POS 388 - Module 2 Discussion

 Prompt:

In her post in the Berkley Forum, Elizabeth Hurd argues that "the time has come for Congress and the Biden administration to dismantle the religion bureaucracy." Do you agree or disagree with Dr. Hurd? Why or why not?

Reply: 

Married to a Jewish Refugee

I agree completely with Dr. Hurd. I think that the idea of religious freedom has gotten too muddied up with the ideas of oppression. Where do we draw the lines? I’m drawn to the quote in Marsden (2020):

“When people are categorized by religious belief, then they are incentivized to frame demands or requests for asylum in the language of religious rights, thereby strengthening the religious freedom advocacy regime’s framing schema (…). This contributes to a desecularising trend in international politics (…), in the sense that it universalizes an American or Western interpretation of religion, overlooking other causal explanation for events in international politics, and opens up space for all aspects of international politics to be religionized (p. 10).”

My husband and his family arrived here in 1990 as refugees from the former Soviet Union. They were granted political and religious asylum on the basis that they were Jewish and unable to live without fear of oppression from the communist government. However, they were not religious in the slightest and their main complaint wasn’t religious but economic. Religious freedom was granted to them, and they were quickly absorbed into the Jewish community here in Phoenix, where they once again faced ostracism for being basically atheist, as their experiences in the USSR had disillusioned them from religion altogether (since being religious meant you couldn’t work). Hurd makes an excellent point when she says, “Instead of calming tensions, elevating religion above other factors hardens divisions between communities by defining identities and interests in religious terms (Shakman Hurd, 2021).” My in-laws didn’t want to come here to openly practice Judaism. They still don’t openly practice Judaism 30 years later. They came here because they wanted to earn money. They couldn’t earn money in the USSR because they were Jews and Jews were places in a lower socio-economic caste than the rest of Russian society, no matter the occupation. Even though they were engineers with master’s degrees, they were living in a one-room apartment with barely enough food to eat because they were born into a religion they did not choose to practice. They were forced into occupations they didn’t want (my mother-in-law famously wanted to be an astronomer but was forced into engineering) and were paid pittance because they had Jewish last names. They sought asylum the only way they knew how: as political and religious refugees. And they were granted asylum under those terms. But that’s not why they wanted to immigrate. They wanted to immigrate for economic reasons, to give their only son a better shot at having a decent, middle-class life and his own bedroom. If we abolished these terms of religious freedom and started looking at the more complex issues underneath, maybe we would see these issues underneath.

Works Cited

Marsden, L. (2020, May 21). International Religious Freedom Promotion and US Foreign Policy. MDPI Religions, 1-18.

Shakman Hurd, E. (2021, July 13). Statement of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Hearing on The State of Religious Freedom Around the Globe. (E. Shakman Hurd, Performer)

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Grade: 50/50

Professor Comments: None