One might hope that war with the Islamic Republic of Iran would make the importance of nuanced, responsible religious engagement even more self-evident. Instead, self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth delivers sermons on the righteousness of the conflict. President Donald J. Trump mocks Islam on Easter morning. Defense officials reportedly have tense exchanges with Vatican diplomats. The president posts a broadside on his Truth Social platform against “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” Pope Leo XIV. The vice president then advises the pontiff “to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” If only someone would think to create bureaucratic capacity for religious engagement in such a time!
Despite its obvious importance, two substantial barriers face the future of strategic religious engagement (SRE). First, as well documented by other authors here at The Missing Dimension, SRE work has become collateral damage in the Trump administration’s broader assault on the bureaucratic capacity of the American state, especially its agencies tasked with diplomacy and international development. Second, religion–specifically, a brand of militant Christianity melded with Trump’s image–has been used to justify the dismantling of state capacity, in favor of the religious theatrics that we mention above. The style and substance of religion in U.S. foreign policy has changed dramatically from SRE’s heyday.
This second point has been underappreciated in analysis of SRE’s future. It is entirely reasonable to propose revising SRE in light of new realities like the U.S. Agency for International Development’s closure and State Department reorganization. Such ideas essentially address the first barrier mentioned above. But the second barrier is unlikely to disappear in our highly polarized environment and will continue to present substantial obstacles even to fair-minded attempts to re-engineer organizational charts within the foreign policy bureaucracy.
In what follows, we briefly illustrate these barriers and provide some tentative suggestions regarding mitigating their impact on rebuilding SRE.
Both the State Department and USAID, where SRE arguably reached its apogee, have been subjected to well-documented reductions in bureaucratic capacity. As other contributors to this blog have ably argued, SRE has suffered in the process. The lights have been turned off on even the limited remaining SRE unit at the State Department, while USAID’s faith-based office went into wood chipper along with the rest of the agency in early 2025.
It is reasonable to expect that, as the 2028 presidential primaries gear up, white papers will proliferate for rebuilding damaged American diplomatic capacity. Several contributors to this blog have essentially put forward proposals that could fit within such a policy plan. Based on our own experiences in the State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs, we see real value in rebuilding different dimensions of “engagement.” Such initiatives would benefit from staff with distinct expertises in both successful development partnerships and diplomatic outreach. In our experience, there is pragmatic value in distinguishing this SRE capacity from long-standing, congressionally-mandated efforts to promote international religious freedom at the State Department. Those with lived experience working in (or with) the foreign policy bureaucracy should continue to refine such proposals to rebuild capacity.
However, the future of SRE initiatives will depend as much on addressing the second barrier we identify above: the extent to which religion has itself become a justification for an assault on the “deep state” bureaucracy. As we have argued elsewhere, the Trump administration has actively cultivated conservative Christian grievances in its campaign against the capacity of the federal government, most notably through its Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was an active contributor to the task force’s work. Trump’s congressional ally Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) justified USAID’s dismantling by alleging it promoted “repugnant” values “antithetical to [the American people’s] moral convictions and their faith.” In the wake of this damage, triumphalist religious performances from diplomatic and national security officials have become almost commonplace, most dramatically through Secretary Hegseth’s statements about war with Iran referenced above.
How can one hope to restore SRE to status quo ante in this environment? Given the integration of religious performance into the public personae of likely 2028 GOP candidates like Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, it seems unlikely that dynamics will transform overnight on the GOP primary trail. And while several potential Democrat presidential hopefuls are in the process of crafting faith-friendly campaign narratives, the Biden administration demonstrated that SRE capacity will not magically reappear simply because of a devout White House occupant.
We would propose two initial steps that could mitigate this second barrier to rebuilding SRE. First, advocates of restoring foreign policy capacity could publicly highlight religious partnership as a way to contest faith-based assaults on the alleged deep state. Second, foreign policy strategists should integrate religious intellectual traditions into efforts to revive the moral basis of international order, as happened at that order’s emergence.
Leaders of faith-based organizations can draw on moral authority and practical experience in assisting public campaigns to rebuild U.S. diplomatic capacity, a necessary precondition for restoring SRE. Religiously-inflected attacks on USAID (and development assistance more broadly) obscure the deep, impactful engagements that have emerged over several decades between faith-based organizations and government development professionals. These partnerships persisted in the first Trump administration’s SRE work at USAID, and they remain visible in the current administration’s decision to channel limited aid to Cuba through agencies of the Catholic Church. The moral authority of religious messengers and associated networks, from international charities down to local congregations, could make an important contribution to rebuilding public support for development and diplomatic capacity.
Second, religious leaders, reflecting diverse traditions, have a proactive part to play as foreign policy strategists consider how to refresh the moral foundations of the post-World War II international order. SRE emerged within that order and has faded as the order itself comes under great strain. The same American leaders quoted in this essay’s opening show disdain for core commitments associated with that postwar approach, from limitations on the use of force, to respect for sovereignty, to maintenance of alliances. In the postwar period, thinkers grounded in diverse religious traditions were central to processes that led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international commitments intended to move beyond a world where the weak suffer what they must. Recapturing such contributions would be a notable contrast to curiously-thin performances of Christian identity.
We do not offer these proposals as a replacement for the more fine-grained, thoughtful ideas about SRE’s future that others have put forward in the SRE Hub’s work. Rather, they could provide a more durable foundation for SRE’s renewed presence in revived American diplomacy.
