Strategic religious engagement (SRE), which refers to efforts by U.S. government foreign policy and national security agencies to engage and partner with religious actors, is currently experiencing an extinction event. Over the past four decades, the U.S. national security ecosystem has made significant progress in nurturing systematic capacity to understand and engage religion in the context of diplomacy, defense, and development. Much of this expertise was housed in three institutional settings: the religion program of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP; technically a congressionally-chartered public institution and not part of the federal government), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the U.S. Department of State. However, as a result of various White House actions and other developments over the course of the past few months, the SRE programs, centers, and units at all three of these institutions have been eliminated. To starkly frame the present crisis: right now, the U.S. government has zero dedicated capacity for SRE.
In order to understand the significance of the moment, it would be helpful to know something about the origins and development of SRE. The first milestone came in 1989 with the founding of USIP’s program on religion and peacebuilding. It would eventually become the institute’s longest running thematic workstream. In 1994, Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson published their pathbreaking edited volume Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft—a text that inspired a generation of SRE scholars and practitioners, and whose thirtieth anniversary was marked by a recent Berkley Forum. The International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998 mandated the establishment of an Office of International Religious Freedom within the State Department. This human rights advocacy function, while distinct from—and arguably sometimes in tension with—religious engagement, is a crucial dimension of the SRE journey.
In 2002, USAID established its Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives based on a mandate from the George W. Bush administration for federal government agencies to enhance their partnerships with faith-based organizations. In 2013, the Department of State under John Kerry established an Office of Religion and Global Affairs (RGA) in parallel with the issuance of a U.S. Strategy on Religious Leader and Faith Community Engagement and the creation of a related interagency policy committee (IPC) in the National Security Council (NSC). The RGA office was eventually folded into the department’s international religious freedom shop to become a small dedicated SRE unit. Between 2020 and 2023, USAID developed and released the U.S. Government’s first-ever comprehensive policy on engaging and working with faith-based actors to achieve shared development and humanitarian goals. It is particularly noteworthy that these various milestones occurred across the administrations of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—a fact that speaks to the strong bipartisan consensus that has always underpinned SRE work.
While certainly surprising, at this time there is no reason to believe that the current administration’s actions affecting SRE signal a lack of support for religious engagement. Rather, it seems that the SRE functions at the likes of USAID and USIP are simply inadvertent casualties of the administration’s broader actions focused on those agencies. Indeed, there was actually every reason to believe that the incoming Trump administration would likely place even greater emphasis on faith-based partnerships. For example, the Project 2025 chapter on USAID makes frequent and extensive references to working with religious actors in U.S. development and humanitarian efforts. And in several other respects the administration has indicated a clear interest in religion—including by renewing the mandate of the White House Faith Office, announcing the creation of a new Religious Freedom Commission, and nominating former congressman Mark Walker to serve as ambassador at large for international religious freedom.
However, whether intentional or not, there is no doubt that the destruction of the U.S. government’s SRE capacity will do great harm to decades of slow and careful one step forward, two steps backward-style progress with respect to religious engagement. Over the years, USAID’s faith-based center had established and nurtured extensive ties to humanitarian and development organizations grounded in religious communities around the world. In addition to jeopardizing these vital relationships, the significant advances USAID has made with respect to building systematic capacity within its workforce for faith-based partnerships will also be lost as its functions get merged into the State Department in a sharply reduced format. With the prospective elimination of USIP, we risk losing some 40 years of best practice research and institutional memory on the intersection of religion and peacebuilding. The fate of hundreds of SRE-related reports, briefings, action guides, and other resources produced by the institute remains uncertain. With the dissolution of the State Department’s SRE unit we lose the only existing space of active interagency cooperation on religious engagement that had been coordinated by the State Department. Finally, with respect to the Department of Defense and the role of U.S. military chaplains in religious engagement—or to use the Pentagon’s terminology, “religious advisement”—USIP, the State Department, and USAID had been important partners in helping to develop this capacity within our armed services.
So where do we go from here? Hopefully once the dust settles from recent developments at USAID, USIP, and the State Department there will be an opportunity for the administration to take stock of where things stand with SRE and to begin rebuilding these important capacities. One space to keep an eye on is the Foreign Services Institute (FSI) where American diplomats, foreign service officers, and other globally deployed government employees receive training. Since 2011, FSI has been regularly offering a course on “Religion and Foreign Policy” in order to provide the knowledge and skills needed for fulfilling congressionally-mandated international religious freedom reporting requirements and for successfully engaging with religious actors and faith-based organizations in other areas of U.S. diplomacy and development. The continuation of this course would represent an important stopgap measure as the administration considers options for recreating SRE capacity in frontline foreign policy and national security agencies.
And in this latter regard, the present moment may represent an opportunity to (borrowing a phrase from another recent administration) “build back better.” If indeed going forward U.S. diplomatic, humanitarian, and development efforts will all be run out of a restructured State Department, it would become the natural new home for a robust and revitalized SRE office providing support across all of these functions. Since we don’t yet know the full details of the plans to merge USAID into State, it is too early to determine where exactly on the new State Department organization chart such a shop might be located. Some possibilities to consider, however, might include:
- Given the pending elimination of the Office of the Undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights (which would have been a natural home for a revitalized SRE shop), one contender would be the proposed new Office of the Director for Foreign Assistance and Human Rights—although this would likely limit the remit of SRE to foreign assistance programming.
- A revival in some form of the previous Office of Religion and Global Affairs under the secretary of State (in order to emphasize an agency-wide mandate for SRE); or
- An expanded mandate for the Office of International Religious Freedom to include an enhanced and properly-resourced SRE function.
There are of course other models to consider, such as dedicated SRE officers in a few select bureaus and offices, but the priority is first and foremost to catalyze renewed thinking in this direction.
In the meantime, it will be more important than ever for the SRE community-at-large, including scholars, practitioners, and religious communities, to support each other and mobilize to preserve the precious gains of recent years. This calls for a collective effort to sustain this work by consolidating resources, expertise, and capacity outside government—most likely via a consortium of academic institutions and research centers—in order to provide stopgap policy support capacity while continuing to advance the SRE agenda in new directions.
