that says, “We actually believe in something bigger than you, O King”—or O President, or whatever self-assumed power they have. So that’s quite a threat. But they’re also threatened by journalists or women’s groups or groups of other kinds. So there’s some places where it’s just a threat because you’re not following me, and I feel threatened by you, so you’re the group that I’m going to go after.

But there are other places where the persecution really is directly because there is a nugget of religious difference. But quite often I see there is a difference in the allocation of something. Right? And so if there’s a difference in the allocation of power, then it makes it easy to other: “Well, I don’t want that group to have the power.” Right? Sometimes it is that people are sitting around thinking about theological differences, but sometimes it is quite often that there is a resource—resource meaning power or water or land—a resource scarcity, and that it is much better than to say, “I’m going after these people because of a religious difference,” and that is driven by that scarcity.

Cherie Harder: So our next question comes from a different anonymous attendee, and I’ll throw this one to you, Knox. They ask, “Is the idea of religious freedom relatively new? If so, when did we begin to believe in the idea that people should be free to worship as they feel they should?”

Knox Thames: I think the idea of religious freedom is actually pretty ancient. One funny story that’s not in the book, but when we held the large International Religious Freedom Summit at the State Department during the Trump administration, I was involved in organizing and overseeing it, working with Sam Brownback. We had the foreign minister of Mongolia come, and when he took the floor, he bragged about how the first real advocate for religious freedom was Genghis Khan. Because if you survived the pillaging and plundering when the Mongolian horde swept through, they didn’t care who you prayed to as long as you paid your taxes. So that notion goes back at least that far.

But you can find it in the Church Fathers, this notion of just soul freedom. God gave us freedom of conscience. What we have today, though, dates back to 1948, in the international system, from the creating of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that I mentioned earlier, Article 18. There’s a wonderful book by Mary Ann Glendon talking about how Eleanor Roosevelt had to navigate all these crosscurrents to produce that document that had buy-in from people representing different cultures and legal systems and faith backgrounds. But that’s sort of, today, the touchstone for international religious freedom promotion.

Cherie Harder: Great. So our next question comes from Fritz Heinzen. And Fritz asks, “When are unilateral state actions more effective against religious persecutors than collective action and vice versa?” Nicole, I’ll throw that one to you.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: Absolutely. There are times, many times, when a state can act unilaterally, and certainly they can act rhetorically unilaterally, meaning a state can choose to say, “I’m going to speak up for this person. I’m going to call out their name, I’m going to call out their persecution, or I’m going to call out a group.” And often it’s important, particularly if there are not other countries that are coming along with you, to have the courage. And I think the United States has, in many cases, taken the initiative or had the courage to speak even when it had to speak alone.

And—not ‘but’ or ‘or’—and it is always great when we can act multilaterally. If you look at economic tools like sanctions and other coercive economic tools, they’re always more effective when they are used multilaterally. It is also more effective when you have a group of nations that are able to speak together, to say that this is not just one country, this is really a group of us that are saying, “We will not stand for this in the international community that we’re all a part of.” So I hope that there’s a way to always act multilaterally. I do think there are times when the United States has to act unilaterally because no one is with us, or no one has the courage that we sometimes are willing to show. But hopefully we are also leading an international community towards a place where other nations are courageous enough to join in and have multilateral action as well.

Knox Thames: And I’ll just quickly add, I’ve seen over my career that— like, I completely agree with everything Nicole says; I just want to say ‘amen’ half the time when she’s speaking. But this idea of the United States, because we are the United States and we’re so big and powerful, we should be speaking with our own voice, but also understanding other voices may carry more influence. But I know that we can’t leave it to others to take the initiative, that if the United States isn’t involved, we are the indispensable actor. And I know people feel tired of that. That’s a burden that some have become weary of us carrying. But it’s true that if the United States isn’t involved, the good things, the value issues, are not represented perhaps at all, or at least not in a very robust way.

And in the book I talk about an example of when Asia Bibi, who was the Christian mother of five who had been sentenced to death in Pakistan for blasphemy, we had worked for years to get her out. She was almost released. We couldn’t quite get the government to let her go. We organized a multilateral series of demarches, these private interventions from ten different countries, and that, we heard later, was sort of the thing that pushed the generals across the line to let her rejoin her family in Canada.

Cherie Harder: Great. A follow-up to that is offered from Paul Winton-Hall. And Paul asks, “How can the US balance the desire to act on behalf of persecuted religious believers or ethnic minorities in other countries with the critique that our financial or military carrots and sticks can be a form of imperialism?” Nicole, I’ll throw that one to you.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: You bet. I would start with the United States does not have a perfect track record all around the world over the last 250 years. And I also don’t think that we can let any problems that have happened in the past be an excuse or a hurdle for us to do the right thing today and every day going forward. I think it’s really important that we look for opportunities to learn when we have made mistakes, but also to be courageous and to not back off of what are the values that are truly universal but are also American values, and to have those really drive our foreign policy. I think quite often people would say, well, the United States has a lot of problems at home, which we have for many, many generations. And the United States has done bad things, which is accurate. But we have done a lot of great things, and the world will not be better off if the United States is quiet and silent about issues.

One thing which I think the United States does, but needs to continue to do, and probably do more, is let us be in conversation with our allies and friends and colleagues around the world, particularly faith partners. Who are the imams and the priests and the pastors in different countries? Let’s listen to them and hear what they need and how the United States can be a supporter of the things that they need.

I think, also, quite often what I hear is people critique the use of more coercive tools. So the use of force or the use of economic sanctions. We have to have those tools in our toolbox. No one in the world would ever say we shouldn’t, because when we look back to, say, the Second World War, we needed them. We used them. And it’s good that we had them. We shouldn’t use them all the time, but we have to have those coercive tools. But because we’re concerned about those coercive tools, we sometimes overlook the very, very, very, very long list of other tools that we have, many of which are articulated so well in Knox’s book. We do have diplomatic might. We do have the power of the word. We do have multilateral bodies that we’re in. We do have aid that we provide or don’t provide. And that gives us a lot of different tools to use. And what we have to do is just infuse the use of these tools with the values that underpin our nation, so that those tools are used for the best benefit of our own nation, but certainly of the people around the world as well.

Cherie Harder: That’s great. And Knox, I want to toss the next question to you. It comes from Fred Post, and Fred asks, “How do you rationalize the fact that many white evangelicals in the US believe that they are persecuted, yet the persecution you are describing is significantly greater and from a kingdom perspective problematic?”

Knox Thames: Yeah, I’ve tried to draw a distinction between our domestic religious liberty debates and the severe persecution we see in other countries. You know, I’ve joked that a bad day for religious freedom in the United States beats a good day in a whole heck of a lot of other countries around the world. And so while we need to sort through how to live together in our increasingly diverse society, and these debates are important, they’re really about the finer issues. And I pray for the day a country like Pakistan is debating, you know, wedding cakes, instead of— I was just talking to an advocate yesterday who heard of a Christian who was burned to death because they were Christian by an angry mob. So it’s just different, and the severity is incomparable, thank God.

And so we have the protections here. We have abilities. If you feel that your religious liberties have been impinged upon, you can go to the courts, you can go to the police, you can go to your congressman, you can go to the senator, go to the Supreme Court. Those issues, those tools, those avenues, just don’t exist in so many other places around the world that are experiencing persecution. Persecution is violent. It’s targeting people for torture, for jail, for dismemberment because of what they believe or don’t believe. It’s just incomparable. And I think it does a disservice for the term “religious persecution” and those people who are truly suffering when we throw it around here on issues that, again, aren’t unimportant, they’re just have a different magnitude.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: I will say amen to that. You know, I had a conversation yesterday. It was a roundtable with North Korean activists. And we had a very similar conversation. You know, I said you probably also would be really excited for the day that you can hate your neighbor because they have a different immigration policy. They live in a country where people are literally thrown in gulags for their entire life for doing nothing. They are starved to death. We have a very different debate going on in the United States, and it’s not to minimize the debate, but it is to ensure that we use the right terms.

And I think it’s an opportunity—and obviously I work for a democracy organization so that’s what I plug every day—but it is an opportunity for us to fall back on democratic principles, including religious freedom, and look at how do we all lean into those principles. But it’s important, going back to your point about polarization, that we’re not fighting for those principles so that we win. We’re fighting for those principles so that everybody gets those. So if I’m going to fight to say, “I want to make sure that my voice, my religious freedom is protected,” I’ve got to be willing to do that for every single person of belief, of not-belief, for them to change their religion, to worship in ways which may seem strange to me, but that is what will allow us to live in a pluralistic society, to have people really experience their religious freedom. But we really—and we’re losing this a little bit in the United States—we’ve got to be willing to do that for everybody, even those people we don’t agree with, because that is the way that we ensure that our religious freedom and our space is fully protected in the way that we want.

Cherie Harder: And that’s actually a perfect segue to what will probably be one of our last questions. This one comes from Krista Barlow, and Krista asks, “While we can applaud the US in fighting for religious freedom in other countries, can you speak to the need for the US to apply the value of protecting minority views in a pluralistic society in the US?” Knox, would you like to take a crack at that one?

Knox Thames: Well, in my book, to tee up why the United States should support international religious freedom, I go back to the Founding Fathers, the work of Thomas Jefferson to create the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, George Washington’s letter to the Touro Synagogue, James Madison’s writings about minority protections in the constitutional system. So these are, as Nicole alluded to earlier—and I’ll actually defer to her just because Freedom House’s work is really seminal in this space—democracy without minority protections can turn into persecution. I mean, that’s the theme of the chapter on India and Nepal when it’s democracy run amok. And you have to have those actually anti-democratic protections of minorities, of minority viewpoints, to preserve democracy. It’s counterintuitive. But the two have to be part-and-parcel together or the system gets out of balance and can lead to human suffering.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: I think we’re at a really crucial point in the United States, too, based on what we’ve seen on college campuses and what we have seen in rising anti-Semitism. We’ve seen rising Islamophobia. We’ve seen rising silencing of people with different views. It’s an opportunity for us to ask ourselves, will we double down on all of the documents that Knox just walked through? Will we double down on the principles that are in those documents, or will we fight for the protection of our group only? Obviously, all of us want to be right, and all of us want to have just our people really always at the top. But the only way that a society does not devolve into violence and into persecution is by having that protection of all faiths.

And so I think now is the time where we are going to challenge the system. And really left to right, across the political spectrum, will we be willing to say, I am going to fight fervently for what I believe in, for my faith, for my political ideology, and I’m going to make space for that person I really don’t agree with, the person who worships or doesn’t worship differently than I do? I am going to make that space protected for them, and I’m going to agree to disagree on a whole lot of things, but I’m going to do it civilly and I’m going to do it within a democratic infrastructure. And that’s also going to guarantee that I, too, can worship the way I want, believe what I want, and follow my conscience as I would. That’s the challenge that we’re facing in the United States. And it’s going to take strong leadership. It’s also going to take each of us individually, within our respective communities, to see whether we will adhere to those principles.

Cherie Harder: Nicole, Knox, thank you so much. This has been fascinating. And in just a moment, I’m going to give each of you the last word. But before that, a few things to share with each of you who are watching. First, immediately after we finish, you will see on your screen an invitation to take a short survey and offer some feedback. We really appreciate it when you do this. We read each one of these. We try to incorporate all of your suggestions to make these programs ever more valuable. And as a small token of our appreciation for your taking the time to do so, we will send you a code for a free Trinity Forum Reading download of your choice. There are several that we would recommend that complement and more deeply explore some of the themes we’ve touched on today, including “To Bigotry, No Sanction,” which was George Washington’s thoughts on religious freedom and religious persecution, Reinhold Niebuhr’s essay “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness,” where he talks about the Christian case for liberal democracy and the basis for religious freedom, as well as Trinity Forum curricula “The Great Experiment,” which looks at the reasons behind religious freedom and why it is so important to our faith, freedom, and flourishing in our country. So I hope that you will take advantage of that opportunity.

In addition, tomorrow, for everyone who registered, we’ll be sending out an email with some additional readings, a lightly edited video link, and we would encourage you to share this conversation with others. Start a discussion about why religious liberty is so important, what sustains it, what we can do.

Third, I want to invite each of you watching to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people that help to advance Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought for the common good. In addition to being part of that community and to furthering the mission, there are a number of benefits that attend society membership, including a subscription to our quarterly Trinity Forum Readings—this is our latest, “The Pardoner’s Tale”—a subscription to our daily “What We’re Reading” list of curated reading recommendations, and with your new membership or your gift of $100 or more, we will send you a signed copy of Knox Thames’s new and excellent book, Ending Persecution. So hope that we will be able to have you join us soon at the Trinity Forum Society.

In addition, if you are interested in sponsoring an Online Conversation, we would love to hear from you. And you can do that either in the feedback form or just by emailing us at mail@TFF.org.

And speaking of sponsorships, we want to thank again the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, ably led by Dean Pete Peterson. As Pete noted, this has been a long and really rewarding as well as delightful partnership. We are so grateful for Pepperdine’s support and for the chance to co-labor with them on this and other important issues. We also note that this is only the second in a four-part series that we are sponsoring with Pepperdine. Next month we’ll be hearing from Byron Johnson at Baylor on “Human Flourishing and Faith.” And then in November, we’ll be hearing from Yuval Levin around his new book, American Covenant. But next week, join us this time, same time, same day, for our next Online Conversation with Francis Collins to discuss “Trust and Truth.”

Finally, a quick thank you to the Trinity Forum team that helps make our mission a reality, tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Brian Dascomb, Marie-Anne Morris and new teammate Macrea Hanke. I so appreciate all of your work.

Finally, as promised, I want to give the last word to Nicole and then to Knox. Nicole.

Nicole Bibbins Sedaka: Thank you so much for opening this space and for all that Trinity Forum does. It is really an extraordinary undertaking. I would say religious persecution should trouble anyone who believes in loving your neighbor, anyone who believes in the democratic values, which includes the protection of minorities, or anyone who wants to live in a stable society where you have to create the space for someone to be different in order for there to be protection of all rights. And so in light of that, I would say this is a problem which should sit on the heart of all of us, and that we should all be pushing our leaders and our government and our foreign-policy makers and domestic-policy makers to really live into the best of ending religious persecution.

Knox Thames: And, Cherie, you suggested perhaps the reading of a poem, so I have one I’d like to offer as a concluding thought. From Walt Whitman: “O Me, O Life.” He wrote it in 1867, his first version of “Leaves of Grass,” and I think you’ll hear in this abridged version I’ll read—because I know we’re short on time—it’s dark. He’s disparaging the status of the United States, the state of the United States, rather, after the Civil War and the slow pace of reconstruction. But then there’s a hopeful word at the end, and that’s what I want to leave us with. It begins,

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more

faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever

renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

  Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

So we’ve just been blessed to be born in the 21st century despite all the challenges we face. But we know this powerful play we’re a part of how it will ultimately end. But the chapter right now is dark. There are villains who seek to hurt others because of what they believe, but there are also heroes, heroes on this call. And it’s up to us to write the chapter in a way that can lead towards religious freedom, so that one day we can see an end to religious persecution. Maybe not on this side of heaven. But hopefully through our efforts, people will be able to live in peace and security and without fear of violence or discrimination because of what they believe.

So thank you for this opportunity to share about the book, and to spend time with my friend Nicole and you, Cherie.

Cherie Harder: Nicole and Knox, thank you so much. This has been a real joy. And thank you to each of you for joining us. Have a great weekend.