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Report on 7th World Congress
Discrimination and
the Persecutory Impulse
Reflections on the 7th World Congress on
Religious Freedom & Human Rights
By Gregory W. Hamilton
April 26, 2012 | 3:00 p.m. EST | Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
The persecutory impulse is alive and well in many societies throughout the world. This has been made forcefully and eloquently clear during this Congress, despite the many progress reports of many countries represented at this quadrennial event... More...
Politics & Religion
A Discussion of Realities and Dangers
May Gleaner Magazine Feature (PDF)
By Gregory W. Hamilton, President
Northwest Religious Liberty Association (NRLA)
March 15, 2011
President Barack Obama came to Cairo in 2009 with the purpose of announcing to the Arab-Muslim world that he was not following his predecessor’s “Democracy Project” as a matter of U.S. Middle East policy. One could call this Obama’s “Olive Branch Doctrine”: the message that interfaith tolerance & unity, rather than the insistence of religious freedom and democracy, would be the foreign policy model pursued by his Administration. In a stroke of illusory foreign policy realism, he was communicating to Arab Muslims that it was not the purpose of the United States to convert anyone to its way of thinking, politically or religiously. More...
President Obama’s middle-ground approach to the credible and well-established “Clash of Civilizations” theme – when formulating international religious freedom policy – is best understood when placed on a scale between tolerance and international consensus (an interfaith, “soft-power” approach), and America’s constitutional ideal of religious freedom and human rights (an Evangelical and “exacting” approach). Yet both policy methods delimit religious freedom, threatening it altogether. More...
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