“Freedom of conscience at home and advocacy of freedom of religion abroad go together,” said Anne Leahy June 22 at McGill University’s Religion and Foreign Policy conference on the challenges of religious pluralism.
“How we manage our challenges at home — the Canadian model — speaks louder than words and is a powerful element of our foreign policy,” Leahy said. “How we act institutionally and as importantly as communities will have an impact beyond our borders.
“We have a responsibility to continue to get it right, to ourselves and to many in the world who need to see that it is possible to everyone’s benefit.”
While Canada projects its values of religious freedom abroad, it “also opens us up to scrutiny,” she said.
Leahy pointed out religion's public role and religious expression “are challenged in the very countries that make religion an explicit feature of their foreign policy.”
“While human rights including religious rights have long featured in our foreign policy, underlying values have evolved at home,” she said. “New patterns of immigration have changed our confessional make-up and Charter protections on freedom of religious belief are being challenged.”
In the United States, the Catholic bishops have set up an Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, she said, while in Canada, medical professionals have to fight “retain the right to conscientious objection on the grounds of their religious beliefs.”
Religion is an unusual and sensitive preoccupation for foreign affairs, she said, and “not singled out explicitly” until the 1990s. But religious freedom as part of human rights has been consistently part of Canada’s foreign policy for “as long as I can remember,” she said.
Leahy recalled working in Moscow in 1980 as the First Secretary of the Canadian Embassy there. “Religious affairs” made up part of her job description, she said. Her work included making representations on behalf of Jewish dissidents, Pentecostalists and Ukrainian Greco-Catholics, she said, as well as advising Canadian officials and concerned groups at home.
What’s new and “most challenging” is the mandate of the new Office of Religious Freedom to make religious freedom a key objective in foreign policy. The Prime Minister “implicitly put its promotion on a level equal to that of other major interests such as economic prosperity and security,” she said.
These changes “will presumably require some mechanisms in the government administration that reflect this increased emphasis and with which to work out what are not always complementary interests,” she said.
Leahy questioned whether reaching foreign policy objectives always require “putting the spotlight on the religious factor.”
Before Canada became so secularized, the religious element would have come naturally to diplomats and public officials, she said, along with social, economic and political issues.
“Today, someone who would have grown up in an environment where religion should be private and public discourse devoid of faith-based references, is less likely to have a sure understanding of environments where this is not the culture,” she said.
The visibility of religion grew after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but Leahy said the foreign affairs department was already looking at Islam as a factor in the 1990s, following the Soviet Union’s disintegration, rising unrest in the Caucasus and events in Central and South Asia and Africa.
Another challenge to notions of religious freedom that had previously always applied to individuals and communities are attempts by Muslim countries to introduce “defamation of religion” into international law.
“Religion itself became the subject of debate in the United Nations,” and other gatherings, she said, where terms like “Islamophobia” and “Christianophobia” have been discussed. The term “Christianophobia” appeared 10 years ago in UN documents, she said, and “was not favoured at first by all Christian leaders including the Catholic Church,” but has gained traction since the Pew Forum has documented Christians are the “most persecuted faith in the world,” she said.