In early 2025, the U.S. State Department’s Strategic Religious Engagement Unit ceased to exist. Its closure marked the end of formal efforts to add religious actor engagement (RAE), a tactic for working directly with religious communities to advance U.S. foreign policy, to its diplomatic toolkit. Secretary of State John Kerry’s creation of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs (RGA) and the release of a “National Strategy on Integrating Religious Leader and Faith Community Engagement into U.S. Foreign Policy” had formally opened this foreign policy experiment in 2013.
Those were heady days early on. RGA grew to over thirty personnel and parlayed high-level backing to conduct both large and small activities, from supporting the Pan Pacific Partnership to combating Nigerian corruption to civic education for immigrants to Europe—all through diplomatic engagement with religious communities.
Strategic Religious Engagement (SRE)
Despite optimism for continued diplomatic engagement with faith communities in U.S. foreign policy, the change of administrations in 2017 upended RGA. The Trump administration did not prioritize its work and RGA lost much of its personnel. I arrived in February 2018 after the team’s move from the “power floor” of the State Department to a science and technology suite in a distant annex.
RGA’s five-person team could no longer cover the world, so we focused our efforts on replicable projects and the creation of knowledge resources that could be disseminated agency-wide. The team strived to spread the “idea” of effectively advancing U.S. foreign policy priorities through engagement with faith communities to foreign affairs actors across the U.S. government. Key projects included social inclusion in Europe, engaging African religious leaders, a working group on the Orthodox world, and training and outreach.
In 2019, RGA joined the Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF) and became the SRE Unit. The SRE concept was formally coined as an overarching approach to diplomatically engaging religious communities and actors to achieve foreign policy goals. There were challenges to overcome and the much smaller SRE Unit had to “defend” its functional space from IRF’s size and focused mission. Possibilities awaited, but the seeds for the SRE Unit’s demise had already been planted.
A Fast Start
Despite few staff, the SRE Unit was on a roll in fall 2019, having just co-sponsored with Switzerland “An Inter-faith Workshop on Conflict Prevention” that gathered religious leaders from seven African countries to negotiate a mutual aid agreement. The SRE Unit brought U.S. diplomats from these countries to observe the workshop and attend training jointly led by State and Swiss diplomats. The Switzerland session kicked off the rapid development of SRE training for State audiences. Meanwhile, preparations advanced for the January 2020 meeting of the Abrahamic Faiths Initiative (AFI) in Rome.
The AFI underscored how senior leadership—here, the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback—can drive an initiative. AFI gathered worldwide religious leaders from Judaism, Islam, and Christianity to craft a covenant toward peace. This initially successful AFI process gradually lost impetus following Amb. Brownback’s January 2021 departure.
With face-to-face interactions the lifeblood of SRE, COVID’s 2020 arrival slowed its momentum. Still, the work continued.
The Projects
The SRE Unit’s multi-faceted portfolio largely fit into five categories—international health, training/education, outreach, democracy/governance, and conflict prevention/peacebuilding—to shed light on its work. With RAE a tactic for achieving U.S. foreign policy goals, the SRE Unit’s approach offered an alternative way to achieve those goals, often by working with sub-national populations to build toward influencing local and national government practice.
The loss of the SRE Unit leaves a gap in U.S. foreign policy capabilities both in terms of an alternate option for policy effectiveness—because religious communities frequently bring a more people-oriented perspective than traditional state-to-state relations—and in tone. The messages from track 1.5 diplomacy with interfaith religious organizations overseas often start with humanitarian language that rises above individual interests toward inclusivity and mutual interests.
International Health
Activities in 2020 included developing a COVID-19 toolkit for U.S. diplomatic posts to work with religious communities and aid African religious leaders to reach people through radio broadcasts about COVID-19 best practices. Along these lines, the SRE Unit also collaborated in 2021 with German, Dutch, and other EU diplomats to encourage our respective diplomatic posts to engage religious leaders in specific African countries to overcome vaccine hesitancy.
Another project in concert with other U.S. agencies trained rural religious actors as first-line mental health support in post-conflict Latin America and provided a means to address many of the unseen wounds impeding peaceful outcomes.
Finally, in early 2025, as part of broader changes in the new administration’s posture on global health and foreign aid, new State Department leadership terminated a promising 18-month effort to address low childhood vaccination rates in Nigeria. The initiative linked U.S. overseas health agencies with interfaith religious networks associated with the NGO Religions for Peace. A potentially ideal collaboration between government experts and knowledgeable, local civil society could have helped to address underlying tensions, even desperation, that encourage conflict between communities by improving their living conditions and lessening potentially dire conditions.
Training/Education
Training State Department and partner agencies’ staff was an SRE Unit constant. From biannual courses at the Foreign Service Institute and Regional Training alongside IRF colleagues, the SRE Unit also partnered with IRF’s army chaplain fellow to reach chaplains at three training levels at the U.S. Army Institute for Religious leadership at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina, and other locations, including the National Guard Bureau. Together, the SRE Unit trained nearly 3,000 U.S. government foreign affairs professionals.
The crown jewel of the trainings came from a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and State Department partnership over three years of curriculum development to offer four-day courses to overseas staff of a diverse set of U.S. agencies in Honduras, Uzbekistan, Indonesia and Thailand, which also included participants from IndoPacific Command.
Outreach
The SRE Unit conducted its work through various partnerships:
- The Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group where the primary participants included State Department, Department of Defense, USAID, and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP).
- The Transatlantic Partnership Network on Religion and Diplomacy (TPNRD)—a carryover from RGA—gathered diplomats and academics in biannual intergovernmental meetings to consider ways to engage religious actors in collaborative diplomatic activity.
- The SRE Unit partnered with civil society, including many domestic and international non-governmental organizations. Three diverse examples include Religions for Peace, Multi-Faith Neighbors Network, and the Nigerian Inter-religious Council (NIREC).
- The SRE Unit provided relevant news through a monthly SRE newsletter sent as a cable to all diplomatic posts, a weekly list-serve on worldwide religious activity, and an internal SRE speakers series.
Democracy/Governance
Religious communities frequently hold heavy-handed governments accountable and protect civil society voices (alas, in some contexts, religious communities may also support those governments). The SRE Unit team presented two panel discussions on the following topics:
(1) religious communities fighting for environmental rights in Latin American and Southeast Asia; and (2) international and domestic religious actors influencing politics in the U.S., Brazil, and Lebanon.
The SRE Unit continued RGA projects and partnered with U.S. posts in Europe to offer civic education for immigrant communities to better engage their governments. An opportunity lost to leadership indifference included an initiative linking U.S. Embassy Lebanon—which invited and welcomed SRE Unit staff to Beirut in summer 2022—with the locally-based Adyan Foundation. The initiative sought to help Adyan’s interfaith partners engage Lebanon’s secular government on a path toward overcoming long-term sectarian conflicts.
The sidelining of projects like these only underlines the recent shift in U.S. foreign policy away from supporting democratic governance.
Conflict Prevention
The loss of organized formal efforts to insert SRE into the larger foreign affairs community—as exemplified by the Beirut initiative and the workshop in Switzerland—will mean the loss of links to U.S. partners for peacebuilding. It undermines whole-of-government efforts to work collaboratively across agency lines with key stakeholders overseas, and it raises simple state interest over weakening commitments to achieving mutually beneficial goals that naturally diminish international conflict.
The End of the SRE Unit
The SRE Unit’s fate was largely determined by indifferent IRF leadership. This lack of commitment to SRE rests on the fact that the International Religious Freedom Act mandate for religious freedom advocacy does not include a similar mandate for SRE. As such, the Unit became an afterthought in the IRF Office.
SRE’s “moment” in fall 2019 came through strong advocacy by an energetic Foreign Service officer (FSO) unit chief—FSOs were bureaucratically mandated to lead the unit—who had the background and interest for the team’s mission. Yet, this proved the exception and exposed the inherent weakness of the Foreign Service model for new tactics. FSOs are generalists who, as a class, step into almost any role and implement policy very well, but the model often fails when new/creative approaches are introduced into the bureaucracy, often through political appointees and/or civil servant subject matter experts. Without prior experience in SRE overseas, most FSO managers coming to Washington were unfamiliar with it in practice. By spring 2023 many of the SRE Unit’s resources and responsibilities were being scaled back, and in early 2025 the unit was formally eliminated.
Whither Strategic Religious Engagement?
The Trump administration is not outwardly hostile toward SRE, but it is also not a priority. New State Department officials expressed interest in SRE early on, including a peace plan in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet, this would be a one-off and there is need for consistent advocacy of this type of approach and/or specific examples of success. These may come from individuals of the diplomatic corps who see possibilities in given situations. For example, U.S. diplomatic relationships with Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa had positive impacts on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process.
To have success with this approach at the State Department, however, there needs to be a sense of consistency and strong, high-level support. The consistency could come from an SRE-type unit in State’s regional bureaus at the center of State Department activity through, perhaps, a standing unit within the Office of the Undersecretary for Political Affairs. Much depends, however, on the strength and longevity of support from the undersecretary at that time, which would help instill the practice of reaching out to religious actors in the bureaus in political affairs.
At this moment, the SRE flag is mostly carried by military chaplains committed to advancing SRE. Their work with U.S. diplomats at embassies and consulates may push the pendulum back toward the broader foreign policy community, while SRE’s full return likely awaits a future administration’s especially strong commitment to integrating the practice into its foreign policy toolkit.
