Recently, the State Department announced the creation of a new Office for Religious Engagement, which will focus on reaching out to “faith-based organizations and religious institutions around the world to strengthen U.S. development and diplomacy and advance America’s interests and values.” Linda Woodhead casts a skeptical glance at that last phrase, hoping it doesn’t imply that there’s “only one possible model of religious freedom” based on U.S.-style separation of church and state. She holds up Europe as a counter-example:
Europe’s historical entanglement with religion is deep and ancient. In fact, the very idea of “Europe” is a product of Christianity’s attempt to bring unity to this region under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, the rise of European nation states in the early modern period is bound up with the contemporaneous creation of national churches. In other words, in the form in which we know them today European states and churches birthed one another. Only in combination did they have the economic, bureaucratic, and cultural capacity to create unified territorial polities.
The result of this symbiotic relation is that it’s impossible for European countries to make religion purely private without engaging in some of the merciless coercion exercised by those communist countries which attempted—with only partial success—to achieve such an end. Imagine the actual costs and consequences of withdrawing state-support from Christian educational foundations given that in many countries they include a significant proportion of primary and secondary schools as well as universities and colleges—even in France, the EU country with the nearest to a state-church separation.
She suggests “going with the grain of existing arrangements” in the countries we work with to avoid doing more harm than good:
Socio-religious ecologies are just that. They are highly complex systems with path-dependent possibilities which have been laid down over centuries (many more centuries in most parts of the world than in the U.S.). When you look beyond the surface, what appears to be unfreedom on a crude index often turns out to work very differently in context and practice. Rash interventions almost always have unintended, often irreversible, consequences.
The Dish 