In the wake of 9/11, many in the U.S. Government (USG) belatedly realized that they had ignored religion for too long. And too many perhaps still perceive religion only as a problem they don't understand. But the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) generally had a strong record of working with faith-based organizations, many of those organizations having begun their work in humanitarian assistance and development in some cases decades prior to the establishment of the agency. So for many in USAID, working with religious and faith-based actors to help others achieve human development goals had long been second nature. But this was far from uniform or consistent across the workforce.
My career supporting religious engagement for the U.S. government began in the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks, as our country prepared itself to respond to the shock and horror we had all just experienced. President George W. Bush famously visited the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, in the week after the attack to clearly differentiate the criminal acts of an unrepresentative few from the mainstream Muslim community in the United States and around the world. Diplomats worldwide followed suit with similar outreach efforts.
I was a graduate student on a USG-funded fellowship where I was conducting research that resulted in strong relationships with imams and others in Uzbekistan's Muslim community that was slowly reviving following decades of anti-religious Soviet repression. The U.S. Embassy approached me and asked for my assistance facilitating some of these early meetings with religious leaders in Tashkent, a role I maintained when I was later hired by the embassy's Public Affairs Section. This positioned me well a couple of years later when USAID announced a contractor position as its Religion, State, and Society (RSS) specialist in the Central Asian region.
The RSS specialist in Central Asia was a novel position made possible due to supplemental funding that Congress passed in the years following 9/11. It allowed USAID's Central Asian Republics mission to have someone who could focus full-time on engaging religious communities. Early efforts focused on simply sharing information with faith-leaders that replicated similar outreach initiatives in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and elsewhere. But it also allowed the USAID mission to look more closely at the areas where it and its partners could cooperate with these communities. In a region where secular authorities discouraged independent civic activity by religious actors, attempting to better integrate religious actors into USAID's development work was often a challenge. At times, there was reticence among USAID staff as well.
Returning to the United States after three years serving as the RSS Specialist in Central Asia, I took a position in an office that would become my professional home for the next seventeen years. In the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation (restructured as the Center for Conflict and Violence Prevention in 2020), I was able to engage more broadly in policy discussions and think about ways that USAID and the interagency could adopt more sustained approaches to religious engagement. But I also saw that as the funding which helped spur some religious engagement efforts after 9/11 dwindled and was not replenished, interest in strategic religious engagement (SRE) also decreased. With protracted costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the weight of chronic development problems elsewhere, even modest investments in further building SRE infrastructure were difficult to acquire. But USAID did maintain notable programs like Bangladesh's Leaders of Influence program that engaged religious actors alongside other business and community leaders. And offices like ours were able to produce guidance that we thought might be helpful for those who chose to integrate religious actors into their peacebuilding work and train interested staff.
During the Obama administration, the White House initiated a strategy development effort to signal the effectiveness and importance of religious engagement as a component of promoting key American foreign policy priorities. The interagency effort to develop the U.S. Strategy on Religious Leader and Faith Community Engagement moved quickly to consensus on key principles and priorities. But the strategy was constrained by two factors: 1) perceived sensitivity to making the strategy public in its entirety and 2) a specific directive that the strategy needed to be cost neutral in a fiscally constrained environment. So while Secretary John Kerry's launch of the strategy in 2013 was an important milestone that was complemented by the establishment of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the State Department, USAID was not able to build on the momentum of the strategy's launch to a similar degree.
While USAID had a dedicated faith office established via Executive Order by every presidential administration since 2002, it was not until the first Trump administration that the Center for Faith and Opportunity Initiatives (CFOI) was able to muster modest resources to build on the 2013 Strategy to launch its own expansion of SRE across many parts of the USG. CFOI brought together stakeholders from across USAID and the agency’s implementing partner community, together with independent practitioners and academics, to collect and present the available learning on SRE in its 2020 Evidence Summit, similar to what it had done in other sectoral areas in years prior in both the Obama and Trump administrations. The product of that was a series of papers that summarized the findings and helped serve as a road map for a future USAID policy on strategic religious engagement.
Something that I am particularly proud of in regards to USAID's SRE work is how non-partisan it always was. This is clearly evident when looking at how the agency continued the work developing its SRE policy and capacities into the Biden administration. CFOI working with staff from regional bureaus and technical offices had accomplished a great deal through the evidence summit process. And I was asked by the outgoing political appointees in the first Trump administration to help to maintain some of that momentum by providing leadership in CFOI until the new Biden appointees came on board. Momentum continued under the Biden administration, as new leadership and appointees remained enthusiastic about launching an SRE policy that built on USAID's decades of experience working with faith-based organizations and religious communities. Leaning heavily on the hard work of the staff in what was now called the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (CFBNP) in USAID's Local, Faith, and Transformative Partnerships (LFT) Hub, USAID was able to launch the USG's first agency policy on SRE in September 2023, “Building Bridges in Development: USAID's Strategic Religious Engagement Policy.” The policy also laid the foundation for additional training that was developed with State Department colleagues and began to be delivered at embassies in Honduras, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, and elsewhere to further mainstream religious engagement as a core competency of diplomats and development officers. Through policy, training, and a newly developed SRE community of practice, we helped many move off of the idea of religion as a problem in development and diplomacy toward an understanding of its crucial role in achieving solutions to many problems that the world faces.
While much of USAID's work around the world came to an abrupt close in recent months, it nonetheless falls on us to decide what comes next. SRE will remain vital in sustainably protecting U.S. national security, human prosperity, and the health of our planet. Setbacks are always expected and resilience has always been the hallmark of USAID’s faith-based partners working in communities around the world. In our SRE trainings, we always noted that faith-based actors would remain long after the governmental actors left the scene—I only wish we had been more prescient about how soon that moment might come. But that shouldn't stop us from charting a way forward with our faith-based partners for a future where these capacities are rebuilt.
The work of the SRE Hub to collect, preserve and elevate USAID and interagency learning documents is an important foundation for these efforts. In the immediate term, we will have to wait and see what the shape of future U.S. development investments themselves will take. But it is reasonable to expect that the corporate private sector will have an increased need to fill the space formerly occupied by USAID and other governmental donors in order to promote stability where markets can continue to be cultivated and grown. Exploring the nexus between corporate social responsibility, development assistance, and the work of faith-inspired actors will be the task of SRE practitioners and advocates in both the public and private sector moving forward.
This article represents the observations and opinions solely of the author. Nothing presented here necessarily reflects or represents the views of the United States Agency for International Development, U.S. Government, or any other employers past or present.
