Brownback discussed the current state of faith-focused liberty at the 2023 International Religious Freedom Summit.
Sam Brownback, ambassador at large for international religious freedom, speaks during a news conference at the State Department in Washington June 10, 2020. (photo: Andrew Harnik / AFP via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Former Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom Sam Brownback is a co-chairman of the International Religious Freedom Summit — and a driving force behind the annual event that aims to raise “public awareness and political strength for the international religious freedom movement.”
Brownback, a Catholic convert, sat down with the Register at the third annual summit Wednesday to discuss the state of religious freedom today, warning that threats to religious freedom were growing both at home and abroad.
The former governor of Kansas and founder of the National Committee for Religious Freedom is concerned about government targeting of Christians in places like Nicaragua and Nigeria. On the domestic front, he is alarmed by the continued church vandalism following the Dobbs decision and cases brought against Catholic hospitals and Christian pharmacists for following their beliefs on abortion and gender.
Brownback also discussed ways he thinks the faithful can get involved in response and how he draws inspiration from the strong Catholic tradition of standing up for victims of persecution.
What are some areas of particular concern for religious freedom that Catholics should be aware of?
Nicaragua is one that a lot of people don’t think about, but the Ortegas are taking priests and having gangs beat up on them, and my concern is that it’s going to spread to other authoritarians in Latin America.
Nigeria is one of the deadliest places to be a Christian on the Earth.
There’s a great place called Nagorno Karabakh. It’s a Christian enclave in the Muslim country of Azerbaijan. It’s about 120,000 people, and they’re getting strangled right now — the road into it. They’re letting a few supplies through, but not a lot. They’re really trying to force the inhabitants out, not kill them, but just force them to leave. Armenia, which they were part of, Armenia is the first country to openly declare itself Christian in the history of Christendom. So it’s tied into that Armenian situation.
Can’t forget China because the Chinese Communist Party is the big enabler of human-rights abuses around the world, and it’s the biggest user of technology to oppress people of faith. And that’s a really concerning thing to me because that’s the future: It’s not going to be as many people in prison, but it’s going to be a lot more people oppressed; and it’ll be the use of the technology doing it. They’re prototyping it and exporting it now.
Posted by 