NEW YORK — Even as President Donald Trump sharply challenged the faith of his political opponents this week, he was drawing new attention to a religious issue that he’s staked repeated claim to: the global freedom to worship. The day after Trump touted his support for domestic religious liberty in his State of the Union address, the State Department rolled out a list of 26 nations that have joined the International Religious Freedom Alliance. Trump lauded the alliance in Thursday remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, vowing that his administration is “standing up for persecuted Christians and religious minorities all around the world, like nobody has ever done.”But the president’s elevation of global religious freedom while he politicizes the topic at home -- Trump asserted last month that he had ended a government “war on religion” -- raises questions about whether a long-standing bipartisan priority can stay that way amid the white-hot politics of an election year. Indeed, religious progressives who have raised their voices to counter Trump’s appeals to his evangelical base challenged his administration’s focus on international religious freedom as advancing a restrictive definition of the term. Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the progressive NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, told reporters Thursday that when she first heard of the administration's new international alliance, “I thought the idea was nations having difficulty providing for religious freedom were joining together to try to improve.”

Source: International New York Times February 07, 2020 00:11 UTC