These conclusions to Gregorio Bettiza's seminal book, Finding Faith in Foreign Policy, are not only true, they confirm the book's foremost, and invaluable, contribution: the establishment of a twofold baseline. First, the book provides a single narrative about how religion has become an important factor in U.S. foreign policy. Second, the book provides a theoretical construct for that narrative. Both will become the point of reference for future scholarship, and, perhaps, policy.

Bettiza writes the book to “unpack how the desecularization of US foreign policy is making the world a different place, especially a religiously different place” (8, 47). He wants to explain the “operationalization of religion in American foreign policy” (10, 23) which is “qualitatively and quantitatively unprecedented” (18).

Toward this end, Bettiza presents a multi-layered framework of discrete units of analysis. “Grounded in a sociological approach to IR theory and a critical realist philosophy” (53), Bettiza organizes his framework around a “regime complex” of four overlapping “religious foreign policy regimes”: International Religious Freedom, Faith-Based Foreign Aid, Muslim and Islamic Interventions, and Religious Engagement (21). These regimes share six factors: “(i) Shared focus on religion; (ii) Overlapping and interconnected institutional architectures; (iii) Parallel histories; (iv) Analogous causes; (v) Common parallel desecularizing processes; (vi) Generation of three broadly comparable global-religious effects” (208).

These potential effects include: “(i) shaping global religious realities along American norms and interests; (ii) contributing to processes of religionization of world politics; and (iii) diffusing and promoting similar religious regimes in international policy” (47). These effects take place through four desecularizing processes: (i) “institutional,” i.e., the inclusion of religious actors/perspectives in U.S. foreign policy making structures; (ii) “epistemic,” i.e., the “erosion of the idea that religion is irrelevant”; (iii) “ideological,” i.e., religion is an “inherently problematic force”; and (iv) “state-normative,” i.e., the conversion of “different elements of thought and practice eventually [result in] “transformed institutional and diplomatic practices” (7–8, 211–12).

The book is truly a theorist's delight, as well as a coherent story told. This unprecedented, dual baseline, however, necessarily “invite[s] a number of well-meaning criticisms” (11), in order to build upon it through even more accurate assessments and analysis.

Now, I should mention that I am a participant in Bettiza's story—someone of “normative entrepreneurship” who “epitomize[s] the broad discourse on religious engagement” (182)—and thus not without bias or deep care for these issues. I believe that the best way for scholars and practitioners alike to deepen and expand the gift of Bettiza's baselines is to continue wrestling—through comparative conversation and scholarship—with their own perspectives and the terms of reference that result. Bettiza has several worthy of closer review.

The first is “desecularization” and “postsecular.” I find such terms self-referential, if not self-indicting. (Ironically, one might make the same general observation about those now writing about a “post-Christian” world.) Good engagement—scholarly, diplomatic or otherwise—always begins with understanding the self-understanding of the other. “Desecularization” suggests that “secularization” was previously the (accepted) organizing principle for state and society, for everyone, everywhere; which, in turn, catalyzes the conversation of “religion's resurgence.” Bettiza briefly acknowledges the possibility that political science, in particular, is just now rediscovering that religion has always permeated global affairs when he quotes Philip Gorski et al. They ask: “Which world has changed—the ‘real’ one or the scholarly one?” (30). But Bettiza does not dwell on this fundamental question as he pursues a well-intentioned paradigm that, inevitably, lessens its own credibility by ordering only the select inputs that support it.

Bettiza's four regimes are based on, and limited to, the “foreign policy” of the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the sake of argument, it is certainly reasonable to exclude the National Security Council, the U.S. military and the intelligence community from the discussion; but it is equally important to at least state, if not discuss, the significant influence these actors have on America's engagement of the world, while also considering the State Department's relative power vis-à-vis these actors.

In a similar fashion, Bettiza's approach allows for the existence of foreign religious actors, but again spends little time on them. To his credit, he briefly notes in his discussion of the Faith-Based Foreign Aid regime that “African Christianity and societies do have and retain considerable agency” (131). Yet without a robust discussion of their agency, to include a nuanced understanding that local actors “may welcome and harness foreign interventions for their own agendas as a means to legitimize their particular religious community's status and grievances” (82), the desecularization approach at best, discounts, and at worst, de-dignifies, local actors.

This approach also risks taking agency away from the American actors examined, and the credibility of the evidence presented. Amidst this paradigm seeking parsimony, there are only “desecularizing processes” and desecularizing people. They include “desecularizing activists,” “desecularizing experts,” and “desecularlizing policymakers” who (un)naturally enough use “desecularizing discourses” (34–38). For instance, in support of giving taxpayer money to U.S. religious actors because they know their local communities best, Bettiza writes that President Obama “deployed a desecularizing discourse” (115). The diction suggests that Obama was acting according to his desire to desecularize; instead of allowing for the possibility that President Obama believed what he said, according to his experience, and that it was good politics—something politicians of any age, in any culture, have always known. One cannot desecularize a people and a politics that has always been religious.

Similarly, Bettiza concludes: “The Faith-Based Foreign Aid regime contributes to the religionization of world politics by emphasizing and promoting the role and place of religion in international relations” through a process of “elevation” (130, 9). But the same question persists: Is the “elevation” of religion—which connotes raising something above other factors—part of an intentional desecularizing process, or is “elevation” simply a matter of including religion as an equal and previously unexamined factor?

This latter reason is why I founded The Review of Faith & International Affairs (Routledge) 17 years ago, so that faith could be taken seriously, at the least, as a genuine analytic factor among all disciplines, precisely because my 36 graduate courses (pre 9/11) did not. If we are to use the word, “elevation” is not privilege, or over-and-above something else. Elevation is merely inclusion, lifting up: (1) religion as an equally worthy theoretical factor that varies locally as a lived religion that is a messy mosaic of identities and allegiances; and (2) religious communities worldwide that, in fact, often have the best sense of local needs, and are usually trusted by the general public more than the local politicians.

This capacity for confusing connotations constrains another key construct of the book: the “institutionalizing” and “operationalizing” of religion pursuant American foreign policy. Even though Bettiza notes that his book “focuses on change in American foreign policy rather than developments on the ground” (51), Bettiza tends to use these two words interchangeably. They are not the same thing. The former creates a bureaucratic process and place to consider the role of religious actors and communities, analytically. The latter yields a process that has a tangible impact in a particular place.

This confusion manifests itself in the description of the regimes. For example, Bettiza provides the following comment, seeking clarity: “It is important to specify that unlike the International Religious Freedom regime, the Faith-Based Foreign Aid regime is not designed to produce a particular—intended or not—religious outcome. Its aim is humanitarian and developmental” (134). This statement is problematic for several reasons. Foremost, no U.S. policy is supposed to seek a “religious outcome,” which would be a violation of the Constitution. U.S. policies do, however, seek to engage religious actors according to U.S. values and interests, and their intersection with the values and interests of local actors, religious or otherwise (with neither being a proxy of the other). Second, while aid policies (of most countries and organizations) seek to be impartial, it is also clear that (not) working with one local group or another, religious or otherwise, can have a political effect, (dis)empowering them, and/or creating good/ill will (as Bettiza broadly acknowledges on p9; also see Seiple, The U.S. Military/NGO Relationship in Humanitarian Intervention, U.S. Army War College, 1996).

Next, Bettiza believes that the International Religious Freedom (IRF) regime “explicitly seeks to regulate religious landscapes around the world” (123). Having worked with every U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom (none of whom were interviewed for the book), I think this notion is exactly backwards. IRF policy across political administrations has generally been institutionally organized to analyze and suggest policies that would de-regulate religion. In other words, the operationalization of religious freedom is to have no operations by any government to restrict the free practice and exercise of religion in the public square.

Bettiza actually acknowledges this fact, writing that American policy, consistent with the country's (Protestant) founding, seeks a “radical pluralism” that includes everyone, to include those “that are in other parts of the world are often not perceived as legitimate religions” (83). Later, however, he writes that U.S. policies on “religious freedom is mostly for those religions, and interpretations and practices thereof, that are compatible with America's immediate security interests and longer-term attempts to build a liberal international order” (86).

Personally, I have only witnessed the former: an urgent and earnest concern for individuals and communities of all faiths and none—by Americans of all faiths and none, serving in the U.S. State Department. Meanwhile, Bettiza does seem to have an implicit bias for the latter. For example, he describes U.S. policy related to religion as seeking to “pacify” (3, 155, 161), “meddle” (9, 226), “manage and marshal” (47, 213), and otherwise end up in “entanglement” (127, 133, 207, 211, 228). All of which suggests a less-than-full understanding of how American policy is (not) made—and (not) implemented—and, more importantly, the relationship of religion and religious freedom to the American identity.

George Washington arguably embodied and sought two key beliefs about religion in public (domestic and foreign) life that have not only formed the American identity, but guided the process of self-critique, and self-correction that is the American experiment. Namely, that:

1. (1) “all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship…for, happily, the Government of the United States…gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” August 21, 1790, Washington's letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Rhode Island, a state which he visited only after it had ratified the Constitution in May 1790 (of course, Rhode Island had practically pioneered many of these concepts more than 150 years previously, through its founder, Roger Williams (Seiple, “The Essence of Exceptionalism,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 10:2)); and

2. (2) “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” Washington Farewell Address, September 17, 1796 (which he intentionally timed to the ninth anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution).

Put differently, religious freedom (#1) enables religious engagement (#2) while religious engagement demonstrates religious freedom. Liberty of conscience allows for freedom of religion or belief, but it also understands and expects such liberty to have a social consequence as beliefs take behavioral form in the service of the common good.

It should not be surprising that then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argued on 30 July 2012 at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, what any Republican would also argue: “For the United States, of course, religious freedom is a cherished constitutional value [#1], a strategic national interest and a foreign policy priority [#2]…Religious freedom is both an essential element of human dignity [#1] and of secure, thriving societies [#2]. It's [#1] been statistically linked with economic development and democratic stability [#2]. And it [#1] creates a climate in which people from different religions can move beyond distrust and work together to solve their shared problems [#2].” It is with this understanding, and balance, that Clinton's “Religion & Foreign Policy Working Group” responded to the May 2012 request to develop recommendations through an October 2012 “White Paper” that would lead to the August 2013 creation of an Office of Faith Based & Community Initiatives (later renamed the Office of Religion and Global Affairs), as well as the “U.S. Strategy on Religious Leader and Faith Community Engagement” (the organization of which followed the sub-committee structure of the Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group).

Perhaps we are left with two greater research questions to ask, rather than regard Bettiza's four regimes as “historically novel” (2). How is it that a Christian-majority country of every denomination and sect cares so much for non-Christians worldwide? How is it that the historic, but not always primary, institution of American foreign policy, the U.S. State Department, became de-sensitized to religion? After all, Peter Berger, who coined the term “desecularization,” is perhaps more famous for stating that the United States is “a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes.”

Ten years ago, I concluded the concluding chapter of Religion, Identity, and Global Governance: Ideas, Evidence, and Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2010), with the following observation:

Different perspectives will name things differently, but as long as they engage and hone one another, beginning with reference to the other, our mutual engagement will enable a better understanding of our world as it is. Bettiza does, in the end, accurately name the reality of the intersection of religion and foreign policy as practiced by the U.S. State Department. He eventually defines this intersection as the “growing enmeshment of religious actors, communities, and agendas with US foreign policy institutions and practices and vice versa” resulting in a “religious engagement…strategy to augment, rather than replace, existing American diplomatic practices” (212–13). As such, this vital book enables all of us—from policymaker to practitioner, scholar to student—to take an enormous step forward in our common endeavor to better understand the role of faith in international affairs, between and among states, and societies, thereby increasing the likelihood of religion's positive role in our world.