What is To Be Done? Responding to the Global Persecution of Christians

April 20, 2017
8:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. EDT
Location: National Press Club, 529 14th Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20045

How do Christians respond to persecution? How can the rest of the world exercise solidarity with them? This day-long public symposium proposed concrete recommendations for action in response to these questions. It featured prominent speakers on religious freedom and leading scholars of global Christianity. A highlight was the launch of the report, In Response to Persecution. It conveys the results of the "Under Caesar’s Sword" project, the world’s first systematic global investigation of Christian responses to persecution, and features findings from over 25 of the world’s most repressive countries. In attendance at the symposium were government officials, business leaders, academics, and religious leaders, as well as representatives of non-governmental, human rights, and news organizations.

The symposium was hosted by the Under Caesar's Sword project and its primary partners, the Religious Freedom Institute and the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, in close collaboration with Aid to the Church in Need. The Religious Freedom Research Project is co-sponsoring a scholarly volume that will address the findings presented at this conference.

Schedule

8:30-9:00 a.m. | Registration and Coffee

9:00-9:15 a.m. | Opening Remarks
Thomas Farr, Religious Freedom Research Project

9:15-10:15 a.m. | Keynote Address
His Eminence Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Catholic Archbishop of Washington, D.C.

10:15-11:30 a.m. | Presentation of Public Report: In Response to Christian Persecution
Daniel Philpott, University of Notre Dame

11:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. | Screening of "Under Caesar's Sword" Documentary
Jason Cohen, Filmmaker

12:00-1:15 p.m. | Lunch & Keynote Address
Farahnaz Ispahani, Author and Human Rights Advocate

1:15-2:30 p.m. | Panel: What is to be Done by Leading Sectors?
Timothy Shah (moderator), Religious Freedom Research Project
Brian Grim, Religious Freedom and Business Foundation
George Marlin, Aid to the Church in Need, U.S.A.
Hon. David Saperstein, Former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom
Nina Shea, Hudson Institute

2:45-4:00 p.m. | Panel: Responding to the Persecution of Christians in the Middle East and Central Asia
Paul Marshall (moderator), Hudson Institute
Mariz Tadros, Sussex University
Kent Hill, Religious Freedom Institute
His Excellency Sebastian Francis Shaw, Archbishop of Lahore, Pakistan

4:15-5:15 p.m. | Panel: Responding to the Persecution of Christians in South and Southeast Asia

Kathleen Collins (moderator), University of Minnesota
Fenggang Yang, Purdue University (China)
Robert Hefner, Boston University (Indonesia)
Chad Bauman, Butler University (India)

5:15-6:00 p.m. | Reception

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Featured Participants

Farahnaz Ispahani Toggle

About Farahnaz Ispahani

Farahnaz Ispahani has been a leading voice for women and religious minorities in Pakistan for over two decades, working as a journalist, member of Pakistan’s National Assembly, and most recently as a United States-based scholar. An advocate of Pakistan’s return to democracy during the military regime of Pervez Musharraf, she served as a spokesperson and international media coordinator for the Pakistan People’s Party, working alongside the late Benazir Bhutto. During her tenure in parliament (2008–2012), she was a member of the Foreign Affairs and Human Rights committees and the Women’s Parliamentary Caucus. In 2013 and 2014 she was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she completed Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities (2016), a book on the persecution of religious minorities in Pakistan. In 2012 she was listed among Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, as well as Newsweek Pakistan’s Top 100 Women Who Matter.

Farahnaz Ispahani's Profile

Daniel Philpott Toggle

About Daniel Philpott

Daniel Philpott is a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. Philpott specializes in religion and global politics, with emphases on reconciliation, religious freedom, and theories of religious actors' political behavior. He has also participated in faith-inspired reconciliation efforts in some of the world’s worst conflict zones, including Kashmir and the Great Lakes region of Africa. Philpott's publications include Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation (2012); God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, co-authored with Monica Toft and Timothy Shah); Strategies of Peace: Transforming Conflict in a Violent Word (2010, edited with Gerard F. Powers); The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and Transitional Justice (2006); and Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (2001). From 2011 to 2016, he was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project and is currently a senior associate scholar with the Religious Freedom Institute. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

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David Saperstein Toggle

About David Saperstein

David Saperstein was the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom from January 2015 to January 2017. He is currently is an adjunct professor with the Center for Jewish Civilization in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and previously was a senior research fellow of the Religious Freedom Research Project at the Berkley Center. An ordained rabbi, he served for several decades as the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism representing the public policy positions of the Reform Jewish Movement, the largest segment of American Jewry, to the government and leading the movement’s efforts to strengthen social justice programming in synagogues across North America. Over the years, he headed several national religious coalitions, including co-chairing the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty, and served on various national boards, among them the NAACP, People for the American Way, and the World Faiths Development Dialogue. In 1999 and 2000, Saperstein served as the first chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He was a crucial part of the faith-based movement that supported passage of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. A frequent media commentator on religion and public life, Saperstein is also an attorney and taught, for over 30 years, seminars on First Amendment law and Jewish law at Georgetown University Law Center.

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Donald Wuerl Toggle

About Donald Wuerl

Cardinal Donald Wuerl is the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C. and was elevated to the College of Cardinals in 2010. He serves on numerous national and international bodies, including the Vatican Congregations for the Doctrine of the Faith, Bishops, and the Clergy as well as the Pontifical Councils for Culture and for Promoting Christian Unity. Previously, he served as auxillary bishop of Seattle and bishop of Pittsburgh; while in Pittsburgh he worked to remove priests accused of child sexual abuse and pushed the Vatican to take a tougher stance on the issue. His prominent position in the United States capital and numerous publications have made him a key voice in church-state interactions, particularly related to the work of Catholic social service agencies. Ordained in 1966, he earned graduate degrees from the Catholic University of America and the Gregorian University in Rome and a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.

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Other Participants

Chad Bauman Toggle

About Chad Bauman

Chad Bauman, professor of religion at Butler University, is an expert on religion and society in India. His earliest research focused on the interaction of low-caste Christians and Hindus in colonial Chhattisgarh; his book Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868-1947 (2008) won the prize for best book in Hindu-Christian Studies, 2006-2008, from the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. Bauman has since worked on Indian debates about conversion and Hindu-Christian conflict, authoring Pentecostals, Proselytization, and anti-Christian Violence in India (2015) and Anti-Christian Violence in India (2020). Bauman also writes about Hindu critics of Christianity and western secular modernities, as in “Critiques of Christianity from Savarkar to Malhotra,” forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations, which Bauman edited with Michelle Voss Roberts. Currently, he is beginning research on the experiences and treatment of Hindu minorities in predominantly Christian countries. Bauman was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project.

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Kathleen Collins Toggle

About Kathleen Collins

Kathleen Collins is an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. Her interests include political transition and democratization, Islam and politics, civil and ethnic conflict, clan politics, informal institutions, and Soviet and post-Soviet political development; she has conducted extensive field research in Central Asia. Collins has been a consultant with the National Bureau of Asian Research, United Nations Development Program, and United States Agency for International Development, among others. She authored Clan Politics and Regime Transition in Central Asia (2006), which won the Central Eurasian Studies Society Award for the best book in the social sciences on Central Eurasia. Collins has published articles in World Politics, Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, Political Research Quarterly, Europe-Asia Studies, Asia Policy, and the Brown Journal of International Affairs. She is working on her second book, The Rise of Political Islam in Eurasia: State Repression, Ideology, and Islamist Mobilization. Collins received her Ph.D. from Stanford University.

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Thomas Farr Toggle

About Thomas Farr

Thomas F. Farr is president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute, an NGO committed to achieving worldwide acceptance of religious liberty. Farr is also a senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. From 2006 to 2018 he was an associate professor of the practice of religion and world affairs at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior fellow at the Berkley Center; during 2017 and 2018 he was director of the Religious Freedom Research Project and from 2011 to 2016 director of the Religious Freedom Project, both at the Berkley Center. After a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and the Foreign Service—which included teaching at West Point and the Air Force Academy, serving as an advisor during U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva, and leading an interagency task force on verification provisions for the START II Treaty—Farr served as the first director of the U.S. State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2003.

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Brian Grim Toggle

About Brian Grim

Brian Grim is president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation and a leading expert on the socioeconomic impact of restrictions on religious freedom and international religious demography. Grim served as 2015-2016 chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Role of Faith and works closely with the Business for Peace platform of the United Nations Global Compact. From 2006 to 2014 Grim directed the largest social science effort to collect and analyze global data on religion at the Pew Research Center. He also worked for two decades as an educator in the former Soviet Union, China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. He is author of numerous articles and books, including The Price of Freedom Denied (2010), and writes the Weekly Number blog. He was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2014 to 2016. Grim holds a doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University.

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Robert W. Hefner Toggle

About Robert W. Hefner

Robert W. Hefner is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Hefner is a social theorist who specializes in the anthropology of religion, ethics and law (including sharia law), education and youth development, as well as the comparative study of gender, citizenship, globalization, and modernity. Hefner was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project.

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Kent Hill Toggle

About Kent Hill

Kent Hill is the senior vice president of international programs for World Vision United States and the executive director of the Religious Freedom Institute. Previously, Hill served as the vice president for character development for the John Templeton Foundation. An expert on democracy, international development policy, and religious freedom issues, he has extensive experience with multiple US government departments and agencies, assistance agencies from other countries, and hundreds of US and international NGOs, including faith-based organizations. Working with the US Agency for International Development, Hill served as the assistant administrator of Europe and Eurasia from 2001 to 2005 and the assistant administrator of the Bureau for Global Health from 2005 to 2009. He holds a M.A. in Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Washington.

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George Marlin Toggle

About George Marlin

George Marlin is a chairman of Aid to the Church in Need U.S.A. He is the former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. A contributing editor to TheCatholicThing.org, an online publication, Marlin is the author or editor of 12 books, including Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy (2015), The American Catholic Voter (2004), and Fighting the Good Fight: A History of the New York Conservative Party (2002).

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Paul Marshall Toggle

About Paul Marshall

Paul Marshall is a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom. Among the world’s leading scholars of religious freedom, Marshall played a pivotal role in directing the world’s attention to the modern crisis of Christian persecution. Marshall is the author and editor of more than twenty books on religion and politics, especially religious freedom, including more recently, Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians (2013, with Lela Gilbert and Nina Shea), Silenced: How Apostasy Laws and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide (2011, with Nina Shea), Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't Get Religion (2009), Religious Freedom in the World (2008), and Radical Islam's Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law (2005). Marshall was also a part of the Christianity and Freedom Project headed by the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project.

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