Robert Joustra

THREE RIVAL VERSIONS OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: WHAT CANADA'S OFFICE OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM CAN TEACH US ABOUT PRINCIPLED PLURALISM

B elieving in God is a dangerous business. For hard evidence of this hard reality, look no further than the Pew Research Center’s sophisticated global studies, which catalogue a “rising tide” of religious restriction and persecution affecting over 75 percent of the population of the world. Human rights advocates and foreign offices have been monitoring the crisis with growing unease. Already in 1998, the United States was in front of the trend, passing the International Religious Freedom Act which, among other things, established an Office of Religious Freedom within the State Department, an Ambassador at Large position dedicated to the issue, and an independent nonpartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). But other governmental and intergovernmental players are increasingly active on this issue as well. The United Nations (UN) has long had a Special Rapporteur position, currently held by the redoubtable Heiner Bielefeldt; and Norway, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy are all revitalizing or rolling out new initiatives on international religious freedom. In February of 2013, Canada joined their ranks, launching its own Office of Religious Freedom headed by Dr Andrew Bennett. Yet despite the seeming international validation of the legitimacy of this foreign policy trend, the reception within Canada has in many cases been vociferously negative. Arvind Sharma, a professor of religious studies at McGill University and author of Problematizing Religious Freedom, called the Office an attempt at “predatory Christian proselytization” (2011b); noted international theorist Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, in a lecture to the University of Ottawa, warned against a “hegemony of religious

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM BEYOND RIGHTS: RETROSPECTIVE LESSONS FOR CANADA FROM AMERICA'S OFFICE OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

American leadership on international religious freedom (IRF) has produced institutional and policy innovations, scholarship, and practical training that has paid dividends in other countries, including Canada, which has recently set up an IRF Office within its department of foreign affairs. Canada can learn a great deal retrospectively from the American experience. The single most important challenge for the Canadian Office is one that continues to persist also for the American Office: how to move religious freedom beyond a mere human rights issue and into a sustained and serious expertise on religion in global affairs at the disposal of diplomacy, defence, and development.

Constitutionalism, Democracy, and Religious Freedom: To Be Fully Human

L iberalism’s got problems. On this, most of us can agree. Hans-Martien ten Napel’s newest book is no exception to that emerging consensus. Ten Napel’s book is part of the zeitgeist of new sensational works on the crisis of liberalism, James K.A. Smith’s Awaiting the King and Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, which argue that we have hit “peak liberalism.” Happily, ten Napel seems far less pessimistic, though. Rather, as Charles Taylor would describe his own work in A Secular Age, it is a kind of loyal opposition to constitutional liberalism: not a revolutionary attempt to dispose of it, but an effort to alert us to the resources inside liberalism’s own often forgotten or marginalized canon, especially religious ones, that may enlarge its virtues and minimize its vices. Ten Napel, then, is one of a chorus of voices that is starting to become stronger in the debate on liberalism. He takes seriously the trenchant criticisms of who he, after Daniel Philpott, calls “the New Critics,” but despite this does not quit the field on democratic liberalism. Rather, he argues that constitutional liberalism has resources internal to it, or at least overlapping with it, that can provide real, substantial improvement. It is a reformational project in that respect, not revolutionary, in the spiritual tradition of Groen Von Prinsterer and his disciple Abraham Kuyper. The argument of ten Napel is simple: that in order to have this still cherished thing called liberal democracy we simply must have a version of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) as it has been historically developed. The practice of FoRB, in other words, is not a kind of affectation that can be taken or left in a liberal democracy, it is fundamental to liberal democracy, and if and when that right is either ignored, overruled, or simply abandoned we can no longer claim in a meaningful way to be a constitutional, liberal democracy. “All three,” he writes, “liberalism, constitutionalism, and religious freedom – are thoroughly interconnected.” And, right to the point, “behind this threesome lie the pre-political moral foundations, religious and otherwise, on which liberal constitutional order like any other political order ultimately rests” (56). This argument may seem to sympathetic readers as not especially radical. FoRB, after all, is recognized by most legal and constitutional scholars as an essential feature of liberal democratic societies. But it is, in my opinion, a

Rerum Novarum and the Right to Work: 19th-Century Lessons for 21st-Century Labor

S ince Pope Leo XIII addressed the problem of labor and capital in Rerum Novarum (1891) more than a hundred years have passed, the global economy has not only come into being it has increased on incredible orders of magnitude, and the world has been—it is not an exaggeration to say it—transformed by technological capitalism. Some would say that the world of that Pope, and of Rerum Novarum, separated from our own by rockets and moon landings, nuclear bombs and microchips, bears little resemblance to us. On the face of it, there is every reason to believe the bracing historicaleconomic thesis of Karl Polanyi, that we have indeed witnessed The Great Transformation. Yet, at least 90 years later, when Pope John Paul II penned Laborem Exercens (1981) we find Rerum Novarum at its very foundation, urgently contemporary, for what would soon become the post-Soviet world. Much of this remains true even today. In this article it is my argument that Rerum Novarum provides a spiritual blueprint, in the phraseology of Bob Goudzwaard (1979), for the revitalization of organized labor in North America. That blueprint has three essential elements that are especially pressing of labor in the present day. First, in what Pope Leo XIII calls the “marvelous and manifold” efficacy of Christian institutions [RN, 19], Rerum Novarm recovers for us both authentic post-secular engagement with resurgent global religion (including inside North America), and a perspective on institutions and organizations which unsettles the typical atomized, secular account of volunteerism. In its recovery of amoral vocabulary for labor, Rerum Novarum suggests a way to think beyond the false dichotomy of individualist association, and compulsory collectivism. Second, Rerum Novarum helps us recover labor unions as essentially economic institutions, that is to say, organizations whose primary purpose is to steward the dignity of human work, and not—as Laborem Exercens argues—to “play politics” [LE, 20]. While union activity undoubtedly enters into politics insofar as it has a “prudent concern for the common good” its limited role is “first of all not to be about human rights, redistribution, or social support” but rather “about stewarding human capital and

Introduction: Popes on the Rise

A mong the accounts of the Kings of Israel in the Catholic Bible, a prophet named Elisha prays for the eyes of a blinded servant (2 Kings, Chapter 6). There is nothing wrong with that servant’s eyes. But what he cannot see are mountains “full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.” Here, maybe, are the Pope’s divisions Joseph Stalin infamously derided. Here too, are what foreign policy scholars have called the spiritual power of religious movements that can topple states and empires, mediate peace, and propel to war. This, certainly, is the heritage and promise of Vatican foreign policy in the world today: a force that is real, but also one that is necessarily limited, case studies of which are afresh and aplenty in our world today. Just in the last several years, there has been a renaissance not only in study but in practice of Vatican diplomacy. We have found the Holy See intervening in Cuba, mediating conversations between then-President Obama and the Cuban President Raúl Castro. Vatican diplomats have been on the ground in Venezuela, attempting to mediate peace between the government of Nicolás Maduro and the opposition. The Holy See has been at the forefront of a big push at the United Nations on a new global treaty banning nuclear weapons. And this is the just the front-page news. Dig into the inglorious grunt work in dusty committee rooms, and you’ll find Vatican diplomats at the 2013 Geneva peace talks to end the Syrian war, at the Truth and Reconciliation process in post-Apartheid South Africa, in the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the list goes on. But even with all these interventions, of course, the Holy See can still seem like an oldworld relic in a hyper-modern world of hard power and economic globalization. What does a small quasi-sovereign mini-state really bring to the table on the “real” issues of international relations? Where, after all, are Elisha’s angel legions in the failed states of Somalia, the civil war in Yemen, the desolate destruction of Mosul, and more? The Vatican might specialize in a kind of boutique moral-diplomacy, but the heavy lifting of the international order will always be left to states with carrier groups and IMF voting blocks. Part of the argument of this issue is that this is not true. What counts as “real” and, indeed, what counts as “heavy lifting” in a globe oftenconsumed by growth rates and security dilemmas needs to be reconsidered. Just as the Vatican by its very existence challenges our common understanding of things like sovereignty and

Is the Problem Really Religious Freedom

By now, much has been made of the return of religion. Much less has been made of the return of the conceptual framework of “religion,” of its politics, its powers, and its international relations. ...

Christian Approaches to International Affairs

A review of Jodok Troy, Christian Approaches to International Affairs (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), a book that calls for renewed attention to and appreciation of the early Christian roots of Realism and the English School.

The (not so) grand strategy of the Byzantine Empire

A review of The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, by Edward Luttwak (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).