Beliefnet uses the term “faith-based diplomacy” to describe the ideas Madeline Albright advances in this interview. She’s talking about the importance of political leaders understanding the role of religious faith in the lives of the world’s population.
We used the phrase in a different way in a op-ed piece I contributed to in September 2005. We were hoping to promote a conference at Washington National Cathedral. Our focus was on the role that religious leaders could play in immeliorating global conflcit and some of the conditions that gave rise to this conflict. (The 35 religious leaders who attended that conference produced this statement.)
The piece never saw the light of day, but I have always been fond of it, so I thought I would pass it on. Here’s an excerpt:
In the multi-ethinic West, we may identify ourselves primarily as citizens of a country, but on much of our violence-ridden and poverty-wracked planet, people understand themselves principally as adherents of a faith. While ideals like freedom and democracy inform the diplomacy of the West, equally strong ideals of submission to the Divine often inform the aspirations and actions of humanity in other corners of the globe.
The developing world is undergoing a religious revival that will only enhance the role of local religious leaders in shaping national destinies. Whether we look at the exponentially growing Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches in sub-Saharan Africa or the continuing trend toward religiously Islamist states in North Africa and the Middle East, it is clear that faith leaders enjoy almost unprecedented influence in the lives of their nations. Moreover, faith leaders, unlike their government counterparts, have the power to speak across national boundaries and connect with people on the deepest of levels: the level of their core beliefs.
Power such as this can be used for good or for ill. Parts of the world where the destabilizing forces of poverty and disease create a climate of hopelessness are ripe for exploitation by religious extremists seeking to motivate terror and conflict. The response of faith leaders committed to peacemaking must go beyond offering a moral vision that directly counters the dark vision of terrorists; we must wage a war against the forces that make their communities targets for exploitation in the first place: poverty, pandemic disease, a lack of basic education, government corruption, and inadequate resources for development. As President Bush observed in 2002: “Poverty doesn’t [itself] cause terrorism…yet persistent poverty and oppression can lead to hopelessness and despair. And when governments fail to meet the most basic needs of their people, these failed states can become havens of terror.”
Click below to read it all.
In the four years since September 11, 2001, the world has become painfully aware of the role religious extremism plays in motivating violence and upheaval. As world leaders prepare to meet at the United Nations to debate strategies for building a more secure and prosperous world, they would do well to consider how the power of faith instead might motivate a new era of global partnership that trumps the forces of terror and instability.
The recent terrorist attacks on Great Britain – like those upon the United States, Spain and Russia – illustrate how unchecked distortion of religion can create a global future of instability and fear. To write faith off as a motivator of violence, however, is to miss one of the world’s best lines of defense against the evil of our time. If the zeal of faith can fuel the suicide bomber, the well of religious devotion also can inspire the peacemaker and the one whom Isaiah calls “the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in.”
In the multi-ethnic West, we may identify ourselves primarily as citizens of a country, but on much of our violence-ridden and poverty-wracked planet, people understand themselves principally as adherents of a faith. While ideals like freedom and democracy inform the diplomacy of the West, equally strong ideals of submission to the Divine often inform the aspirations and actions of humanity in other corners of the globe.
The developing world is undergoing a religious revival that will only enhance the role of local religious leaders in shaping national destinies. Whether we look at the exponentially growing Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches in sub-Saharan Africa or the continuing trend toward religiously Islamist states in North Africa and the Middle East, it is clear that faith leaders enjoy almost unprecedented influence in the lives of their nations. Moreover, faith leaders, unlike their government counterparts, have the power to speak across national boundaries and connect with people on the deepest of levels: the level of their core beliefs.
Power such as this can be used for good or for ill. Parts of the world where the destabilizing forces of poverty and disease create a climate of hopelessness are ripe for exploitation by religious extremists seeking to motivate terror and conflict. The response of faith leaders committed to peacemaking must go beyond offering a moral vision that directly counters the dark vision of terrorists; we must wage a war against the forces that make their communities targets for exploitation in the first place: poverty, pandemic disease, a lack of basic education, government corruption, and inadequate resources for development. As President Bush observed in 2002: “Poverty doesn’t [itself] cause terrorism…yet persistent poverty and oppression can lead to hopelessness and despair. And when governments fail to meet the most basic needs of their people, these failed states can become havens of terror.”
Yet President Bush and most other world leaders have been slow to make an urgent response to poverty and its effects a central front in the battle for global security. As the UN meets this week to consider the world’s progress toward the poverty-reduction targets set in 2000 by the historic Millennium Declaration, the data are not encouraging. The UN’s five-year progress report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) filed this spring shows the developing world lagging behind in most MDG areas – and making negative progress in some – mostly as a result of inadequate resources and leadership from rich nations. The disheartening news in late August that President Bush is urging the world community to abandon the MDGs altogether only makes matters worse. If the international community is serious about building a more secure future for our children and children’s children, an urgent and well-funded global movement for poverty reduction is vital.
In many cases, the world’s religious leaders are ideally positioned to make such a movement possible.
A major strength the faith community brings to the quest for global security and human development is infrastructure. Through collaboration with religious charities and relief-and-development organizations in the developed world, faith communities in many impoverished countries have vast and sophisticated systems to deliver resources for human development. Often these capabilities far surpass those of other members of civil society and even of governments. If these infrastructures are mobilized across denominational lines and in partnership with government and other sectors of civil society, they have the ability to revolutionize global development.
Additionally, the voice of faith leaders can bring an inherently moral dimension to the politics of global security that can directly counter the voices of terrorists, insurgents, and despots in the hearts and minds of communities and peoples. While it is undeniably true that faith sadly has been used to propel conflict through the centuries, it is just as certain that nearly all of the world’s major faith traditions, at their core, expound a calling to peace and reconciliation between people. If faith leaders of many different traditions were willing to respect one another’s doctrinal and dogmatic differences but speak with a common and consistent message of reconciliation, the effect could be profound.
Religious partnership also has the power to offer a model of cooperation between rich and poor that secular and governmental institutions could model and build on in seeking to fulfill the world’s ambitions for rooting out poverty and instability. Rich governments often cite a lack of absorptive capacity in the developing world, as well as corrupt governments and institutions in poor countries, as justifications for not mobilizing resources for development. A genuine commitment from faith leaders in the rich world to collaborate with their counterparts in developing countries in these areas – in which many religious institutions in the developing world have been working for years — could help ensure not only that this work takes place in a coordinated way, but also that governments and other institutions have an example of how the sort of partnership envisioned by the MDGs should work.
In short, global religious networks offer significant and largely untapped potential to contribute greatly to lifting the barriers to security and prosperity currently threatening the world. How could such partnership begin?
First, world leaders – beginning with those meeting at the UN this week – should encourage such relationships. The international community should call upon developing-country governments to engage the voices of the religious sector in their homelands as partners in building stability and prosperity. Rich governments should be encouraged to seek partnership opportunities with religious charities and development organizations that work in close proximity to the faith leaders of the developing world as a way of strengthening capacity.
Second, the international community – and the United States in particular – should commit to shifting resources from bilateral development programs (country-to-country efforts) to genuine multilateral initiatives that are free of the sorts of economic conditions and administrative requirements that have crippled development efforts in the past. While bilateral programs such as President Bush’s Millennium Challenge Account and his Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief are worthwhile, they have been funded by robbing genuine multinational partnerships. By pursuing the opposite approach – giving money to international partnerships that work with the religious community and other sectors – the world community could ensure that developing-country voices shape the future of development. This would incorporate the voices of the faith community and others, would be more effective than any condition-laden program in rooting out corruption and guaranteeing capacity, and could provide a true end to the “donor culture” that now plagues global development efforts and often proves counterproductive to the intended beneficiaries of funds.
Finally, religious leaders simply need to start working together. This week, the Washington National Cathedral will convene a historic gathering of gathering of high-level religious leaders from many countries and many faith traditions to begin developing strategies for how a global religious partnership for human development might work. These leaders will develop a communiqué committing themselves to these strategies, and will travel to New York to present this document on the opening day of the UN General Assembly. Though the Cathedral’s ministry traditionally has been focused locally and domestically, we firmly believe that the world in which we live no longer permits faith leaders to limit their vision by national borders. Accordingly, this week’s gathering will be just the first step in the Cathedral’s commitment to global religious partnership.
Recent history is full of examples of the benefits of such partnership. The Churches of the Sudan – long victims of repression at the hands of a religious-extremist state – have repeatedly demonstrated how faith undeterred by adversity can move a nation toward peace, even if that movement comes slowly. The unique coalition of people from many faiths who united in the Jubilee 2000 movement to bring the developing world three rounds of debt cancellation in the past decade gives us another model, as does the role of religious leaders in helping exterminate Apartheid in South Africa. These examples offer hope and proof that united faith coalitions that offer a witness of peace and reconciliation can deal mortal blows to evil and oppression that masquerade as religion.
Our present generation’s rendezvous with reality may very well be judged on how we use the power of faith to shape our world. What shall triumph: the zeal of the terrorist bomber or the faith of the peacemaker? Both have the power to radically transform the world, and it is up to all of us alive today to choose which one will win the day.