International Religious Freedom Should Be Priority for Next President | Opinion

As Americans prepare to go to the polls later this fall, persecuted religious minorities abroad are awaiting the results with bated breath. Why? Because in contrast with America’s longstanding tradition of standing up against faith-based atrocities and genocides, the Biden White House has been remarkably hostile to religious minorities worldwide, reserving special animus towards Christians. And things could get worse should Vice President Kamala Harris win in November.
I know this problem firsthand. Under the Trump administration, I led a counter-genocide program in Iraq to help Christian and Yazidi victims recover from ISIS’ campaign of extermination. We provided these traumatized religious minorities with humanitarian aid, psycho-social help, and medical assistance, while pushing back against Iranian influence. President Donald Trump met with their leaders, sometimes without any publicity, to encourage them to remain in their ancient homeland and assure them that America stood with them.
Unfortunately, the program was discontinued soon after Trump left the White House and funds intended to help the return of these exiled communities were terminated. With American protection gone, Iraqi President Abdul Latif Rashid brazenly ordered the removal of the country’s top Chaldean Christian cleric, Patriarch Louis Sako, as civic head of the church, forcing the 76-year-old prelate into a nine-month exile.
Behind the decision was an Iranian-backed militia leader—sanctioned by the Trump administration in 2019 for murder, rape, and the looting of Christian towns—scheming to seize Church properties. Five years later, Iraq’s persecuted minorities are no longer an administration priority and no further progress has been made on their return home.
The Biden administration’s anti-Christian animus has hit Africa especially hard.
The day Biden-Harris took office, USAID cancelled a $10 million grant to Nigerian human rights leaders to document mass atrocities committed by Islamic terrorists that have left hundreds of churches demolished, thousands of Christians—including nuns and priests—dead, and millions uprooted. The grant cost less than 0.02 percent of the total annual U.S foreign aid budget. The administration’s decision was not about cutting costs.
The White House also removed Nigeria from the U.S. government’s list of worst violators of religious freedom, in spite of pleas from human rights advocates and the government’s own bipartisan Commission on International Religious Freedom to reverse course. The result? Last year saw the highest number of killings on record, with more than 8,000 Christians killed at the hands of jihadists, and enflamed the possibility of a religious war in a country of more than 200 million people.
According to Bishop Matthew Kukah of Sokoto province, a hub of terrorist attacks on Christians, “We have seen no visible show of interest from the American government, other than blaming the violence on climate change.” He is referring to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Nigeria last January, where he laid out his first item of business as “driving climate action,” while saying nothing about the atrocities.
Now, Church leaders in Africa are facing the prospect of a future Harris administration further undermining their leadership. As a U.S. senator, Harris called for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of taxpayer money to pay for abortions at home, and as president she would likely seek to repeal the Helms Amendment, which restricts taxpayer funding for abortions abroad.
Such a move would hit Africa hard. Its churches are the continent’s primary provider of critical health, education, and other social services. Under a Harris administration’s policies, they would be disqualified from U.S. foreign aid grants, denying millions of Africans life-saving assistance.
This is a shame. Africa’s extensive church network is an asset to the United States, but Biden and Harris instead see them as obstacles to the administration’s progressive agenda. As a Kenyan Baptist-based NGO told me: “We used to be invited to U.S. Embassy events. The day President Biden took office I got a call from the Embassy telling me: ‘Your website is very Christ-centered.’ We have not been invited to the Embassy since.”
This animus toward Christians could come back to bite Vice President Harris in November, however. More than 200,000 Chaldean Catholics live in the Detroit, Michigan, metro area alone. And over 700,000 Americans of Nigerian descent, many residing in Georgia and Pennsylvania, will also vote this November. The administration’s decision to abandon their religious communities will weigh heavily on their minds.
Max Primorac is Senior Research Fellow at The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation. He was the U.S. Vice-President’s envoy for counter-genocide programs in Iraq in 2018 and 2019.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.