Facing History and Ourselves's blog

Direct outreach to young people and community leaders, not governments alone, is crucial to the efforts of the State Department's Farah Pandith, Special Representative to Muslim Communities.  "Citizen diplomacy," as Pandith calls it, consists of speaking directly to citizens in Islamic communities, and elsewhere, about the ways in which many American shares the desire for fundamental freedoms that has driven recent political revolutions.

On March 26, 2012, we were privileged to host a unique conversation about religion and democracy with the State Department's Farah Pandith, Special Representative to Muslim Communities and Hannah Rosenthal, U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. 

America's 2012 election cycle has brought issues of religion and democracy and the phrase "separation of church and state" into headlines once more.  

Thomas Jefferson’s famous words in his Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association from 1802 have become one of underlying principles of American democracy:

The debate over allowing Muslim women in France to wear headscarves, niqabs, and burkas in schools and public places continues to resonate with people across the globe. A 2010 law banning burkas and niqabs in public spaces was viewed favorably by those who sought an official condemnation of Islamic fundamentalism and female victimization—but drew criticism from staunch believers in freedom of religious expression and individual liberty.

As we honor the calendar birthday of George Washington, this is a great moment to recall his landmark words extending welcome to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, to whom he wrote  of the United States as a nation where "all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship . . . which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." [Full Text]

On February 17, Facing History is hosting a unique workshop in Paris, titled "What Do We Do with a Difference?: Religion, Politics, and the Public Space." We will examine age-old questions of the relationship between religion and democracy that have resurfaced in the wake of events like the headscarf debate in France and the controversy over the Park51/Ground Zero Mosque.

As new leaders work to shake off the bonds of dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa, questions about the place of religion and its role in government have sharpened worldwide.

These questions are nothing new. They arose  in the American Revolution, and during the French Revolution a decade later. While marveling at the courage of today's protesters, commentators wonder what kind of political arrangements will replace authoritarian rule. Will new governments protect religious minorities? What rights will nonbelievers be granted?

Puritans and Anglicans, Baptists and Quakers, Catholics and Jews, Native Americans and slaves, rationalists and revivalists: long before 1776, early American settlers struggled to deal with religious difference. To understand how the United States' current balance among national law, local community practice, and individual freedom of belief evolved, it's helpful to understand some of the common experiences around religion in colonial culture.

Almost three hundred and fifty years ago Mary Dyer, a converted Quaker and mother of six, returned to Massachusetts from her exile in Rhode Island, knowing that she would be executed on arrival. She went back deliberately to protest the religious persecution she and her fellow Quakers faced under Puritan rule in the Bay Colony.

Alexis de Tocqueville was the French author of Democracy in America (1835), perhaps the best, and certainly the most widely-quoted book ever written about the United States. He was unusual for his time in many ways. One way in which he stood out in nineteenth-century France was his attitude towards religion.