"The United States is a religious nation, but neither scholars of U.S. foreign policy nor its practitioners have taken religion very seriously." So says the opening sentence from Thomas Farr's article "Diplomacy in an Age of Faith: Religious Freedom and National Security," published in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs . Farr argues that despite the collapse of the "secularization thesis,"which holds that as modernity advances religion will inevitably decline, "analysts and policymakers have remained either ignorant or baffled" even while scholars are "scrambling to reexamine the question of faith in international affairs." While many secularists assume that religion is inimical to the advance of freedom, Farr insists that"religious ideas and actors can buttress and expand ordered liberty," and argues that the U.S. "should move resolutely to make the defense and expansion of religious liberty a core component of U.S. foreign policy."

Thomas F. Farr is the Visiting Professor of Religion and Foreign Affairs at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and the author of the forthcoming World of Faith and Freedom: Why Religious Liberty Is Vital to American National Security ( Oxford University Press). A career diplomat, he became in 1999 the first director of the Office of International Religious Freedom. A Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina, Dr. Farr served for seven years in the U.S. Army and has taught at both the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy. His early diplomatic career focused on strategic nuclear weapons policy, the Cold War and European politics, and his positions included deputy director for strategic arms control policy, State Department advisor to U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva, and senior intelligence analyst for NATO, Greece, and Cyprus.

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