The old American consensus on the duty to proclaim religious liberty to the world has frayed but not completely disappeared
STUDYING RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION, in all its ghastly forms, concentrates the mind. However Americans feel about the country’s domestic culture wars, most can agree in abhorring the imprisonment of Muslim Uighurs in China, the arrest and torture of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, the jailing of so-called blasphemers in Pakistan. Such brutal assaults on basic religious liberty can make America’s internal debates on the term’s precise meaning seem rather petty.
The event will not silence those who accuse the Trump administration of hypocrisy in matters of religion: because, for example, it often excoriates the Shia rulers of Iran while giving a free-ish pass to its own Sunni Muslim friends. As Shadi Hamid of the Brookings think-tank puts it, “nothing in this ministerial changes the fact that America encourages and empowers the authoritarian rulers of Saudi Arabia.
More fundamentally, Mr Pompeo is horrifying liberal-minded rights advocates by dismantling the approach to rights and diplomacy that was developed by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. She had emphasised women’s rights, reproductive rights and gay rights. She was not indifferent to matters of faith but she spoke often of “religious engagement”, implying that faiths could be harnessed and also challenged.
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