On Wednesday morning, Hardwired Global, a nonprofit group that promotes religious freedom around the world, co-hosted an event with members of the Congressional International Religious Freedom Caucus. It celebrated the release of Hardwired’s new report on rights-based education and the success of working with teachers to promote religious tolerance.
Tina Ramirez, the founder and president of Hardwired, spoke along with a Moroccan counselor and three members of the IRF Caucus: Reps. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., Thomas Garrett, R-Va., and Jamie Raskin, D- Md. All mentioned the need for increased tolerance, an end to religious violence, and the ongoing difficulty of promoting religious liberty around the world.
For all of the lofty ideals of our Constitution, however, the United States is no perfect example of religious tolerance. Indeed, religious intolerance has been seemingly sanctioned by the words and legislation of President Trump who called for and defended his “Muslim ban” and had to be pushed to condemn anti-Semitism.
The 2016 FBI statistics, showed that more than 20 percent of all reported hate crimes in the U.S. were motivated by religious bias — more than reported crimes perpetrated on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, and gender bias combined. Of those incidents, 54.2 percent were anti-Jewish and 24.8 were anti-Islamic. Overall, incidences of hate crimes rose by more than 11 percent compared to the 2014 statistics.
The numbers for 2017, based on statistics compiled by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, (the FBI data has not yet been released) don’t look any better. Their report shows that hate crimes in the nation’s largest cities increased by 12.5 percent in 2017. Among crimes targeting religion, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim crimes accounted for the majority of incidences. A report by the Anti-Defamation League corroborates the rise of religious intolerance citing a 57 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017.
Clearly, it is not just other countries that struggle with religious intolerance.
Domestic religious intolerance, like religious intolerance abroad, deserves bipartisan attention but is much more difficult to address. While the lawmakers at Wednesday’s event acknowledged this, and Hardwire is working to bring its programs to the U.S., lawmakers, especially Republicans, must be willing to call out intolerance from the White House and make a stand for tolerance at home.
Remaining silent in the wake of Trump’s remarks on the white nationalist and anti-Semitic “Unite the Right Rally” as Bilirakis did and meeting with an organizer of that rally as Garrett did (although he later said he regretted it) does not lend credibility to claims of standing up against intolerance around the world.
To be clear, this is not to say that work of the IRF or promoting religious liberty abroad is misguided, but rather to caution that for the U.S. to be taken seriously, attention must be paid to domestic intolerance as well.
[Also read: Young people are more religious than older adults in these two countries]
