Obama Needs to Appoint an Ambassador for Religious Freedom—And One That Isn’t an Oprahesque Billy Graham

In Christianity Today , Thomas Farr explains the need for the U.S. to appoint an ambassador for religious freedom :

To have an influence on this critical element of our own national security, the United States must begin to take its international religious freedom policy seriously. Both the administration and the Senate should move quickly to put in place a credible, experienced ambassador at large with the authority and the resources to get the job done.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration’s candidate is neither credible nor experienced :

President Obama has re-nominated a New York pastor and motivational speaker, Suzan Johnson Cook, also known as “Dr. Sujay,” to be his ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom despite widespread concerns about her qualifications for the post and a Senate “hold” that halted her confirmation last year.

Obama waited until last June to fill a post that had already been low on the diplomatic pecking order despite the critical importance of the issue, as recent events in Egypt and the rest of the Muslim world have shown. And Johnson Cook, a Baptist pastor from the Bronx, was from the start cast as too much of a lightweight for such a job: She has been a chaplain to the New York City Police Department, has written books of spiritual uplift, and was described in a 2002 New York Times story as “Billy Graham and Oprah rolled into one.”

Good grief. Are there seriously no center-left experts on religious freedom on that Obama could appoint to the position?

In September R.R. Reno discussed why religious freedom is so important :

Both Christianity and Islam are animated by the conviction that their truths are universal. Both want to realize this universality in and through evangelization, which involves the transformation of culture. Both face the temptation to conscript the power of the modern state to achieve this goal. A commitment to religious freedom blocks this temptation. It redirects the ambitions of the evangelist toward their proper object: the heart and mind of the human person, and fittingly so, for it is the place where culture percolates.