Finding Faith in Foreign Policy: Religion and American Diplomacy in a Postsecular World [Hardcover]

Finding Faith in Foreign Policycomprehensively investigates how American foreign policymakers have come to think about, engage with, and manage religion in world politics across a range of domains since the end of the Cold War and in the aftermath of 9/11. Gregorio Bettiza develops an original theoretical framework and draws upon extensive empirical research and interviews in order to explain policymakers' attempts to promote international religious freedom, deliver aid through faith-based channels, fight terrorism by supporting moderate Muslims and Islam, and engaging religious actors for the purposes of resolving conflicts and finding solutions to current world crises.Since the end of the Cold War, religion has become an ever more explicit and systematic focus of US foreign policy across multiple domains. US foreign policymakers, for instance, have been increasingly tasked with monitoring religious freedom and promoting it globally, delivering humanitarian and development aid abroad by drawing on faith-based organizations, fighting global terrorism by seeking to reform Muslim societies and Islamic theologies, and advancing American interests and values more broadly worldwide by engaging with religious actors and dynamics. Simply put, religion has become a major subject and object of American foreign policy in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago.InFinding Faith in Foreign Policy, Gregorio Bettiza explains the causes and consequences of this shift by developing an original theoretical framework and drawing upon extensive empirical research and interviews. He argues that American foreign policy and religious forces have become ever more inextricably entangled in an age witnessing a global resurgence of religion and the emergence of a postsecular world society. He further shows how the boundaries between faith and state have been redefined through processes of desecularization in the context of American foreign policy, leading the mostl