The Rumi Forum presented ‘Faith-based Diplomacy: Bridging the Religious Divide’ with Dr. Douglas M. Johnston, President of the ICRD.
Dr. Johnston stated, it is supremely ironic that a deeply religious nation like the United States should have such difficulty in dealing with the religious imperatives that permeate today’s geopolitical landscape. Among the underlying reasons, two stand out: (1) a longstanding commitment to the rational-actor model of decision-making, which has effectively excluded religion from the policymaker’s calculus; and (2) a proclivity for using our ardent separation of church and state as a crutch for not doing our homework to understand how religion informs the world views and political aspirations of others who do not similarly separate the two. The looming specter of religious extremism married to weapons of mass destruction only makes more urgent our need to bridge this gap. One approach for doing so that shows unusual promise is a new form of engagement called faith-based diplomacy. As practiced to date by the Washington-based International Center for Religion & Diplomacy (ICRD), this form of diplomacy effectively capitalizes on the role that religious leaders and institutions can play in building trust and overcoming differences. In short, it brings the transcendent aspects of personal religious faith to bear in overcoming the secular obstacles to peace. Thus far, ICRD has been actively engaged on this basis in Sudan; Kashmir; Iran; Pakistan; Syria; and, most recently, Afghanistan.
Dr. Douglas M. Johnston is president and founder of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy. He is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and holds a Masters Degree in Public Administration and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. He has served in senior positions in government, business, the military, and academia, including six years at Harvard where he taught international affairs and was founder and director of the University’s Executive Program in National and International Security. His most recent assignment was as Executive Vice President and COO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is the principal author and editor of Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft (Oxford University Press, 1994), Foreign Policy into the 21st Century the U.S. Leadership Challenge (CSIS, 1996), and Faith-based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik (Oxford University Press, 2003).