FARR: “IF YOU DON’T HAVE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO HAVE A STABLE DEMOCRACY
IDC – September 2014
Thomas Farr said religious freedom is critical to achieving peace and stability in the Middle East. The Catholic News Agency covered his remarks to the Catholic Information Center recently:
Encouraging robust religious freedom is a critical foundation for peace and stability in the Middle East, said panelists discussing the ongoing violence facing Christians in the region.
“If you don’t have religious freedom, you’re not going to have a stable democracy, you’re not going to have stable growth,” said Dr. Tom Farr, director of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University’s Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.
“Religious Freedom is very much needed in the Middle East, indeed it’s needed now,” he stressed. “What we have to do is what we should have been doing all along, and that is the promotion of stable self-governance grounded in religious freedom.”
“If we do not do the hard work,” Farr warned, “we will suffer and our children will suffer” from the consequences of restricted religious freedom around the world. “We’ve got to get in this game, and at the root of it is religious freedom.”
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