It may be, as some have speculated, that the Supreme Court ruled differently in the second case as a way of atoning for a mistaken decision in the first. The similarities in these cases are as striking as the differences: death row inmates, spiritual advisors, stays of execution. The next month, the Supreme Court decided differently, suggesting that Buddhist inmate Patrick Murphy could be granted a stay of execution so that his Buddhist chaplain could receive the sort of training that had been denied Ray’s imam. In February 2019, the Supreme Court denied a stay of execution for a Muslim inmate, Domineque Ray, who had asked for the minimum amount of time for his imam to receive the training required to attend Ray at his death. Take, for example, two recent court cases that involved the religious rights of incarcerated men. However, the realities of American domestic politics put lie to that claim. As scholars such as Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Anna Su have also shown, this conceit that the United States has figured out religious freedom and the rest of the world must play catch-up has prominently featured in American foreign policy for the last several decades. In a 2019 book, I showed how white Americans explicitly denied religious freedom to Japanese American Buddhists in the 1920s, but I also showed how American officials occupying Japan in the early 1940s said it was inconceivable that Japanese people could understand or enact religious freedom without American help. Many of us who study religious freedom as a facet of American foreign policy have also described the contrasting faces of religious freedom America presents at home and abroad. The two faces of religious freedom talk represented by Pompeo and Barr are not unique to the Trump administration, nor are they exclusively the province of the political right. Healan Gaston have persuasively demonstrated, religious freedom talk has long served to both include and exclude.
They have long been a part of grandiloquent narratives about American greatness and cultural uniqueness. policy more than it has represented a change. But in the case of international religious freedom, the Trump administration has exemplified a continuation of U.S. The Biden team will no doubt be tempted to do exactly that. It is tempting to wave away these evident hypocrisies as the byproducts of a particularly venal administration that has engaged in malfeasance of the highest order. If we take Barr at his word, then democracy is literally inconceivable without the aid of religion, and real religious freedom leaves no room for unbelief. For example, in his address at the International Religious Freedom Alliance dinner in February 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was careful to use inclusive rhetoric about protecting people’s “right to believe in whatever it is they wish, to change their faith, or to hold no faith at all.” But how do we square this statement with Attorney General Bill Barr’s October 2019 speech at Notre Dame that decried the “growing ascendancy of secularism” and a “steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system and a comprehensive effort to drive it from the public square”? Which of these political appointees spoke for the administration? If we take Pompeo at his word, then religious freedom includes protections for those who are not religious. Moreover, the Trump administration’s own messaging on religious freedom has been internally inconsistent. An administration that maintained squalid, overcrowded prisons for migrants and asylum seekers was hardly on sound footing to criticize the People’s Republic of China for its horrific practice of “reeducating” religious minorities in militarized camps. Trump aggressively opened federal lands to extractive industries, violating sites that Native Americans hold sacred. After all, the Trump administration proudly instituted discriminatory travel bans that targeted specific religious communities. This suggestion may seem counterintuitive. Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue Topicīut in the case of international religious freedom, the temptation to get back to normal must be avoided.
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