The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has started a firestorm with its report, titled "Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy, which recommends that the U.S. essentially recalibrate international relations in areas of the world dominated by religious identity, to engage those regions more as religious communities, and less as traditional geo-political entities.
Part of that shift, the report argues, requires the President to reconsider how the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment applies to our foreign policy, understanding that it does limit the methods of engagement. But a written dissent goes much further, claiming constitutional religious liberty protections don't apply to international relations.
BJC Executive Director Brent Walker responds to that secondary idea:
Yes, we can debate the nuances of how and to what extent the Establishment Clause may or may not apply to foreign affairs (as we have been doing for decades on the domestic front). And yes… the courts have been unable or unwilling to rule definitively. But to suggest that the Establishment Clause can never apply beyond our borders would be an emasculation of that critical pillar of the First Amendment that ensures religious liberty for all Americans and whose underlying principle of governmental neutrality informs a proper understanding of religious liberty abroad.
