← New Books Network
New Books Network
Ashlyn Hand, "Prioritizing Faith: International Religious Freedom and U.S. Foreign Policy" (NYU Press, 2025)
00:43:20
Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:00]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Well, the holidays have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year.
- [00:15]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
What do you have to lose?
- [00:16]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time.
- [00:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 month or $180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy see.
- [00:29]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Terms welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Ashlyn Hand about her book titled Prioritizing International Religious Freedom and US Foreign Policy, published by NYU Press in 2025. Now, this book takes us to a really interesting moment in US Foreign policy, as the subtitle suggests, where we end up with some groups agreeing with each other that I at least was kind of surprised by in terms of who was agreeing with who and how this then played out over successive US Presidential administration. So focusing primarily on Clinton, Bush, and Obama, for instance, looking at what international religious freedom meant, who was coming up with those ideas, and then how that played out into honestly areas of foreign policy that I did not think would be related to this. So we are going to go all over the place talking about China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and probably more so clearly a lot to discuss. Ashlyn, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [01:43]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [01:51]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Sure, absolutely. So as you mentioned, my name is Ashlyn Hand and I currently am an assistant director at the center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. I've been working in foreign policy and US grand strategy for several years now and this book came out of my doctoral work. When people ask why I wrote this book, sometimes I question why did I write this book? But I thought I would start with a story that I stumbled upon in early grad school and that story really caught my attention and then I couldn't let it go. So basically I found this article that was talking about in the lead up to the Gulf War, how U.S. troops that were deployed in Saudi Arabia were instructed to hide their own faith practices. So family and friends were Barred from sending Bibles through the mail, chaplains had to be called morale officers. Mass was rebranded as fellowship meetings. So even in the middle of this partnership against Saddam Hussein, American soldiers in Saudi Arabia found themselves hiding their faith to maintain an Allian. And that moment crystallizes for me a much larger dilemma, I think, that has plagued US foreign policy for decades. It's not a simple question, it's a big one, which is what happens when America's values and America's interests collide and how do we reconcile, if we reconcile a professed commitment to religious freedom with the compromises that are demanded by geopolitics? So it was questions like that and the palpable tensions that they surfaced that led me to write this book. And at the opening line, you know, at the very first pages of the book, it says that it's a book about belief. And it is. It's a story of competing beliefs about the relationship between religion and politics and about the nature, honestly, of religion itself. It's about beliefs surrounding the United States own unique religious history and its role in the world. It's also about beliefs about U.S. foreign policy, the power of the executive branch, and then the responsibility, if any, and that's a big if the United States has to religious believers across the world. It's also a story about beliefs of a supernatural order. These are ones that extend beyond space and time and sometimes beliefs that people are willing to die to protect. So this book considers the plight of Uyghur, as you said, we're going to go all over the world, but it considers the plight of Uyghur Muslims in China, evangelicals in Vietnam, agnostics in Saudi Arabia, and millions of people the world over who really dare to remain true to their deepest convictions even in the face of persecution and death. So it's not a light topic, but it's one that has interest me for many years and that eventually became. Became this book.
- [04:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, there's so many things all boiled up. Even you said that one story you mentioned at the beginning. So I can see why this is something that kind of kept tugging at you and you wanted to look into. So let's start to unpick kind of how we get to. To that sort of point, right. Of the soldiers in Saudi Arabia, like what's the sort of backstory? So you obviously center a lot of this on the International Religious Freedom act, which obviously is not a starting point either, because no act comes out of nothing. So how and why do we get evangelicals, movements for universal human rights and some post Cold War stuff coming together to end up with this act.
- [05:20]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Yeah, great question. So really, the second half of the book is, as you mentioned, what this act looks like in practice. But the entire first half of the book is really a history of how the bureaucracies changed, of presidential politics, and of the advocacy that led to this point. So the three things that you mentioned are the ones that I, of course, highlight in the book, where by the mid-1990s, there were three powerful currents that had converged, and they created together a policy window that advocates and entrepreneurs then stepped into. So the first was evangelical and Jewish advocacy, which has deep roots in American life. Evangelicals really, going back to the middle of the 20th century, had organized to assert themselves more forcefully in public life. They built global relief and missionary networks that tied evangelism to humanitarian aid. But by the 1970s, evangelical activism had become increasingly international in scope and explicitly. Evangelicals were calling on governments to guarantee religious freedom, so not only the right to believe privately, but also the right to live out those beliefs publicly. Now, these advocacy networks were growing alongside Jewish advocacy networks. So during the Cold War, as you may remember, Jewish leaders mobilized around the plight of Soviet Jews, particularly Jews that were trying to leave the Soviet Union, and they pressed the United States government to act. Their activism culminated in something called the Jackson Vanik Amendment, which tied U.S. trade benefits to human rights performance and showed that religious rights could be written into the fabric of foreign policy. Importantly, this was also a time when Congress got involved, which, of course, as we were about to talk about the International Religious Freedom Act, Congress once again got involved here. So it was another. The Jackson Vanik Amendment was a precursor to show how congressional mobilization on these issues could be successful. So by the 1990s, which is really where my story picks up, these networks were poised to influence policies in some new ways. You mentioned in the introduction that it brought together a really wide variety of groups, and it did. It was evangelicals, Catholics, Jewish advocacy groups, and other human rights activists that formed a coalition around this cause of international religious freedom. What made the moment different, I think, in the 90s, was the insistence at this point from advocates that the US Government itself had a responsibility to act. The second current that you mentioned was the developing international human rights movement. And I mentioned this because none of this was occurring in a vacuum. Instead, we had some of the infrastructure that was already for international religious freedom that was already in place long before the 1990s with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, after World War II, religious freedom was Embedded then in an international framework from the start. So Article 18 of the Universal Declaration, human rights guarantees their freedom of thought, conscience, religion, including importantly, the right to change one's religion and to live out their beliefs publicly. So in that way, we kind of already had the scaffolding and in the opening pages of this international religious freedom act itself, it calls upon those universal and international documents as kind of the basis for why religious freedom should be an international right. The third current was, and perhaps most importantly was really the time that this happened, which was the post Cold War environment. So of course, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, US foreign policy really found itself in some uncharted waters. The end of the Cold War lifted some old ideological divides and there was kind of new space to think about where U.S. foreign policy should go. And so together again, these three currents really aligned just long enough to propel the international religious movement. International religious freedom movement, excuse me, onto the US foreign policy agenda.
- [09:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm, that's really interesting to kind of see how it gets to the point of becoming an act. Right. Acts sound very important, but of course, not all laws sort of get attention. This one clearly, as you're describing, does, though, in becoming a law. And then kind of immediately afterwards, was all of that attention good though, what were some of the kind of critiques or concerns that were raised about what actually became the actual.
- [09:45]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Yeah, so this was on paper, if you look at it, the law passes with flying colors at the end and is a bipartisan bill. You have people from all sides that are in favor of it, but that really papers over a much deeper story and a story that I think does expose some long standing divisions in this space. And so in the book I really talk about two types of criticisms that came from the law itself. And if I could, I might back up briefly just say what the law did, because that kind of gets us to why people critiqued it. Really the law was it made it institutionalized religious freedom into US foreign policy. So really there are kind of three main things that the law does. I'll try not to get too policy wonk here, but it really created the people that would be in charge of monitoring religious freedom across the world. So it created at the Secretary of. Or excuse me, it created in the State Department and Ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom that was directed to report to the Secretary of State. Also in the State Department established this new Office of International Religious Freedom, which was required to send these annual reports. Again, we're paying attention all across the world to what religious freedom looks like. Then it created a policy lever which was a system, and this will be the only acronym I use, I promise, which is called Countries of Particular Concern. Countries are noted as having particularly egregious and systematic and ongoing religious freedom violations. They can pull this policy lever and identify those countries as a CPC or a country of particular concern, and there requires the US to act. Now these actions that are required can range from policy tools like quiet diplomacy to sanctions to binding agreements, kind of, that runs the whole gamut. But as you can imagine, as this law is getting off the ground, there were a lot of people that had very different views on how we should do this. So when I talk about the criticisms in this space, I really talk about two different types, types of criticisms. One is, is this the way that we should do this? So there were some that thought that this wasn't strong enough, that we needed something that, you know, automatically created, not just a government reaction, but a strong government reaction. You know, is this the way that we should be doing it? Was the question that they asked. But then there was a whole other separate group of critics who said, should the United States be doing this at all? Here we have allegations of cultural imperialism that's kind of dressed up as human rights, or does it unfairly prioritize Christianity or missionary activity? So in general, we have kind of those that are questioning its effectiveness and those that are questioning whether we should be doing it at all. So again, while it looks like it was unanimous and kind of, you know, something that everybody was rallying behind, underneath there were a lot of debates on how the United States should go about this, if it should be doing it at all.
- [12:52]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And of course, those debates kind of only continue in a lot of ways because once it is made an act, then each presidential administration has to sort of come up with their own answers to those kinds of questions. So how did Clinton, the second Bush president, and Obama each approach these sorts of questions? I mean, obviously they didn't all do exactly the same thing, but in kind of broad overview sorts of ways. How did they approach these questions and what this act sort of put on the table for them?
- [13:21]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Yeah, absolutely. So I don't want to imply in the book, I try to be careful of this, that the presidents themselves, you know, were involved in the day to day decision making around these issues. That's not realistic. Part of what I'm talking about is trying to place religious freedom in a much larger geopolitical context. But to your point, the presidential administrations and their approaches still really matter. And so kind of the way that I present it was that Clinton, President Clinton really represented the last or final holdout of an older diplomatic paradigm that preferred honestly to avoid religion and foreign policy altogether. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has been quoted saying diplomats in her day were taught not to invite trouble, and no subject seemed more treacherous than religion. And so there was kind of this idea of, let's keep this separate, the fear that bringing religion into diplomacy might actually make it more difficult to push forward on other foreign policy goals. And so I kind of view President Clinton as the last holdout of that older diplomatic paradigm. But it was really during his tenure that things started to shift. And over the course of his presidency, growing congressional pressure and these advocacy campaigns that I've talked about really forced religion into the diplomatic calculus. So during President Clinton's term, you have what I would call an institutionalization of religion coming in contact with foreign policy. Instance that's also true about domestic policy. So, you know, the, the. This. This goes hand in hand that what Clinton was institutionalizing was both at a domestic level and more at the foreign policy level. President George W. Bush approached things a lot differently. So his own evangelical faith made him a lot more comfortable speaking publicly about religion. He often invoked America's first freedom, which, of course is the. The freedom of religion, and tied religious liberty to his broader freedom agenda. But it's important there that the war on terror really loomed over everything during George W. Bush's terms, especially when it comes to religious freedom issues. Because here you see the tension that's brought out between religious extremism and religious freedom. We can talk about that more in a moment, if you'd like. But then I would say President Obama took yet another path. So he, rather than kind of rooting his commitment to religious freedom and American history, he really focused on rooting his approach in international law and religious engagement, specifically emphasizing that Article 18 of the UDHR rather than US history itself. So if I kind of zoom out and think about the arc there, I would say that Clinton institutionalized religious freedom, that Bush really personalized religious freedom, and then Obama worked to internationalize it. That's kind of my overview, at least, of the presidential approaches.
- [16:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very helpful to have this sort of obviously overgeneralized. Right. But kind of general archetypes in mind to think about sort of what that meant for their foreign policy in practice. So how much were they, or obviously their administrations kind of framing sort of how they wanted to approach this, given everything else going on? Right. All three presidents, for instance, were trying to deal with relations with China. How did that play into their thinking when it came to religious freedom?
- [16:50]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Yeah, so this is where I really think the contribution of the book lies, which is that I don't think it would be fair to say that President Clinton or George W. Bush or President Obama or their administrations didn't care about religious freedom. I don't think that's a fair characterization. But I do think it's fair to say that when push comes to shove in the cases that I studied, so that would be China, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, we really see that when the implementation is where rubber meets the road. So it's not are we for or against religious freedom freedom, it's rather how do we put religious freedom next to securing a new trade deal or making sure that our partners in the war on terror are protected? So it's kind of just these other really important debates that are happening at the same time. So briefly, I would say that on the China case, we can go into more detail if you'd like, but on the China case that this one, especially in the Clinton years, ended up being, he campaigned on this idea of we are not going to condemning business as usual with tyrants. So he was angry about H.W. bush's policy toward China, especially after Tiananmen Square. But you know, early in his presidency he even tried to link trade privileges to human rights improvements. But very quickly he shifted course into something that he then called comprehensive engagement, which meant that he was going to prioritize a long term economic ties and trying to bring China into the World Trade Organization, even if it meant, and it did mean soft pedaling, if you will, on human rights rights. So there we see a place where religious freedom was raised, but it wasn't decisive. Instead it was more focused on trade. George W. Bush, perhaps unsurprisingly, took a more vocal approach in China. His own evangelical faith really shaped the way that he spoke around religious freedom. And he repeatedly raised cases of prisoners of conscience to Chinese leaders. But it also came during a time of the war on terror. And Beijing proved, Beijing proved, I think, really adept at using America's own language to justify its repression. So they framed their crackdowns on Uyghur Muslims, for example, as counterterrorism, not persecution. And in the climate of the early 2000s, when terrorism was constantly in the headlines, I think that framing really did carry weight. So that's an example of the fact that these issues just aren't occurring in a vacuum and instead everything that's happening across the world is really impacting how much leverage there is in any of these places.
- [19:25]
Shopify Advertiser
Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing, to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer yeah.
- [19:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That'S a really key way to show that these things are very much linked and not happening at all in a vacuum. And of course, that's not just in terms of geopolitical tensions, but also kind of. There's no vacuum to be had within the levers of government either. So how is that actually working?
- [20:08]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Right.
- [20:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
You mentioned that, like, it's not like these presidents are sat there on a daily basis going, how am I going to implement this act?
- [20:13]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Right.
- [20:13]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Like, who is doing this? Like, how is this practically being carried out within the bureaucracy?
- [20:21]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Yeah, so this is one of my favorite questions. And it gets at the heart of kind of what we mentioned earlier, of these internal debates within the movement itself. And so in the book, I really identify the actors in my story in two camps. And again, it's by the nature of there being two camps, it's slightly reductive, but I think it is a helpful frame which is what I call the Earth Purists and the Earth Pragmatists. Now, as the name might suggest, the Purists wanted to stand up unequivocally against religious persecution wherever it occurred. So what did this translate to in practice? Well, it was advocates that wanted swift designations. They were always saying that we needed to designate more people or more countries rather, as CPCs. They wanted tougher sanctions and maximum pressure. The figures I mentioned in the book are folks like Michael Horowitz, Nina Shea, who have this kind of guiding question of how do we stand against evil in the world? And so for them, religious freedom was a moral absolute. And hesitation, I think, often looked like complicity. On the other side of my story, though, were the pragmatists. So they shared the same ultimate goal, which was to expand religious liberty. But here they really emphasized diplomacy, relationship building, and they were a lot more comfortable with incremental progress. So here we have leaders like Bob Seiple, who was the first ambassador at large, John Hanford, who was his successor, he actually helped write the act too. So who really Understood that you couldn't just hammer countries into submission on these issues. You had to find ways to nudge them forward and to secure kind of these small wins that would eventually accumulate over time. And so I kind of positioned their guiding question is how do we make real lasting improvements on the ground now they weren't abstract differences. So you ask kind of like, who's doing the day to day work here? Again, this is a simplification, but I would say that the way that the act itself was set up almost pulled these two sides apart in some ways. So we've already talked about at the State Department this new Office of International Religious Freedom. And as you might imagine, because that was having to work within the larger State Department context, they had to be really pragmatic. But the act also created a separate watchdog organization that was really supposed to hold the Office of International Religious Freedom accountable. And so the watchdog organization, as you might imagine, attracted more folks like the pragmatists, excuse me, like the purists. So there you have both in their institutional arrangements, but also in their approach, some real differences in how they wanted to make progress, progress on these issues. Does that, does that answer your question there?
- [23:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think it does. And obviously putting people in sort of camps like that or sort of conceptualizing them that way, I mean, are these camps cooperative with each other? Are there tensions between them? Like when we say people didn't agree, how much do they not agree?
- [23:24]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Yeah, so it depends on when this would. I would say there were pieces of time, you know, where. And part of my research strategy was to interview people all the way from ambassadors level to interns that were in the office, which I think actually kind of creates a bigger picture of what the day to day workings looked like. And I was struck in my, in my research by just how different some of the descriptions of these environments were. So some would say, oh yeah, we worked great together. And then others would say, you know, it was a toxic work environment or whatever. And so I would say that the places where it kind of pushed came to shove was when there were larger kind of ongoing diplomatic pressure at the State Department on other issues, whether it be trade or security that maybe weren't public. So things that you weren't, you know, we weren't ready to talk about explicitly in the public eye, but that the purist camp was really angry about. So one example that I come back to is from the Saudi Arabia case. And here you saw a real disagreement and I think a fair one. So, you know, Saudi Arabia was not designated a CPC in the first couple years of the International Religious Freedom act in the first annual reports. But if you open those early reports, the first line when it talks about Saudi Arabia, says, freedom of religion does not exist in Saudi Arabia. And so it kind of, you know, there's this question where the purists were like, how are you going to say that there's. That it doesn't exist, that there's no freedom of religion, but at the same time not designate them as cpc? Meanwhile, the pragmatists would be like, you know, the cost that it would, you know, the amount that it would cost in order to designate Saudi Arabia as CPC would derail all of these other diplomatic priorities. So that's like one example of. When I say there was tension, that's an example of what it looked like in practice. Now, to his credit, George W. Bush and the Bush administration did identify Saudi Arabia as a CPC a couple of years later. So that one kind of dissipated. But I would say that there were cycles like that where there's kind of ongoing diplomatic initiatives that are very protected and sensitive and that the purists were like, but if we say we're going to come out against religious freedom, this is an obvious and egregious case.
- [25:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really helpful to get an inside look into what was going on. That's obviously then an instance where the act doesn't really succeed, at least kind of with the official. What it was meant to do on paper and kind of how it was put into practice. Are there instances where it does succeed? And if so, what sorts of factors made that possible in instances like, for example, Vietnam.
- [26:09]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Yeah, Vietnam. And part of why I think it's important to include this case is because Vietnam stands out as a story where the United States actually did have unusual leverage there, and it's leverage that made religious freedom a real point of negotiation. So I would say for decades, Vietnam's story has been one of progress on religious freedom and then deterioration. The same, honestly, could be said of US Vietnam relationships in general during that period. It has a rich and syncretic religious history. So Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism have all shaped its culture for centuries. Catholicism came through Jesuit missionaries in the colonial period, and Protestantism didn't come through until much later, especially among the Montagnards and Hmong people. So by the 1980s, again, right before my story really picks up, there was a remarkable religious revival around the country with churches, temples, and schools multiplying. And. And the Communist Party of Vietnam has always viewed Religion with suspicion. So after the reunification in 1975, the government destroyed churches, imprisoned leaders, and forced believers to renounce their faith. And minority groups, like some I just mentioned, like the Montagnards, were really singled out, not only because they were Protestant, but also importantly. And this goes back to the geopolitical piece. They had fought alongside US Forces during the Vietnam War war. So the regime really saw them as foreign agents. Now, Vietnam eventually codified its approach to recognizing only six patriotic religions, which were each carefully controlled by the state. So anything outside of those, you know, six patriotic religions is viewed as illegal. And so, you know, all of this is playing out in the 1980s against the backdrop of economic collapse and international isolation. But then in the 19, I would say 1986, you have these renovation reforms that are really attempting to open up Vietnam's economy to global trade. And that same opening really unleashed a religious growth, which again caused a crackdown. So you have this cycle of trying to open up in some ways, especially economically, but then not wanting to let religion run free. So by the 1990s, Vietnam was trying to normalize its diplomatic relationship with the United States. But it's deplorable. I mean, just deplorable. Religious freedom conditions really become a sticking point. So for advocates in Washington, I think Vietnam represented both a challenge and an opportunity. So here's a communist regime with deep religious repression, but it was also one that needed something from the United States. So, as I mentioned, on the economic side, Vietnam was desperate to normalize its relations with the United States and to join the global economy. So it's been decades of isolation, but then Hanoi signs this bilateral trade agreement with the United States, which was in 2000, which was the year 2000, and then it set its sights on joining the World Trade Organization. Give you just, like, a little bit of a sense of scale. The US Trade jumped from just under half a billion dollars in the mid-1990s to nearly 8 billion by the end of the early 2000s. So Vietnam's leaders really did know how much they needed American approval to keep that momentum going. And another important geopolitical piece here is that on the security side, Vietnam during this time was increasingly anxious about a rising check China. So the two countries that fought this bloody border war back in 1979. And by the early 2000s, I think Beijing's growing aggression in the South China Sea made Hanoi eager for these closer ties to Washington. So that meant, like, we had bargaining power that we rarely had elsewhere. And so, you know, this was a case where I think that the irfa, as it's known, the International Religious Freedom act, really works the way that it was, is designed to work. So eventually, you know, Vietnam does get designated as a cpc, which in some ways is a form of, is like a scarlet letter. It means the US Government that's determined that a country is responsible for the systematic, ongoing, egregious religious freedom violations. And so by the 19, you know, by early 2000s, Vietnam was facing pressure from a lot of different directions. Its own desire for trade, its security concerns about China, and then the prospect of being publicly branded a cpc. And I think that like I said earlier, that this was a rare convergence where the United States actually had an opening and leverage. So what actually happened in 2004 after the CPC was designated, Hanoi wanted to work with the United States. And this is what I mean by the act working the way it was intended to act. So led by the office at this point was led by Ambassador John Hanford, and he really worked with the government of Vietnam to put together a plan, plan a binding agreement to change religious freedom conditions on the ground. And just to give you a snapshot, almost overnight, this was successful. So you saw concrete changes where hundreds of prisoners who had been jailed for their religious activities were released. The government outlawed the practice of forced renunciations of faith, which was something that had really devastated those Protestant communities, especially in the Central highlands. Churches were reopened and house churches were granted, granted legal recognition for the first time. So really, people that had been forced underground were able to exercise their faith freely. And again, this happened very quickly. And the persistence, I think of John Hanford and his team showed what can happen when US does have leverage. Now I'd be remiss not to mention that it's also a sobering story in some ways because while there was this great success during the Bush administration as economic integration advanced, repression did crep creep back in. So it's not, you know, it's not a story that these, these conditions change constantly. And making success at one point doesn't necessarily mean ongoing success. It's something that I think requires consistent pressure and consistent action. But it is something to say that, you know, here's an example where that leverage did provide an opening and we had the policy levers and the people in place to actually make a difference there.
- [32:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a really interesting example because quite often, you know, the focus is on what doesn't work. And of many of those are often the more headline catching ones too, given what else is happening geopolitically. So very helpful to See an instance where it does work, even if it doesn't kind of latch on in the public imagination as much. And, of course, one reason for that is that if China is not grabbing the headlines at this point, it is usually the global war on terror. That is. Right. Those tend to be kind of the big things for these administrations. So now that we have all this kind of context and background, can we go back to Saudi Arabia and talk more about. About how all of these tensions played out with US Policy there?
- [33:13]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Absolutely. Saudi Arabia presents a very different kind of challenge. So here, the United States was dealing with a close strategic partner, critical for U.S. energy and U.S. security, but whose government is also a theocracy that tightly restricts religion. And so here it's interesting to go from, if you're in a communist regime that is generally trying to get religion out of public life, this is an exact inverse where we have a theocracy that is requiring its citizens to believe and to behave in very specific, specific ways. But the war on terror really blurred the lines, I think, between advancing religious freedom and confronting extremism. And so, you know, during the 1990s and 2000s, US diplomats really did press Riyadh to curb some of its extremist textbooks, reform its religious police, for example, and ease some of the restrictions on private worship, at least by non Muslims. And there was some progress that was made, but it was honestly when terrorism struck within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia itself, where they started to realize, wait, this war on terror is not just a, you know, American problem, but it's a problem that's affecting all of us, that I think things started to change. So here we have, you know, in 2003, there was the Riyadh compound bombings. In 2004, there's the Cobo, our Tower attacks. And it was then, I think, that Saudi leaders became more willing to cooperate. But in general, yeah, U.S. diplomats were pressing for reforms, but they were constantly balancing how to press for change without jeopardizing this partnership that they really depended on.
- [34:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really interesting to think about, kind of how that all had to be very carefully navigated and balanced.
- [35:00]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Yeah.
- [35:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And of course, that's still relevant. Right. When it comes to religious freedom in Saudi Arabia, given that this act is still force now.
- [35:07]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Yeah. So my. My book really finishes with the Obama administration, but this policy hasn't changed. You know, it's still. It's still very much in practice. So if. If I could, I might spend just a couple minutes talking about Trump and Biden and now Trump again to Kind of see where things are headed. And his first term, President Trump really gave international religious freedom new prominence, especially through Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then Ambassador, the IRF ambassador, Ambassador at. For his term was Sam Brownback. So they started this thing called the Ministerial to Advanced Religious Freedom, which really brought together hundreds of leaders from around the world. And for a moment, I think it looked like IRF had finally, to the advocates at least, perspective, become a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy or U.S. diplomacy. But at the same time, I'd be remiss not to mention the deep polarization in the United States and how that those politics colored how those efforts were received. So many praise, the scale and ambition, but others really argue that this was being politicized or narrowly framed through this Judeo Christian lens. President Biden tried to separate himself from this and really took a different path. So he was emphasizing kind of like his, you know, his kind of like President Obama had, emphasizing multilateralism and really worked to integrate IRF efforts into this broader human rights agenda. So his administration put new focus on protecting vulnerable minorities and linking religious freedom to democracy promotion and economic development development. But again, there's always critics, and the critics here worried that the issue was being subsumed under kind of these larger human rights frameworks, which lost the distinct visibility that Congress had intended with the irfa. And so now, you know, with President Trump back in office for a second term, I think the ascensions have only sharpened. Widespread cuts to the State Department have reduced the IRF office's authority, even as polarization around the issue has continued to deepen. So I won't speculate on what the future of international religious freedom policy. Policy will be. But it's certainly. I don't think we are in a period where there's a lot of agreement on what is happening now, whether that be in Saudi Arabia or vis a vis China, and what to do regarding international religious freedom.
- [37:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it definitely remains very much an ongoing open question. In putting all of this together, then, across so many different places and obviously different presidential administrations, is there anything in particular you came about across that really surprised you, even if it didn't end up making it into the book?
- [37:43]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Ooh, good question. You know, I'll answer that in two ways. The first is that I'll say that I was surprised during my interviews by how painful the process of getting this act out was. And so, you know, this has been. It's now been many years since the passage of the International Religious Freedom act, and it was a contentious process and the beliefs around, around what the United States should be doing and what that should look like in congressional legislation was really tenuous. And I think that it was surprising to me that even after decades that the passion and kind of the strong debates about bureaucracy were still as strong as they were. So that's one thing I would say is just the kind of emotional piece of it. And the interviews really stuck out. But then on a hopeful note, one thing that surprised me again, a lot of the book is about division and tension and all of that, but I really was surprised how often progress came about when people could start by naming their shared points of agreement. So I think that that shared outrage sometimes made it possible to talk through harder disagreements. So for example, we might, in this space, there's constantly debates on whether there's persecution happening in the United States for examp. And you know, setting those debates aside, if we can come together to say, you know, what is happening to Uyghur Muslims in China is objectly wrong, then you can kind of set disagreements and partisan politics aside briefly for searching for an answer for this kind of more common struggle. And I found that to be a hopeful line that you had people on all sides of the issue, on both political parties who were really focused on how to make a difference for people whose voices are often, often ignored.
- [39:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that's very interesting indeed. Thank you for sharing that sort of behind the scenes experience of it. What, may I ask then have you turned your attention to? Now that this book is off your desk, is there anything related or unrelated you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [39:53]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Yeah, so it's a great question. I'll be honest with you. I gave myself. So the book was published in September of last year and I purposefully kind of put things aside for, for the rest of the year and was just taking some time to read and to think. And so it wasn't really until January of this year that I started writing again and thinking through what my next angle or next project might look like. So it's going to be a slightly different and a little less niche. I spent a lot of time with one particular piece of legislation, so I'm hopeful that I'm going to be able to grow out a little bit. But it comes out of some of the same questions, which is I want to look at the history of pluralism in the United States, how that term has evolved and what Americans have meant by pluralism domestically, but then also trace how those understandings have shaped if they have, which my instinct is that they have U.S. engagement in the world. So I'm kind of back to this interest in the gap between pluralism as an idea and pluralism them as lived practice. So I think that'll be book two. But I won't lie to you, I don't know when book two will emerge.
- [41:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, that's very fair. And, of course, while you are thinking through all of those ideas, listeners can read the book, of course, that we've been discussing titled Prioritizing International Religious Freedom and U.S. foreign Policy, published by NYU Press in 2025. Ashlyn, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [41:20]
Dr. Ashlyn Hand
Absolutely. Thanks for me having having me.