Kmiec’s gospel falls flat at State Department
The State Department has a "rigidly narrow" view of diplomacy that
neglects religion's role in foreign affairs, a prominent ambassador
charged as he announced his resignation in mid-April.
Other
foreign-policy experts have another name for it: Religion Avoidance
Syndrome. And the departure of Douglas Kmiec as ambassador to Malta,
they say, is symptomatic of a long-standing God gap in American foreign
policy.
Kmiec, a Catholic legal scholar who helped shape an
intellectual framework for President Obama's outreach to Catholics
during the 2008 campaign, was slammed in a recent State Department
report for spending too much time writing about religion.
His
focus on faith, "based on a belief that he was given a special mandate
to promote President Obama's interfaith initiatives . . . detracted from
his attention to core mission goals," the State Department's inspector
general wrote in a February report made public in early April.
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A
former lawyer in the Reagan administration and onetime dean of Catholic
University's law school, Kmiec announced he would resign on August 15,
which he pointedly noted is the Feast of the Assumption.
The State
Department fired back on April 18 at Kmiec's accusations. "I can't
imagine an agency that has a broader portfolio," said State Department
spokesman Evan Owen. "We have an ambassador for religious freedom; we
have an office for international religious freedom; we publish two
reports a year on religious freedom; we maintain a list of countries of
particular concern for religious freedom," Owen said.
Kmiec,
currently on leave from the law faculty at Pepperdine University in
California, fiercely defended his work in earlier letters to Obama and
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Kmiec told Obama his
work was "devoted to promoting what I know you believe in most
strongly—namely, personal faith and greater mutual understanding of the
faiths of others as the way toward greater mutual respect. If I may be
forgiven a dissent from the view adopted by the Inspector General, it is
that I doubt very much whether anyone could spend too much time on this
subject."
Kmiec also tied his work on religion to Clinton's
promotion of "smart power," saying it had a "highly positive effect on
our bilateral relations."
The inspector general's office, he said,
has a "flawed and narrow vision of our diplomatic vision" and
"manipulated their policy dislike of the president's policies,
especially his interfaith initiative, into an unauthorized 'outside
activity,'" Kmiec told Clinton.
The controversy over Kmiec
reflects a widespread aversion to religion within Washington's
foreign-policy establishment, said Thomas Farr, a former director of
religious freedom at the State Department.
Farr said that he has
not read Kmiec's speeches and that, as a fellow Catholic, he was
disappointed with the ambassador's support for Obama. But, Farr
continued, Kmiec is correct about faith in Foggy Bottom.
"There is
a deep-seated discomfort with dealing with religious ideas, concepts
and religious actors," said Farr, who now teaches at Georgetown
University.
Farr and Kmiec are not the first to find fault in the
State Department's hands-off approach to religion. "Our diplomats are
very well trained and they are very capable," said former Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright in 2006. "But they have not really focused on
religion per se as a subject of study."
Albright, who wrote a book on faith and diplomacy called The Mighty and the Almighty,
has said her former colleagues were "a little surprised" about her
focus on religion. "They really look at me as if I had, you know,
ventured into some post-secretary of state mode where I just didn't
understand what was going on," she told the PBS program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly in 2006.
The
State Department has taken small steps toward reckoning with faith,
including a three-day course on religion and foreign policy offered this
summer by the Foreign Service Institute, Farr said.
But the
inspector general's report on Kmiec could send a chilling message to
other diplomats that religion lies outside their portfolios, said
Randolph Marshall Bell, a State Department veteran who now directs the
First Freedom Center in Richmond, Virginia.
"The wrong signal to
me would be that somehow attention to aspects of religion which touch
upon our foreign policy interests should be separated out," Bell said.
"Compartmentalization never works." —RNS
