Platform or Plateau?
The Promise and Challenge of the Religious Freedom and Integral Human Development Platform
Can focusing on religious freedom and integral human development provide a path to renewing Catholic engagement in international affairs? Last month, I attended a day-long online conference (the broadcast of an in-person conference that had taken place in Rome) titled “Religious Freedom and Integral Human Development: A New Global Platform” in pursuit of an answer to this question. Of course, the Catholic Church has never stopped engaging in international affairs; however, there is reason to worry that the Church is failing to live up to its potential in this area. Catholics have forgotten much of their patrimony when it comes to IR theory, taking their cues from political candidates or social media influencers sooner than Augustine or Aquinas; on the other hand, Catholic IR theory is badly in need of what lawyer and diplomat Mary Ann Glendon has called “updating” in the spirit of Vatican II’s call for aggiornamento. (See my review of Glendon’s most recent book for more on the problems plaguing Catholic IR today.) In my personal experience, attempts to make Catholic teaching seem relevant to secular actors in international affairs usually result in the dilution, and even de-Christianizing, of Catholic teaching.
Given this state of affairs, I was intrigued when I saw that the Atlantic Council, a prominent bipartisan, secular think tank, was partnering with The Order of Malta to stage a conference on the topics of religious freedom and integral human development. The concept of integral human development originated within the Catholic Church; like all of Catholic social teaching, however, this concept is meant to be shared with the world and contains much that can be understood and accepted by other philosophical and faith traditions. Many of the conference speakers were Catholic, but the speaker lineup represented a diverse array of religious traditions and international actors. A single conference can never be the final word on a topic; however, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to observe Catholic experts using a distinctly Catholic concept (integral human development) and a post-Vatican II priority (religious freedom) to engage with secular society and to see if this approach shows promise.
I was not disappointed. The speakers brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table, and together they painted a detailed picture, not only of the state of religious freedom and integral human development in the world today, but also of both the promise and challenge of using this “new global platform” as a platform for Catholic engagement in international affairs.
Sustainable Development or Integral Human Development?
According to conference speaker and Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs, Scott Appleby, the term “integral human development” was coined by French Dominican Louis-Joseph Lebret, but was later incorporated into papal documents, including Populorum Progressio. Appleby defined it as “the state of a society in which the irreducible dignity of each person and every person and the cultural and spiritual as well as economic and material requirements of human flourishing are central to political and social life are upheld by the rule of law.”
While integral human development gained traction in the Catholic Church over half a century ago, a different development paradigm gained dominance in mainstream international development: sustainable development. Perhaps the best-known application of this concept is the Sustainable Development Goals – the 17 goals, to be met by 2030, that all UN member states have recognized as “vital for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.” While I have long been familiar with these goals, as well as the international religious freedom landscape, I was surprised to learn that religious freedom is not mentioned at all in the SDG’s. Given this omission, it is unsurprising that the world is not on track to meet the SDG’s by 2030. The problem isn’t merely that one human right among many was left off a long list of goods necessary for development. Looking at religious freedom through the lens of integral human development reveals that, like removing a keystone from a bridge, removing religious freedom from development causes the whole edifice to crumble. As the Holy See’s secretary for relations with states Archbishop Paul Gallagher emphasized,
“religious freedom is arguably the most fundamental (human right). It is the right of freedom of conscience that provides the foundation for all other human rights by allowing individuals to exercise their conscience without interference. It places a limit on the authority of the State. This in turn ensures that fundamental rights are not violated. It is therefore clear that the violation of the right to religious freedom has the effect of undermining not just one right by the entire category of human rights.”
Furthermore, the neglect of religious freedom hurts not only human rights, but prosperity. A fascinating panel on religious freedom and economic development made the case that lack of religious freedom contributes to corruption, hurts states’ global competitiveness, and leaves religious minorities out of economic progress.
These effects of the failure to protect religious freedom, while important, point to an even more fundamental problem: that the prevailing international development framework misunderstands the human person. The Catholic understanding of integral human development is based in the knowledge that the human person is created in the image and likeness of God, and so his development must include not only economic or material development, but also authentic spiritual development. One of the key insights articulated in this conference – at times haltingly and obliquely, but articulated nonetheless – was that the failure of the SDG’s to prioritize or even acknowledge this spiritual development reveals the chasm between “sustainable development” and integral human development.
Promise and Challenge
To my mind, the fact that presenters were able to speak about this at a secular, prestigious conference in itself showed that the religious freedom/integral human development platform holds promise. It was refreshing to hear secular leaders acknowledging the importance of religious freedom and spiritual development, and at times even citing recent popes as inspiration. I was pleasantly surprised when Archbishop Gallagher spoke of the “intolerance that shows its Sinister face in the opulent countries of the northern hemisphere in the west which prides itself on its achievements in the recognition and protection of Human Rights.” He continued that
“this is a paradoxical situation because on the one hand these countries pride themselves on being the exporters of human rights, sometimes even of what they erroneously call rights - think of the struggles for the universalization of abortion as a right or more generally of so-called reproductive rights, think also of the demands on the subject of gender - on the other hand they neglect the first of the rights in question: religious freedom.”
Certainly not all the conference participants shared this perspective, but this makes his remarks all the more significant. There would be nothing remarkable had he been “preaching to the choir” at an explicitly Christian conference. While I wish there had been greater recognition of the decline of religious freedom in the West and the export of “false rights,” the fact that these topics received ANY serious attention was a positive sign. And while some of the non-Catholic speakers seemed to have a tenuous grasp (at best) of integral human development, the fact that they were trying in good faith to engage with this Catholic concept and appropriate it into the development lexicon was a small sign that the Church can still influence international conversations.
Despite these promising signs, the challenges inherent in this project were also evident. Many speakers stressed the centrality of human dignity to the integral human development framework; however, as far as I could tell, no one even attempted to offer a definition of human dignity. Many speakers addressed aspects of human dignity. Scott Appleby compared transcendent and secular understandings of human dignity. Rocco D’Ambrosio noted that attacks on religious freedom are harmful to human dignity. Perhaps the closest anyone came to offering a definition was Msgr. Anthony Onyemuche Ekpo, who clearly articulated that both integral human development and religious freedom are based in human dignity and the nature of the human person. If the failure to attempt a working definition was an oversight, it was an egregious one; however, I suspect it was an intentional strategic decision. The keynote speaker and United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Nazila Ghanea, set the tone when she remarked:
“…some argue that where both human rights and development find significant common ground is in the concept of human dignity. Others link it to the idea of an integral human development approach which they hold to be less contested. I am sympathetic to the idea of dignity as a practice rather than assuming a particular understanding.”
Throughout the conference, my sense was that there was an unspoken agreement to focus on “dignity as a practice,” leaving the definition open-ended in order to avoid controversy.
The challenge, of course, is that a purely practical dignity can easily turn into meaningless dignity. This is not a new challenge, nor is it exclusive to the Catholic Church. As Mary Ann Glendon has documented, the framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights decided early on in the drafting process that defining human dignity, or offering any philosophical foundations for human rights, was too contentious a task. They settled for a somewhat vague statement that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Glendon recounts myriad ways that the failure to define human dignity has resulted in the decay of the human rights project: the proliferation of rights, the introduction of special interests, the neo-colonial export of pseudo-rights, and the tendency to favor certain rights at the expense of others. She concludes (correctly, in my view), that “the human rights project will rest on shaky foundations unless and until philosophers and statespersons collaborate on the business that the framers left unfinished.”
I fear this conclusion holds true for integral human development. While the “Religious Freedom and Integral Human Development” conference was in many ways a step in the right direction, I wonder how much further this movement can progress without a deeper consensus on the meaning of human dignity and its relationship to integral human development and religious freedom. In short, will it be a platform or a plateau?
I understand the need to work with people of various faiths (and no faith), and therefore to find ways of talking about human dignity that are not exclusively Catholic or Biblical. However, in my experience, it is still possible to offer a basic understanding and philosophy of human dignity that resonates across many faiths and cultures. If this conference is to grow into an effective “platform,” I think intellectuals and policymakers will eventually have to confront this issue head-on.
The tension between proclaiming the Catholic understanding of human dignity - that human persons are made in the image and likeness of God – and finding pragmatic ways to work with those who do not share our theology points to the dilemma that all Catholics, and indeed all Christians, face when working in international affairs: how do we reconcile the imperative to share the fullness of our faith with the need to be effective in a pluralistic, increasingly secular world? In recent years, I think the Catholic solution has too often been to NOT share the fullness of our faith; the result is a watered-down, generic approach to international issues that could easily be mistaken for an NGO’s mission statement. This helps no one; it injures Catholics spiritually, and the world is deprived of the Church’s distinctive contributions. I know it is easy to criticize this error, but much harder to suggest an effective remedy. It’s not as simple as going around thumping a Bible and exclusively using language straight out of the Catechism of the Catholic Church - obviously, this would be counterproductive in most settings. Catholics are called to engage with the world in good faith, at times compromising and working to find common ground with those who don’t share our faith, while ALSO being in the world and not of the world. This is no easy feat.
I don’t pretend to have a complete solution, and the Church must continue to discern how to be both faithful and effective in a rapidly changing global context. I can, however, suggest criteria for this discernment. A priest friend of mine recently said, “The goal of the Catholic Church’s involvement in world affairs is to bring Christ to the world.” The Church isn’t in the business of international development out of some vague sense of altruism or a desire to build a utopia on earth. No, we are motivated by our love of Christ and the love of neighbor that flows from that. So, whether working at the intersection of religious freedom and integral human development, or in diplomacy, or in peacebuilding efforts, the question is always the same: am I bringing Christ to the world? The answer to this question will be the true measure of success for Catholics involved in the religious freedom and integral human development project, and for all Catholic engagement in international affairs.