{"id":15,"date":"2010-06-16T08:53:09","date_gmt":"2010-06-16T08:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/the-new-religious-freedom-ambassador.html"},"modified":"2010-06-16T08:53:09","modified_gmt":"2010-06-16T08:53:09","slug":"the-new-religious-freedom-ambassador","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/the-new-religious-freedom-ambassador.html","title":{"rendered":"The New Religious Freedom Ambassador"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sujay.jpg\"For some months now, folks concerned<\/a> about the
\nfederal government’s engagement with freedom of religion abroad have
\nbeen agitating for the White House to get around to naming the
\nAmbassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. Yesterday, it
\nfinally did
\nso<\/a>, and I’m afraid they are not going to be happy.<\/p>\n

The nominee is Suzan Johnson Cook, a Baptist pastor from the Bronx known
\nfor stirring preaching and writing spiritual self-help books. (In a
\nshort profile<\/a>
\nin the New York Times <\/i>in 2002, Jane Gross described her as
\n“Billy Graham and Oprah rolled into one.”) Other than serving as a
\nchaplain to the New York Police Department, Dr. Sujay’s (as she styles
\nherself) only government experience was as a White House fellow attached
\nto the domestic policy council in the Clinton White House. Her
\ninternational experience is, as far as can be told, nil. (She is
\nidentified as president and founder of the Worldwide Wisdom Institute,
\nbut what that is other than a line on a resume is impossible to tell
\nfrom her website<\/a> or
\nanywhere else on the Web.)<\/p>\n

Her predecessors as Ambassador-at-Large were, in the Clinton
\nAdministration, Robert
\nA. Seiple<\/a>, who came to the job having served as president for 11
\nyears of World Vision, Inc., the huge Christian relief and development
\nagency. In the Bush administration, it was John V.Hanford<\/a>,
\nwho had spent 14 years working on international religious issues for
\nSen. Richard Lugar and who also played a critical role in drafting the
\n1998 International Religious Freedom Act, which established the
\nAmbassador-at-Large position.<\/p>\n

The position is a tricky one. Not only does the office holder have
\nprecious little line authority but also has to deal with both the State
\nDepartment’s need to balance human rights against other policy
\npriorities and the free-wheeling U.S. Commission on International
\nReligious Freedom, which has its own funding and staff, and no qualms
\nabout taking potshots at U.S. allies with less than stellar religious
\nfreedom records.<\/p>\n

In short, this is not a bully pulpit. Which is the one place where
\nJohnson Cook seems to know her way around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For some months now, folks concerned about the federal government’s engagement with freedom of religion abroad have been agitating for the White House to get around to naming the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. Yesterday, it finally did so, and I’m afraid they are not going to be happy. The nominee is Suzan Johnson Cook,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nThe New Religious Freedom Ambassador - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/the-new-religious-freedom-ambassador.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The New Religious Freedom Ambassador - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For some months now, folks concerned about the federal government’s engagement with freedom of religion abroad have been agitating for the White House to get around to naming the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. 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The nominee is Suzan Johnson Cook,…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/the-new-religious-freedom-ambassador.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-06-16T08:53:09+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.spiritual-politics.org\/Sujay.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The New Religious Freedom Ambassador - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/the-new-religious-freedom-ambassador.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The New Religious Freedom Ambassador - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"For some months now, folks concerned about the federal government’s engagement with freedom of religion abroad have been agitating for the White House to get around to naming the Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}