The Importance of International Religious Freedom Day

October 27 is International Religious Freedom Day, a testimony to the inestimable worth of our first freedoms. It is also a reminder of how many people around the world, especially under Marxist regimes, cannot freely live out their fundamental human rights. 

On October 27, 1998 President Bill Clinton signed the bi-partisan International Religious Freedom Act (IRF Act). The Act was both something new and something tried and true. It was new in explicitly expressing religious freedom as a foreign policy imperative for the United States.  As President Clinton noted in his signing statement,

“My Administration has made religious freedom a central element of U.S. foreign policy. When we promote religious freedom we also promote freedom of expression, conscience, and association, and other human rights. This Act is not directed against any one country or religious faith. Indeed, this Act will serve to promote the religious freedom of people of all backgrounds, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, or any other faith.”

The IRF Act made changes to government, creating an office for International Religious Freedom at the U.S. Department of State led by an ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, and a free-standing U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).  It also called for a special advisor on international religious freedom at the National Security Council and provided a number of mechanisms, most notably economic sanctions, that could be directed against gross religious freedom violators, known as “countries of particular concern” (CPCs).

Nevertheless, the underlying premise for the Act was the tried and true principle of religious freedom, a force for civility and stability at home and abroad.  As President Clinton noted, religious liberty is intrinsic to other fundamental freedoms such as expression, conscience, association, private property, and the press.  Religious people naturally congregate to worship together and raise their children in the faith.  They study, read, and publish material. They train up new generations of parishioners and faith leaders.  They create voluntary associations, schools, orphanages, and invest in other charitable work.  Religious freedom recognizes this vast sphere of individual and collective activity outside the control of government, and it is rooted not just in the American experience, but more recently in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the legally-binding International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights.

Sadly, on October 27, 2024, billions of people live in restrictive or repressive environments.  It is worth noting one major commonality on the State Department’s current list of “countries of particular concern”: their government’s current or past adherence to a Marxist ideology.  Seven of the twelve gross violators are currently communist (China, Cuba, North Korea), socialist (Nicaragua), or continue to have draconian policies and a repressive security apparatus that learned its business under the Soviet Union (Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan).  Moreover, two others are on the State Department’s “special watch list” (Vietnam, Azerbaijan).

Why is it that the inheritors of Marx-Leninism are consistently among the most brutal violators of religious freedom? Indeed, they claim to be tolerant of ‘democratic peoples republics’ and, in many instances, point to written constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.  

It’s all a sham. The fact of the matter is that these countries have atheistic, materialistic worldviews rooted in Marxist ideology. They see history as simply a struggle for the survival of the fittest, and their understanding of that struggle is the pitting of one socio-economic class against another for ultimate primacy.   That is the Marxist view of history and key to its ethic: the ends justify the means in seizing and maintaining control of the state and thereby dominating all aspects of civic life.  

The individual and his or her immediate associations, most notably the family, religious affiliation, and cultural identity, are the first barriers to communist control of society and thus are the first targets of attack.  In other words, personal religious faith, individual thought, conscience and belief, and social structures, particularly those informed by religious associations or religious ideas, such as the family, houses of worship, charitable organizations and other religious institutions, either must be controlled by the communist state or eliminated as a threat.

Religious faith and institutions are a threat to communism because religion provides a moral code and an authority structure that is beyond the individual and that is beyond and outside government. Marxist ideology, in practice, avers that there can be no authority higher than the Communist Party and the state that the Party controls.  Thus, it is not surprising that the oligarchs in Beijing, Havana, and Pyongyang see religious freedom as a particularly pernicious threat to their demands for unconditional allegiance. 

Moreover, today’s communists can look back to see that among their greatest past opponents were people of faith, such as Hungary’s Cardinal Mindszenty, who was an anti-Nazi, an anti-fascist, and an anti-communist, and ended up living in the basement of the US Embassy in Budapest for fifteen years.  Another was Pope John Paul II, a champion of the freedom of all peoples and a critic of the dehumanizing aspects of communist ideology and practice. Today, the prisons of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, China and elsewhere hold many a religious dissident, pastor, priest, or humanitarian who has refused to bow the knee to the communist Caesar. 

Among the modern faces of all of this are individuals such as Cardinal Joseph Zen, who at the age of 90 was detained by the increasingly authoritarian CCP-controlled government of Hong Kong (2022) and exiled Nicaraguan Bishop Rolando Álvarez.  

International Religious Freedom Day does not pick favorites: as President Clinton said, “This Act will serve to promote the religious freedom of people of all backgrounds, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, or any other faith.”  Just as the Western tradition of pluralism and liberty embraces religious liberty as a common good for all, communists and their allies take the opposite approach, restricting and punishing religious faith, practice and identity, from China’s Muslim Uyghurs to Cuba’s evangelicals to Vietnam’s Christian Montagnards. This October 27, there is work to be done so that all citizens, regardless of faith, culture, or nationality, can faithfully live out their fundamental convictions.

This op-ed was originally published in Providence Magazine. Photo by Malcolm Brown via CC BY-SA 2.0.