Contemporary international relations scholarship has generally disregarded the role of religion in global politics. The two dominant IR paradigms—neorealism and neoliberalism—tend to neglect religion altogether, assuming that religious beliefs and institutions are an impediment to world order. To a significant degree, the skepticism about religion is rooted in the prevailing Western assumption that science and reason will make religion unnecessary in modern life. However, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the world has not become more secular. Rather, religion has become more prominent in society, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As a result, the leading secular IR paradigms have failed to take into account the religious dimension in international affairs.

Thankfully, a growing number of scholars have begun to address this conceptual and empirical shortcoming. One of the first noteworthy books to call attention to the significant role of religion in global politics was Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson's Religion—the Missing Element of Statecraft (1995). Since then, numerous other studies have been published on the role of the sacred in global politics. Freeing God's Children by Allen Hertzke is a welcome addition to this emerging literature.

In this book, Hertzke explores the growing role of religious actors in the making of U.S. foreign policy, focusing on neglected human rights issues. Since human rights groups have historically focused on governmental abuses, they have given little priority to offenses driven by religious fundamentalism or commercial interests. As a result, such abuses as religious persecution or sex trafficking have not been major concerns of either the foreign policy establishment or the international human rights movement. In the past decade, however, American religious groups, inspired by transcendent ideals, have begun to challenge the prevalent conception of human rights advocacy. As Hertzke demonstrates compellingly, religiously motivated actors—working with political leaders, publicists, and nonreligious groups—have helped to develop a more comprehensive human rights agenda, thereby “filling a void in human rights advocacy” (p. 5). More particularly, the rise of evangelical global activism has provided “one of the few significant counterweights to the domination of foreign policy by corporate interests or strategic calculation” (p. 341).

Throughout much of the twentieth century, fundamentalist and evangelical believers, influenced by pietism and the belief that religious service was more important than public affairs, gave little attention to social and political action. This began to change as the Christian Right began to address domestic social issues in the 1970s and as evangelicals began to focus on global human rights in the 1990s. Ironically, the religious activism reinforced a conservative agenda on domestic issues but a progressive agenda on global concerns. Indeed, because of the rising impact of religious actors on global humanitarian issues, Hertzke claims, evangelicals have begun to serve as the foreign policy conscience of conservatism.

The author attributes the growing influence of the human rights faith-based coalition in the United States to several factors. First, because of a global religious revival, religion is more important in the world. While this renewal has been most dramatic in the Third World, religion has also become more salient in the United States, with evangelicals establishing some of the largest, best-organized social networks in the country. Second, since Christianity has been declining in Europe while rising in Asia and Africa, the shift of the Christian population from the North to the South has resulted in a religious “demographic revolution.” Whereas 80% of the Christian population lived in Europe or North America in 1900, by 2000 only 40% were in the North. Third, a growing number of believers have begun to face intense religious persecution. According to Hertzke, more than 600 million believers face nontrivial restrictions on their religious freedom. Finally, the growing intellectual awareness that Christianity has been conducive to human rights, peacekeeping, and democracy has resulted in an intellectual environment that is more hospitable to religion.

Of course, egregious injustices do not assure political reform. If policy change is to occur and advocacy to succeed, grassroots support must be mobilized and political leaders must provide tactical guidance. In earlier books, Hertzke analyzed the role of religious lobbies in Washington and the general role of religion in American politics. Here, he focuses on how religious groups have helped to promote international human rights and how concerned citizens have sought to influence U.S. foreign policy in confronting religious persecution and human trafficking. He provides a persuasive account of how human rights activists (e.g., Michael Horowitz and Nina Shea), heads of religious organizations (e.g., James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Charles Colson of Prison Fellowship, and Franklin Graham of Samaritan's Purse), congressional leaders (e.g., Representatives Frank Wolf, Chris Smith, and Tony Hall and Senators Joseph Liebermann, Sam Brownback, and Don Nickles), and columnists, such as Abe Rosenthal and Eric Reeves, worked together to bring about major reforms in human rights legislation. The most important achievement was the passage in 1998 of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), a law that established an Office of International Religious Freedom at the Department of State and called for an annual report on the status of religious freedom worldwide. With the passage of this important law, the interfaith coalition (Jewish, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical) created a faith-based organizational “scaffolding” that greatly facilitated passage of other human rights reforms, including the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (2000) and the Sudan Peace Act (2002).

A major strength of this book is that it illuminates how religiously inspired action can contribute to public policy reform. In particular, it shows how religious actors—influenced by the conviction that all persons are entitled to dignity because they are “God's children”—can strengthen global human rights. Second, the book provides an account of the nature and growing political influence of evangelical groups concerned with promoting liberation from human bondage. Finally, the study provides a compelling and often riveting story of how a faith-based movement has helped to establish a new human rights foreign policy architecture.