Written by Don Byrd
Ohio Governor and Republican presidential candidate John Kasich yesterday gave a foreign policy address in which he proposed a new government agency that would focus on international diplomacy. Sounds good so far. The Washington Post reports on a few of the important details:
“We must be more forceful in the battle of ideas,” Kasich said. “U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting have lost their focus on the case for Western values and ideals and effectively countering our opponents’ propaganda and disinformation. I will consolidate them into a new agency that has a clear mandate to promote the core, Judeo-Christian Western values that we and our friends and allies share: the values of human rights, the values of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association.” The areas he would target: the Middle East, China, Iran and Russia.
Wait, what? So, foreign policy objectives of the U.S. government would include spreading Christian values across the world?
When it comes to our government promoting values of human rights, democracy, free speech, religious freedom and free association, count me in. But promoting Christian values sounds more like the domain of the church, doesn’t it? Let’s leave the government out of the business of promoting the perspective of a particular faith or group of faiths, Governor.
For one thing, establishing a government agency for the purpose of advancing a particular religious worldview seems to directly contradict the First Amendment.
But also, if one of our goals, and appropriately so, is to convince the Middle East that the United States is not at war with Islam, shouldn’t we maybe refrain from framing our diplomatic efforts in religious and Judeo-Christian terms? After all, isn’t that exactly how the propagandists who would terrorize the West frame it?
Won’t the message of human rights and democracy spread the world over more easily if it didn’t appear to have the strings of a particular religion attached?
