Faith, Family, and Freedom Beyond the Water’s Edge: Foreign Policy Priorities for Christian Conservatives in the Second Trump Administration
Christian conservatives in the United States tend to have a strong domestic focus where policy is concerned. The “Faith, Family, and Freedom” agenda of social conservatives usually focuses on issues close to home: abortion, LGBTQ-rights claims, and the freedom for Christians to bring their faith into the American public square. Still, conservative Christians have made substantial contributions to U.S. foreign policy in areas including human rights, national security, and international development.
In general, socially conservative Christians have focused on four international issues: global pro-family policy, promotion of religious freedom, faith-based humanitarian relief and development, and support for Israel. By and large, they have enjoyed the most success on the last issue, since support for Israel was a bipartisan issue throughout most of the Jewish state’s existence.
On international religious freedom, conservative Christians helped craft a broad coalition to enshrine the promotion of religious freedom as an objective of U.S. foreign policy. However, this consensus has begun to fray around the edges in recent years, as Democrat administrations have seen a conflict between promoting religious freedom internationally and advancing LGBTQ-rights claims in foreign countries. That Democrats have prioritized the latter is entirely unsurprising.
In terms of humanitarian aid and development policy, Christian-conservative efforts have been a mixed bag. On one hand, evangelical and traditional, Catholic aid organizations have been quite effective in their own aid and development efforts. On the other, the U.S. foreign-aid industrial complex is, by some estimates, even more hostile to faith-based organizations than the State Department itself.
Finally, global pro-family policy has also seen a mixture of success and failure. Conservative Christians were instrumental in raising awareness about sex trafficking as a major human rights concern, and in Republican administrations, they have limited U.S. support for abortion abroad due to the Mexico City policy. That said, much more can and must be done in support of a global, pro-family agenda.
Keeping these socially conservative priorities in mind, here are the top ten practical recommendations for socially conservative foreign policy in the new administration:
1. Quickly confirm all of President Trump’s pro-Israel nominees. This is likely to be an easy lift, but social conservatives will want to see a foreign-policy team committed to robust support for the Jewish state. President Trump’s nominees for Secretary of State, Ambassador to Israel, and Ambassador to the United Nations fit the bill. Social conservatives should support rapid confirmation of all three.
2. Urge President Trump to renew his June 2020 executive order promoting religious freedom. Though it was over-shadowed by a number of other events, that executive order established the “first freedom” as a national-security priority for the United States. It created a permanent staff position for International Religious Freedom (IRF) promotion in the National Security Council (NSC) and earmarked funds for development projects focused on IRF promotion within USAID. Christian conservatives should urge President Trump to recommit to these priorities and to appropriately staff both the NSC and USAID with knowledgeable professionals capable of implementing that policy.
3. Support strategic engagement in Syria regarding Israel and the protection of religious minorities. With the collapse of the Assad regime, it appears Abu Mohammed Al-Golani will emerge as the major player in Syria. Rumors indicate that Al-Golani desperately wants to be removed from the U.S. terrorism list. Though it is reasonable to take this claim with a heap of salt, Al-Golani’s commitment to moderation is a hypothesis worth testing. For social conservatives, this is an opportunity to replicate a modestly successful strategy employed with the post-Bashir government in Sudan. It is in Al-Golani’s interest to fight ISIS, and the U.S. should encourage him to do so. Additionally, Christian conservatives should advocate for a series of measurable, tangible commitments to protect religious minorities and to respect their religious freedom. Such commitments are essential to protect Syria’s Christians, estimated at 10% of the nation’s population. Ideally, this should be combined with a modus vivendi with the Kurds and Druze communities — both of which can be relied on to oppose Islamic extremism and potentially soften Syria’s position toward Israel. It is unlikely that Al-Golani, or any government he leads, would or could join the Abraham Accords. However, the U.S. could include some modest goals designed to thaw relations between Syria and Israel.
4. Reform USAID. Foreign aid is often seen as a niche foreign-policy issue, but it can be a very cost-effective means of projecting American soft power, giving the U.S. a global humanitarian presence at a cost of .5% of the federal budget. That said, USAID is in desperate need of reform. In a report I co-authored with the Family Research Council, we identified systematic anti-religious bias within USAID, driven in part by ignorance of the impact faith-based organizations (FBOs) have on relief and development and by the intrinsic, secular bias found throughout much of the professional relief-and-development apparatus. Christian conservatives should push for reforms in USAID designed to open up the oligopolistic foreign-aid contracting system to greater competition from faith-based organizations, while encouraging education and data collection on the profound, positive impact FBOs have on issues of relief and development. A specific, early initiative might relate to the protection of religious minorities in Syria. Drawing on lessons from the first Trump Administration, the New Partnership Initiative (NPI) framework used to aid religious minorities in Iraq post-ISIS could also serve as the basis for a similar effort in Syria. If successful, NPI-style programs should also be considered for other potentially vulnerable religious minorities, such as Christians in Northern Nigeria.
5. Make the Mexico City policy permanent. President Trump is all but certain to issue an executive order reinstating the Mexico City policy prohibiting funding for abortions abroad. Unfortunately, like all executive orders, this policy can currently be overturned by the next Democrat administration. With control of the House and Senate, Republicans should take the opportunity to enshrine this policy in legislation, extending the prohibition on federal funding for abortions into the international sphere. Even in a Democrat majority, swing-state Democrats will find it difficult to convince their constituents that U.S.-taxpayer funding for abortions in other countries is essential to our national interest. On the other hand, leaving the issue up to the President gives Democrat administrations the ability to bury it amidst a flood of other executive orders, as they have done in the past. This would be a measurable, broadly popular, commonsense win for the pro-life movement that would likely enjoy very broad support.
6. Expand the Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords were the signature achievement of President Trump’s first-term Middle East policy. Now, in a second term, the expansion of the Accords would extend peace and prosperity across the region. As groups such as the Philos Project have emphasized, Christians — like Jews and Muslims — are inheritors of the Abrahamic tradition. So, the Abraham Accords can and should include Christians in the region. Abraham Accords countries can achieve this by promoting stability in Syria, crafting a new future for Lebanon that restores its multi-sectarian pluralism, and ensuring that any post-war solution for Gaza robustly protects religious minorities — thereby, perhaps, allowing Christians to return to the Gaza Strip.
7. Restore the State Department’s emphasis on the values of the Commission for Unalienable Rights. One of the underrated, but significant, accomplishments of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was the report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights. Restating the fundamental freedoms of the American constitutional tradition, the Commission recommended that these rights serve as the underpinning of U.S. human rights policy with implications for U.S. national security. By contrast, then-Secretary of State Tony Blinken gave a speech in 2021 specifically rejecting the idea of unalienable rights and paving the way for the Biden Administration’s full-court-press advocacy for LGBTQ rights. Social conservatives should push the State Department to restore the human-rights understanding of the Commission. In so doing, they can craft a forward-looking, human-rights agenda capable of building a global and pluralistic consensus based on shared civilizational values. Many nations, from our Eastern European allies to Muslim countries like Indonesia, were quite supportive of the Commission’s understanding, which could help forge a global coalition against Islamic extremism, radical secularism, and the neocolonial human-rights-free power grab of the People’s Republic of China.
8. Demand accountability regarding the consequences of the Biden Administration’s global DEI and LGBTQ agenda. The promotion of LGBTQ ideology has been interwoven into every foreign policy issue during the Biden Administration, as it also was during much of the Obama Administration. Even in President Trump’s first term, career bureaucrats in several foreign policy agencies used their positions to advocate for radical, gender-ideology and LGBTQ rights in many traditional societies around the world. Evidence suggests this has been ineffective in actually protecting LGBTQ people globally and deleterious to U.S. diplomacy and national security. Christian conservatives should demand accountability on this issue: How much has been spent? How effective, if at all, has this money been in actually protecting LGBTQ individuals in traditional societies? And to what extent have Russia, China and other U.S. adversaries used this advocacy to undermine our diplomatic position? In the end, Christian conservatives can and should argue that a traditional, human-rights framework that protects the rights of conscience of all people is the best framework for protecting vulnerable people, including those who are LGBTQ.
9. Replace global, anti-natalist policies with global, pro-natalist ones. It is long past time for the U.S. government to not only move on from the disastrous population control ideas it helped promote in the 1970s and 1980s, but to promote pro-family and pro-population growth policies in many parts of the world. Even secular actors, from Elon Musk to the “effective altruism” movement, have come to recognize that population decline, rather than population growth, is the most likely existential crisis for the 21st century. Demographers, such as Lyman Stone, have also demonstrated that population decline and economic stagnation can have more harmful environmental effects than population growth and economic dynamism. Conservative Christians should ally with these secular groups to push for a pro-population-growth mindset in U.S. foreign policy and help look for successful pro-natalist policies that can work both at home and abroad. Here again, there is some overlap in our priorities: Israel is one of the world’s truly outstanding demographic successes.
10. Take a proactive stance against global antisemitism. As Christian conservatives, our support for Israel and the Jewish people must not stop at the borders of the Jewish state. The rise of global antisemitism is a pressing issue for Christians, just as much as it is for Jews. First, the antisemitism in the Muslim world fosters anti-Christian sentiment. As a popular radical Islamist slogan succinctly puts it: “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” Second, left-wing antisemitism is a direct threat to Christianity, since much of the Left’s new Jew-hatred is aimed at a particularity in Judaism that secularists find offensive — and which Christians partially share. Finally, even Christian antisemitism is usually accompanied either by hatred of and restrictions on evangelicals or doctrinal ideas most Bible-believing Christians would find heretical. In short, Christian conservatives’ love for the Jewish people and support for religious freedom are butressed by several compelling interests in opposing global antisemitism.
Of course, this list is far from exhaustive. Christian conservatives will need to be aware of global events, while standing ready and able to defend our co-religionists and our global values and interests in any number of settings. However, these ten priorities would lead to a significant and positive transformation of U.S. foreign policy during the second Trump Administration.
Many Christian conservatives have gladly embraced the “America First” label — but “America First” doesn’t have to mean “Everyone Else Last.” We can strengthen America’s global position through promoting policies in keeping with our traditional emphases on religious freedom, support for Israel, faith-based humanitarian relief and development, and pro-family policy around the world. In so doing, we will also strengthen America at home and demonstrate the importance of the global “Faith, Family, and Freedom” agenda for years to come.