The Foreign Service Journal, September 2005

and avoid such totally misguided adventures in the future. That is not isolationism; it is realism and common sense. Robert V. Keeley, a retired FSO, served as ambassador to Mauritius, Zimbabwe and Greece. He was presi- dent of the Middle East Institute in Washington from 1990 to 1995. Recently he was elected chairman of the Council for the National Interest Foundation. His small independent publishing company, the Five and Ten Press, has produced 24 original paper- backs since 1995. Advancing Religious Freedom Can God and Caesar Coexist? Religious Freedom and International Law Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Yale University Press, 2004, $30, hardcover, 266 pages. R EVIEWED BY J OHN M. G RONDELSKI The overwhelming reaction to Pope John Paul II’s death shows that religion is alive and well on the global “public square.” Indeed, since the 1990s, there has been greater worldwide focus on the human right to freedom of religion and conscience, especially in light of persecution of believers in places like China and Darfur. But religious freedom is not just a discovery of recent years, insists Father Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest, Georgetown law professor and former congressman. The notion of a human right to religious freedom has been evolving over the past half-century, starting with the Universal Declara- tion of Human Rights and reaching new heights in the 1981 U.N. Declaration on Religious Freedom. Yet despite this steady but quiet progress, literature on the subject has been limited. Drinan tries to fill that gap in 13 chapters examining nearly every imaginable facet of the topic, concluding with a summary chapter that gives the book its title: “Questions of God and Caesar.” Drinan argues that the 1946 Declaration should be turned into a legally enforceable treaty. But he’s familiar with the problems his posi- tion entails. For example, countries like China have a history of trampling “on any culture or religion that could pose a threat to the ruling powers.” He’s also dubious that Muslim coun- tries could reconcile religious free- dom with basing their civil law on sharia. And he expresses dissatisfac- tion with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, which he believes is overly deferential to national laws at the expense of claims of violations of religious free- dom, especially of minorities. The greatest obstacle, however, is that the notion of an international right to religious freedom remains inchoate. Drinan admits that “appro- priate standards by which to judge restrictions on the free exercise of religion are just beginning to be artic- ulated.” Despite this, he believes that the general trajectory in which this right is evolving is on course, and that a multilateral treaty would foster that development. This reviewer is less than con- vinced by Drinan’s optimism that a treaty (even one backed by some kind of international tribunal or U.N. com- mittee) would significantly advance religious freedom. Why would a nation that tramples religious free- dom change, just because the U.N. says so? Why would nations that cur- rently could — and don’t — sanction gross violators of religious freedom suddenly sacrifice pragmatism for principle? Drinan also omits one other princi- ple of Catholic social thought relevant to this study: subsidiarity. Subsidiarity maintains that responsibilities that can be handled at a lower or more localized level should not be entrust- ed to higher or more removed bodies. In light of subsidiarity, is an interna- tional covenant advisable at this time? “Religious freedom” unfortunately remains a term of somewhat ambigu- ous content. At one extreme is China, where religious freedom does not encompass the right to belong to a religion free of state control. At the other extreme are some quarters of the U.S. and western Europe, where “freedom of religion” is taken as “free- dom from religion.” Given such equivocation, a convention guarantee- ing religious freedom would seeming- ly have to be so minimal as to ensure protection for the most basic rights of conscience or run the risk of wreaking worldwide mischief, as judges or diplomats expansively interpret ambiguous texts. In such a context, “one-size-fits-all” worldwide may do the cause of religious freedom more harm than good. Still, respect for religious freedom is an indispensable element to the progress of democracy. Curiously, for all his references to Catholic thought, Drinan never really develops John Paul II’s insight that religious freedom is the first human right and, therefore, a prerequisite to democracy. A state acknowledging religious freedom rec- ognizes its claims on its citizens are limited by other allegiances. Demo- cracies do not “grant” religious free- dom; by checking Caesar’s claims, religious freedom gives birth to democracies. 80 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 5 B O O K S u