By Catherine Pepinster
Religions are facing huge challenges around the world, in some countries squeezed out by authoritarianism opposed to freedom of belief, according to President Joe Biden’s adviser on faith and belief. In others, a decline in belief has led to people turning to politics or even sport to find a sense of identity.
The result, Professor Stephen Schneck says, is that as religious affiliation declines in an increasingly polarised United States, “community is eroding, and American political identity is a reaction to that loss of community. Community engagement has withered.”
He also warned that elsewhere in the world that “the rise of authoritarianism squeezes out the space for religion. Religion is a challenge to authoritarianism, so it loses ground as authoritarianism rises.”
Professor Schneck, who chairs the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and has advised Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden on religion, was speaking on Tuesday at a breakfast gathering, The State of Our Politics, organised by the Theos think tank, at which he commented on the divisions in American society, as the nation prepares to vote in the presidential election on 5 November.
Asked by Dr Giles Fraser, who chaired the gathering, who would win — the Democrat candidate Kamala Harris or Republican candidate — Donald Trump, he said: “It’s a dead heat.”
And with the United States split, with 35 per cent of the population registered as voters for each party, plus others who regularly vote the same way, he estimated that the true split between Republicans and Democrats was 48-48, with 4 per cent of waverers who could determine the outcome.
The past months in the run-up to the election, he said, had seen “partisanship reach its peak”, and that polarised society was unsustainable. What would determine America’s future was “how will the next president reach out to those who did not vote for them”.
Both candidates, Professor Schneck said, had been trying to appeal to different religions, and different Christian denominations showed divisions like those in society as a whole. The Catholic vote was 48-48 as were the mainstream Protestant churches. The exception were evangelicals who tended to favour Trump, with “some quarters supporting him regardless of his flaws”, such as his record as a convicted felon and his views of women.
Professor Schneck, turning to religious freedom around the globe, warned that it was far more at risk than even 20 years ago, and the restrictions on religious freedom affected those with no religious beliefs and who belonged to a faith.
As well as the impact of authoritarianism on religious freedom, he also blamed globalisation for creating “a sense of dislocation and insecurity; it inclines some people to such religiosity that they become antagonistic towards those of faiths different to their own, while others become opposed to any religion”.
He also highlighted that the other main trend across the globe since the Hamas attack on Israel a year ago, the consequent onslaught by Israel on Gaza and more recently on Hezbollah in Lebanon, was a surge in antisemitism and hatred of Muslims.
One of the results, he said, had been confrontation on American campuses with some students trying to block speakers from all sides of the debate on the Middle East. Columbia University is one of several colleges that has suspended pro-Palestinian groups, saying that their rhetoric was threatening and intimidating. Chants such as “from the river to the sea” are being claimed by some as support for the freedom of Palestinians while others say that it calls for genocide of the Jews.
“Some students are trying to throttle free speech and some of the authorities are doing the same,” he said. “This battle is still under way and we don’t know how it is going to develop.”
Professor Schneck, who was previously director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America, was appointed to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2022, becoming its chairman in 2024. His term runs until May 2026, well after the presidential election, but he said it was “conceivable” that Trump could ask him to step aside if he were elected president.
Stephen Schneck serves on the governing boards of Catholic Climate Covenant, which advocates for environmental justice and care for creation, and of Catholic Mobilising Network, a Catholic organisation working to end the death penalty. He also used to be executive director of Franciscan Action Network, which promotes environmental, economic, racial, and social justice on behalf of the Franciscan communities of the United States. They follow the teachings of Francis of Assisi, who focused on care of creation, living with the poor, and the earliest forms of interfaith dialogue. St Francis, he says, “is the model of what Christians can be. In so many ways he is the ideal.”
