THE FIRST HUMAN RIGHT: RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AND THE AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC TRADITION

Abstract

Although presidential administrations have promoted and protected religious liberty abroad fitfully and inconsistently, the freedom of religion has long been seen as both a symptom of, and a cure for, tensions within the United States’ relations with the wider world. In keeping with a faith-inflected version of democratic peace theory, many US foreign policy makers have perceived the absence of religious liberty in foreign countries as a warning sign that such countries will behave aggressively. The clearest expression of this worldview came during what was perhaps America's gravest foreign policy challenge: the world crisis of the late 1930s and the outbreak of World War II.