US President Jimmy Carter’s funeral is being held today in Washington, DC at the National Cathedral. Since he passed away shortly after Christmas, tributes have abounded about a man once derided as a weak one-term President. After leaving the Presidency, however, he became a powerful voice for good, leading peacebuilding and election monitoring efforts, and supporting humanitarian projects like Habitat for Humanity. And, importantly to me, he combined his progressive values with his public faith in a way that makes many other liberal Christians–like this buttoned-up Lutheran turned Episcopalian–uncomfortable.

So I wasn’t sure I had anything to say, but after some reflection I wanted to write a post on one of his biggest impacts on my work.

Carter’s impact on the study of religion and IR

In 1994, Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson edited Religion, the missing dimension of statecraft. This volume presented a series of case studies on religious communities contributing to peacebuilding efforts throughout the 20th century. Many of the cases were well-known, but the role of religious beliefs and actors in them had been ignored by mainstream analyses.

The book has been very influential in both policy and academic circles.

It has hundreds of citations on Google scholar, and that is just for the book itself–I’m sure if we collected citations for every individual chapter it would be much greater. It is one of the foundational books in religion and international relations that all scholars of this area must read (and return to frequently); I consult it as I begin many of my projects, and it was one of the launching off points for my latest book on religion and power politics.

Policy-wise, Johnston had been a senior VP at the Center for Strategic and International Studies when he edited the book, and later went on to found the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, a fixture in DC religion and peace organizations. Sampson, meanwhile, went on to conduct numerous studies on religion and peacebuilding, contributing to efforts by institutions like the US Institute for Peace.

The endorsement of people like Jimmy Carter helped the study of religion and IR gain credibility.

Clearly the book is influential, and is still worth a read 30 years later if you haven’t yet.

I say all this because Jimmy Carter wrote the book’s foreword. In the short passage, he provided examples of religion’s overlooked importance in peacebuilding, noting its role in the Camp David Accords, democratization in Zambia and reconciliation in Nicaragua. He closes with a “challenge to diplomats and politicians, religious figures and laypersons, analysts and academics alike.” He calls on religious actors to “exercise their moral authority” to build peace, while foreign policy scholars and practitioners need to recognize religion’s importance.

The continued relevance of his challenge

The study of religion and IR had been a “fringe” area for some time, and remained so even after the 9/11 attacks. But the endorsement of people like Jimmy Carter helped it gain credibility. By the time I entered graduate school in 2007, religion and IR was a burgeoning research program even if it never broke into the mainstream the way some of us hoped. Additionally, Carter’s emphasis on the importance of religion in peacebuilding and not just conflict was a useful check on later attempts to securitize religion–Islam especially–after 9/11. As IR continues to slip back into secularism and materialism it is worth remembering Carter’s challenge, a challenge I attempted to renew in my book (although he did it more forcefully in 1.5 pages than I did in 200+).

As Trump’s second term begins, I hope religious communities engaging on US foreign policy will revisit Carter’s words

His challenge to religious actors was also impactful. The 90s saw numerous interfaith efforts, as well as the multi-faith international religious freedom movement. But just as academic IR threatens to forget Carter’s challenge, I worry many of the religious actors who gained policy relevance thanks to Carter have forgotten it as well. The international religious freedom movement seems more concerned with institutional access than interfaith understanding and human dignity. Its policy initiatives threaten to degrade into sectarianism. As Trump’s second term begins, I hope religious communities engaging on US foreign policy–of which I used to be a part–will revisit Carter’s words.