Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power
by anna su
harvard, 296 pages, $39.95

Anna Su’s study of U.S. efforts to promote religious freedom abroad from 1898 through the present ends as it begins. In the Philippines in the early twentieth century and again in Iraq in the twenty-first, Republican administrations turned to religious freedom to help quiet Islamic insurgencies while assuaging domestic constituencies. Exporting Freedom, Su writes, is “first and foremost a cautionary tale,” whose “most important lessons” lie “in its past wreckage, not its dreams.”

Though Su situates her study within the critical scholarship on human rights that has flourished in recent years, her narrative is nevertheless progressive. Woodrow Wilson’s unfulfilled promise to protect religious freedom in the Covenant of the League of Nations gained new life after the Second World War. In the 1970s, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment (tying favorable trade status to human rights norms) and the Helsinki Final Act “resuscitated” the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and at last gave religious freedom a meaningful place in international law. While Su shows that this evolution was driven by international power politics, not simply by high ideals, the trajectory is unmistakable.

You've reached the end of your free articles for the month.
Subscribe now to read the rest of this article.
Already a subscriber?
Click here to log in.