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Interviews from a multicultural perspective that question the way we understand America
If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.
Welcome to Back in America, the podcast. What if I told you that two-thirds of the world population can't freely practice their religion? Today on Back in America, I am speaking with Knox Thames, an international human rights lawyer, advocate, author with over 20 years of U.S. government experience across Obama, Bush, and Trump administrations. He served as the special advisor for religious minorities in the Near East and South Central Asia and held key roles at the State Department and Foreign Policy Commissions. Knox is a senior fellow at Burdine University and a senior visiting expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace. In his book, Ending Persecution, Charting the Path to Global Religious Freedom, Knox examines the global crisis of religious
persecution. Known for his non-partisan approach, he continues to advocate for strategies that protect minorities and promote universal rights. Welcome to Back in America, Knox. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. All right. So I know that you are studying religion globally. However, for Back in America, I would like to focus on what's happening in this country, in the U.S. And let me ask you, in a country like the U.S. where freedom of religion is constitutionally granted, why are we even talking about ensuring freedom for minorities?
I think that the challenge of the 21st century is going to be the challenge of diversity. For the first time in history, literally everybody is everywhere. People that you and I would have learned about in an encyclopedia or our kids are learning about on Wikipedia are now our neighbors, our classmates. We're rubbing shoulders in the office, at the grocery store. And this has a great potential for new synergies and new energies. And I think the United States, because we are a country of such great diversity, we've seen the benefits of that. We've seen how new ideas, new approaches to life and new cultures, new faiths can enrich our society, can empower new thinking, drive new ideas. But at the same time, we know, just as a student of
history, living with people different from ourselves is difficult. It's not always a positive story. So much of my work has been focused on promoting human rights and religious freedom globally. We see that friction where groups come up and are forced to live together or through migration, come into community. How do they resolve those differences? How do they learn to live together in peace? The challenge of pluralism is really about agreeing to disagree on ultimate questions by doing so agreeably, then standing arm in arm with the fundamental belief that everyone has the right to pursue truth as their conscience lays. We might disagree on what that looks like, but we agree that every person has the right to pursue that and we will stand in defense of that right.
We've got positive examples of that here domestically. We also have our challenges. This is not unique to the United States, it's something every country is grappling with in one way or another. It makes me think of a lot of things, especially coming from France, which make a clear distinction between the government and religion, right? Since the revolution, the two have been clearly split. However, let me come back to the US. Why do you think that religion has been protected by the First Amendment? Historically, you explained that. I think it's because so many of the founding fathers were of European ancestry and they had seen the wars of religion. They had remembered the Thirty Years War, the Hundred Years War that had
issues of faith and ethnicity and politics all intertwined. The great sort of leap forward for Europe was when confession and citizenship were somewhat delinked. At the conclusion of the Thirty Years War, the grand bargain that was established was that each prince would be a Catholic prince or Protestant prince, but would they allow immigration of the other faith to kingdoms that align with them or provide them at least a modicum of space within their principality? The founders knew that. They had seen that and so many of the first settlers were religious minorities in Europe and fleeing persecution, trying to find space to practice those beliefs founded here. It was baked into the worldview of the founding fathers that in this great experiment, this grand experiment
of self-governance, that they wanted to create, they appreciated the value and the importance of religion, Christian perspective, and they wanted to create space for it. They wanted to protect it from kings and rulers from trying to manipulate it to support their rule. At the same time, they wanted to insulate rulers from religious leaders trying to manipulate the secular authorities to benefit their faith. So it began this long conversation. Yesterday here in the United States, we just marked Religious Freedom Day. It's the day when the state of Virginia, where I live, passed the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was written by Thomas Jefferson and passed in 1786. It starts with this wonderful sentence that, God hath created the mind free. It's the
first annunciation in our country of really religious freedom for everybody. It has this very clever line that you would almost expect to see on social media today, but it says that a person's view on faith shouldn't impact their citizenship any more than their view on geometry. And it was coming out of Thomas Jefferson's engagement with Baptists here in Virginia, Baptists who refused to pay the required tax to the Anglican Church. And so because they were proud protestants protesting the established Church of England faith in the colonial period, Baptist pastors were constantly being arrested for illegally preaching for their tent services. And they found in Thomas Jefferson, the great deist, an ally. And the statute passed after independence, but it was from that those
challenges here in the Commonwealth of Virginia that formed the basis of the argument that there's no role for government in the affairs of the everlasting any more than there's a role for clergy in dictating laws and policies. Now, this idea of a wall of separation between church and state, which is another Jeffersonian idea when Baptists in Connecticut were facing discrimination because of that congregational church that had been established. They wrote him asking for assistance, understanding that the First Amendment prevented him from intervening in a state affair, but recognizing his commitment to helping religious minorities in the United States. And that's when he talked about there's this wall, and it's not a wall that's to segregate. It's the
wall to protect both from each other and allow each to flourish. So this goes back to the very beginning. When I hear you, I can't keep thinking about In God We Trust, which we even see on the dollar bill. And so maybe you can comment on that. And then the fact that we know that the Catholic were not so much welcome in the US. So what do you make of that? So In God We Trust is a 20th century addition, I believe in the 1950s, in the height of the Cold War, again, trying to differentiate the United States from the atheistic Soviets. But your foundational question about what about other faiths that were more Protestant? And I think the story of the United States is not a perfect story. Our foundational documents that established the highest ideals also included the original
sin of slavery. And so we had that two steps forward, two steps back dynamic in our foundational documents. And I think the story of the United States is one of continually trying to live up to these high ideals that the founders established and that they themselves personally didn't even live up to. But that's the beauty of these documents in that by not grounding citizenship and in blood or soil, but then ideals, do you agree in that inherent liberties of all people and their equality and their God given right to religious freedom and equal citizenship, then you can be a part of this grand experiment in self-government. So yeah, we had these that, you know, the Jewish community, another example that was disenfranchised for many years past the Catholics, our challenges
with new faiths coming in the 20th and 21st century. Again, going back to my first point of this living together in a multicultural society is hard, but I think some of the comparative advantages that the United States has over other countries is that because we're founded on values, we have the foundational pieces in place to navigate these challenges in ways that countries in Europe or the Middle East that are more grounded in a certain ethno nationality are struggling with. Yeah, and beg that for me. Then a lot of time in my career looking at religious freedom issues and Europe and Eurasia, and when you have ethnicity, faith in the popular imagination tied to nationality and citizenship
with migration occurring, just a reality for every country, when you have new populations coming in, people who look different, believe different, pray different, and yet also gaining the benefits of citizenship and the rights of citizenship, how are they integrated into society? Can they ever be like a person of Turkish heritage ever be German? That's not a question we deal with here. Can someone of South Asian descent ever be truly British or English? These are quasi-ethnic terms, your own, your home country's France dealing with Algerian or Moroccan and then hyphenated French citizens because of this sort of national identity that is much stronger in a way that here we get because we are a place that attracts people, migrate here,
immigrate here, and then join this credible patchwork quilt of cultures coming together towards these American ideals to build our country better. We've been able to absorb them in a way that these European nations struggle with, and you get to places like the Middle East where it's even those ideas of to be Saudi is to be a Sunni Arab. Despite millions of people living there for the entire lives here of South Asian heritage, there's no opportunity for them to become a citizen, so it even gets more challenging other parts of the world, and a lot of the points in my book are identifying ways the United States can humbly share our lessons learned through our bumpy history of doing some things well and falling short at other times yet trying to course-correct
with countries that are dealing with these challenges now and advocating for them to. Do you think that's even possible, right? Because as you said, the fundamental things that will make you an American is absolutely different from what makes you a German and Italian, especially French.
The history is different, everything is different. How did you work that around? Well, this is where when I was working in my various diplomatic roles, we were never trying to export the American approach as good as it's been for us. Our First Amendment has provided incredible religious freedoms, freedoms of speech, but as you say, our history is different. Our history is really unique, but we would try to share the lessons learned. When you discriminate against a segment of your society based on their heritage or skin color, it creates a whole host of ills that are much more difficult to solve if you allow it to extend for generations. We can share that when we've gotten this right, how our country has flourished and done better.
It's not for us to dictate or to even comment on how France, Germany, Italy deal with these things because of the vastly different histories, but at the same time, as a student of history, all of these European nations are at one time were separate kingdoms that were amalgamated together through different conquests. There is a story of taking different, at least regions together that had distinct identities and creating a national whole. Germany was a confederation. Italy was a confederation of different principalities with different regional perspectives, and yet they've come together. Belgium got two different distinct languages coming together, and Belgium's tricky because they've had trouble forming a government because of those differences, yet there is a
Belgian identity despite speaking Dutch or French. And so the exact way a country will do that is hard to talk about in the abstract, but there are these fundamental values that we share with our European cousins that you find in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other documents that are a firm foundation from which to have those conversations about how to manage this.
In your book, you talk about the risk of autocracy for minorities. How do you think the new Trump government might cause a risk for minorities? We've seen in the past how Trump's travel ban on Muslims, for example, did impact some minorities. We heard him talk about wanting to send a lot of immigrants back to their home countries. What do you make of that?
My expertise is global, not so much domestic. I don't have a lot of expertise on these questions other than just being American. But I think there were some interesting observations in how the vote broke down that Trump did surprisingly well with African-American men and Hispanic men, Asians. And so what I think the Democratic Party was assuming ethnic minorities would gravitate towards them didn't really happen because so many of these communities are recent arrivals, or care about the economy and remember the first presidency as being a time of great economic activity. And so the how does this play out? Once he comes into office, time will tell. I think that while the Muslim ban I had severe concerns about, I did work in the state department
in a civil service position during the Trump administration. And a counter narrative to that problematic policy was a very good policies we were able to put into place focusing on international religious freedom, protecting religious freedom of people of all faiths and none, convening two summits at the State Department, bringing together 100 governments, survivors of persecution from different Christian denominations, but also Muslims, Yazidis, Baha'is, even an atheist from Bangladesh who had suffered an attack. So I think many of us are, I mean, all Americans, will be paying a lot of attention to where Mr. Trump goes in the first 100 days. In my space, looking more globally, I think Marco Rubio's appointment was welcomed as someone who certainly
knows these issues was in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for years and has been a strong voice for religious freedom and the persecuted. So much so that China has issued a travel ban on him for his criticism of the persecution of Uighurs there.
So yeah, time will tell. It'll be interesting if we talk again in a year. I want to come back to the values of the US. And in your book, you highlight how government frequently use waivers and symbolic acts to address persecution without real consequences, even while claiming more leadership. So if you had unlimited power for one year, how would you design a global accountability system that nations couldn't evade? Yeah, that would be quite an experience to have that much power. I talk about how when I was in a diplomatic role, I was incredibly proud to represent the United States on these values issues. The US really contributes more manpower and resources toward advancing human rights and
religious freedom than any other country in the world by a long stretch. And that's something I think all Americans should be proud of, that we carry our values into our diplomacy in a way that no other nation really does. At the same time, there's this pandemic of persecution that's impacting every faith community somewhere. We see the decline of democracy, the march of autocracy. So being really good at this isn't good enough. And so we need to really reevaluate how much we value these values. And I argue in the book that if we say human rights matters, then it really needs to matter in how we conduct our foreign policy. So if I was king for a day or for a year, I would ensure the tighter interweaving of human rights, religious freedom, our values issues into
our trade policy, our military policy, our energy policy, and look and work to leverage our power and influence in ways that advances the respect for fundamental freedoms. It's a bipartisan tradition to talk a good game about human rights and religious freedom, and then in many cases, pull your punches when it really comes down to the nitty gritty. China, now there's a bipartisan consensus that the CCP and Xi Jinping is a global competitor that's persecuting Uighurs, Buddhists, Christians, and we need to respond. And I think that's right. But I think there's been a lack, there's a bipartisan consensus that the way to counter China is to cozy up with Narendra Modi in India. And I think that's a mistake by ignoring the decline in human rights
and religious freedoms in that country. If we should leverage our influence with our partner, India, our fellow democracy, to challenge them to live up to their founding ideals that are very similar to ours, that people of all faith and non should be able to feel, practice their beliefs without fear of discrimination or violence, yet we see the Modi government drifting in a way towards Hindu nationalism that victimizes Muslims and Christians. And we need to use our influence, our self-power, and if we have to, our sanctions abilities to entice India to come the other way. And we don't do that to dictate or to force our values on the world, but just to say, this is who we are, this is what we believe. And if you want to really draw close to us economically
under our security umbrella, our share, our energy resources, we want to do that with countries that respect our values, that are like us. I think that's a fundamental part of human nature. You want your friends with people who believe and conduct themselves in a way that's similar to how you think and believe. Same is true with global affairs. And so we should do a better job of leveraging all of these gifts that we've been given with our immense economy, our security umbrella to encourage countries to do a better job on human rights and religious freedom. And right now, I think we're leaving a lot of influence on the table and letting countries like India and others take a lot from us, but not get much back in return.
Do you think that Trump will continue to have this international role
in exercising influence abroad? If we listen to what he said, he really wants to focus more internally and be less active externally. He's very proud of the fact that no wars were started during his first tenure. And I think there is a fatigue amongst the American public, which is why his idea of America first was attractive to lots of Americans, just because there's a war-weariness and the burdens of leadership weigh heavy. But at the same time, global events have a way of forcing themselves onto a president's agenda in ways that were unplanned or even undesired. And we can't fully disengage from the world. We need places to at least sell our products. We have security considerations against terrorist groups like ISIS that I think will be important to him.
So I don't think it will be a complete disengagement, but I think it will be selective in where he disengages, where he re-engages, or where he creates new partnerships. When I was at the State Department, I was tasked with creating during the Trump administration something called the International Religious Freedom Alliance, a network of 40 countries committed to advancing religious freedom for everybody. And while I was building this, there was also an effort from the White House at the time to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol, question NATO. So there was going in two different directions at the same time. And I think that'll be, I expect that to be the same way in the second term. Thank you. You just mentioned ISIS. How much
do you think the U.S. might be responsible for the actual creation of ISIS and Muslim extremism? I'm thinking of the war, obviously, in the Gulf and then Afghanistan.
Certainly, our intervention in Iraq, more so than Afghanistan, created a lot of problems, not in ISIS and fueling terrorist narratives as only one of them. But at the same time, it's easy to say it was all America's fault that ISIS exists or that there's Islamic extremism. And there are a lot of other factors, a lot of history that also removes any agency on the part of the individuals or the countries from where they're coming from. I think we did a lot of things wrong in Iraq, but I have friends who are Kurdish and they can't stop thanking America for saving their community and giving them a level of autonomy that they've never experienced in their history. Our involvement is complicated. The narrative is
not a straight line. Did we create ISIS? I would say no. Did our bad decisions feed a narrative that motivated people to undertake acts of terrorism? I think you can make that argument. But we weren't the only actor there. To lay all that on us, I think, is incorrect.
That's a good transition to the fact that in your book, you advocate education and tolerance as a means to combat extremism. Tell us more about that. I think so much of my work was responding after a human rights violation occurred, after an attack had happened, after someone had been beaten up or even murdered. And we were responding to the symptoms of a bigger problem. And so this question of how do we get upstream of the mentality that lead people to undertake these acts of violence, I think this is where education is critically important and underappreciated and underfunded. Again, the United States spent a lot of money on reading, writing, and arithmetic. And that's important. And it's
probably not enough to ensure that children around the world have a basic education. But again, with this reality that everybody is everywhere, I think we need to add a fourth pillar of teaching tolerance, of giving children the tools to learn to live together in this diverse world that they're going to be inhabiting in the 21st century. Now, what does that look like? That's going to be a country by country programming decision, working with partners on the ground. But right now, really no nation spends any money on this. While our adversaries, like ISIS, different extremist parties, they focus as much as we don't, they focus as much on education to inculcate kids with their worldview. That's often narrow and hateful. I've often said that when an
extremist group comes into government in some sort of coalition government, the top priority is to control the Ministry of Interior. That's where the guns are. But if they can't get that, time and time again, I've seen them then pivot to the Ministry of Education and work to change the curricula, the textbooks, what teachers can teach. Because if you think about it, if you can change the outlook of a society by just 5%, in a lifetime, that country is in a very different place. And so they're playing a long game in a way that the United States and the West just isn't on the battlefield of education. And we should view it as such and start to put the resources forward to empower those voices on the ground that want to give kids the ability to live peacefully with
the neighbors who they can believe differently, and also to help them navigate this world of misinformation and disinformation to sort through what's right. Now, I know some people will say we should do that in the United States, too. I think you're probably right, beyond my expertise, but how are we preparing kids to live in a 21st century that's going to be defined by diversity and pluralism really needs to come up the priority list in a way that it just hasn't, that no administration has picked up. I think that's an opportunity where the Trump administration could really lead. That's where the Ministry of Education is defounded. We see that fake news is all over the place. We see an oligarchy taking place in the government with Musk, and we see how he's
controlled the social media. We see that book ban is a reality in the US. So what you're telling me is pretty scary in the light of what we're living in. In the state I'm in, we don't have a lot of those problems. So I've read about it in other states, as far as the book bans and education. I think the challenge is it's a local issue, the way it's organized here. And Republicans have always questioned the need to have a Department of Education. I think that's what's different about Mr. Trump. He's gone from just having a talking point to actually doing stuff that he talks about. So we'll see what that means for the Department of Education. That's really interesting, right? From the outside, to understand that the US,
in the US, the federal government has limited power when it comes to things like education. Can you, for the purpose of this podcast, can you tell us more about this diverse role in the way the government functions? Just in broad strokes, our federal system empowers state governments to play a large role in how laws are written, how education policies are cited, how health policies are cited, how health insurance issues are dealt with. And there's always been this give and take. And this goes back to
the creation of our Constitution with the Federalist paper with Alexander Hamilton and James Madison talking about this tension between a strong individual state versus a federal government. And you see that issue never really resolved. And it's been a through line of our history that the state federal tension has always existed and it ebbs and flows. But it does give states an autonomy that is unusual in a lot of other countries around the world. I think there are parallels with how Germany is organized or India. Switzerland, maybe. Switzerland, yeah. The Cantons, yeah. How can Americans engage at their community level? Because we see from what you say that this is really where things are important and taking place. So how can they
engage at their community level to support religious minorities? I think just by being aware of their neighbors, both physically next door, but also in their community. I had a surprising experience at a Walmart last year where I was in the checkout line and the woman checking me out, because of her dress and her features and her name, I thought I was suspected she was from China and was from the Uighur Muslim community. So I just asked her, I said, are you Uighur? And she was surprised and said, yes, I am. And then I just asked, how's your family? I know the government's really punishing them for being Uighur. And she was so surprised and pleasantly surprised that this stranger knew enough to ask. It seemed to be like a cool cup of water on a hot day to her.
And that is just like the bare minimum of just asking your neighbors who are from different communities, do they have a story of fleeing some type of oppression? They might. Do they have family members in harm's way? And just being curious. My Jewish friends after the Hamas attack were traumatized asking how they were doing. My Arab friends after the response and what's happening in Gaza had been traumatized asking how they're doing. Just showing that humanity, shared humanity that we were paying attention and we care. And then that can lead, I think, to other conversations and other ways to engage through acts of public service. But I think too often we're so atomized now and focused on our phones. Many of us are missing these opportunities just to have positive
interactions with strangers and they got some fortune. Let me ask you about yourself. Are you a religious person? Are you believing in a supreme entity, God? And if so, how does that shape your war? Yeah, I'm a Christian and I do my best to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and apply them to my life very imperfectly. One of the things that I think has really given my work direction has been a consistent narrative throughout the Bible of God's call for justice. This sigh over my shoulder is Micah 6-8 paraphrase that what does God require of you? Will to seek justice, love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. That carries forward into the New Testament with Jesus when he announced his ministry at the synagogue. He talked about he's here to
break the chains of oppression, give sight to the blind and declare the year of the Lord's favor. And then in his teachings, I've always found meaning in the parable of the Good Samaritan and Luke chapter 10 where this lawyer is trying to stump Jesus with these gotcha questions. And he asked, what does it take to inherit eternal life? And Jesus turns the question back on the lawyer and says, what does the law require? The lawyer knew Deuteronomy and Leviticus and says the law requires to love your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says, do this and you will live. And then the lawyer, I think feeling,
I don't know, wanting to try to come back with a sharper question says, who's my neighbor? And so it's in that context that Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. And most people know the story even if they don't go to church, but there was a traveler who was beset upon by robbers left for dead. Two people from his religious community passed by on the other side, refused to help him. And the hero of the story was a Samaritan. Now for first century listeners in Palestine, having the Samaritan be the hero was a huge twist because Samaritans by the Jewish community were viewed as ethnically and religiously different. And there was incredible animosity between the two groups. Jews would walk around Samaria instead of taking a more
direct path through it because they didn't want to have anything to do with Samaritans. So Jesus picking a Samaritan in the story as the hero was shocking. And the example was of him giving up his time, his money and his resources to care for this stranger from a different community and making sure they were safe and taken care of. And then he concludes the parable by saying, go and do likewise. And I think as I've since leaving government four years ago, I've actually recovered freedom of speech myself. And so I've been able to write some for the American Christian community challenging us. But what does it mean to go and do likewise in the context of advocating for the persecuted, advocating for people who are different than us?
This story, this parable of what does it mean to love your neighbor of reaching across ethnic and religious differences and reaching across hatreds and animosity to help someone in need is a powerful example that we're called to do. And so while when I was a civil servant, the focus was the constitution, I was privileged to do work for the government that did align with my values. Now that I'm out of government, can they talk about that more? I think it's an important thing that all Americans, even if you're not a Christian, can appreciate this powerful way powerful moral lesson of helping strangers who are in harm's way.
Do you think that Americans are more religious than other nations? We're certainly more religious than our European friends. Although there's been interesting survey work showing pretty dramatic declines in church attendance and the rise of this group, they're calling the nuns, N-O-N-E-S, folks that just aren't anything. They're not identifying with a particular faith. They might be spiritual, they have an agnostic thought of there is a god, but they don't explore that through any kind of organized religion. And so I think even with that, though, we are for an industrialized country, one of the most religious in the world. But the Pew Research Center has done some really great survey work to find that roughly 84% of
the global community believes in God or higher power or something that gives direction and meaning to individual lives. So the world is incredibly religious. I think Europe is an exception to that trend. And the United States is going either way. And we'll see how that plays out over the course of time. But a lot of religious leaders are concerned about the declining religiosity, the declining conversant knowledge of the faith. I remember when I first came to the States, and that was when I was a student, I was turned to discover the megachar.
Or this big shows that the money that was floating around and all that. What can you tell me about that?
I attend a church that I don't know if it's a mega church, but high value in a
performing arts approach to worship and trying to be engaging. I think it in a way,
goes back to it's a thread throughout our history of pastors being entrepreneurs in a certain sense. That because our religious landscape is so decentralized and diverse, there was this competition for members and hearings and participants in a local church. And that's, I think, led to a real help maintain our religious vitality in a way that we haven't seen in other advanced countries. But then it does lead to at least some would say excesses of say excesses of spending millions of dollars on a high tech sanctuary and all kinds of lights and sound system and a much smaller portion on helping the poor, the marginalized. And I think that's a larger debate in American Protestant Christianity about the balance between
recruitment, getting people into the church and ministry, helping people in your community. Okay. Is there anything that I did not cover in my question that is important to you and you would like to stress before we end this interview? I think I would just reiterate a theme of my book is that there's an important role for the United States to play in advocating for human rights and religious freedom around the world. We're not perfect. And I know some people have argued that who are we to talk about these values when we're not respecting them fully at home? And I would be the first person to say we need to do everything we can to make sure everybody in our country enjoys the rights of citizenship, have their human rights protected, their civil
rights protected. But I also know that if we wait to be perfect, we're never going to have an opportunity to speak to these challenges in other countries around the world. And I've seen time and time again over my 20 years of diplomatic service that when the United States shows up to talk about human rights, things happen that wouldn't happen otherwise. And when we're absent, suffering increases in ways that it didn't have to. And while this administration, I think is, you talked about wanting to pull back a bit, I've seen time and time again that the things that push people to flee different types of persecution, religious persecution, political persecution, we ignore them at our peril. And they will eventually find their way to our shores. And so we can be, if anything,
preventative by using all the tools of statecraft and our influence to advocate for these human rights, for religious freedom in countries far away from us so that people can live in peace and security at home. And if migration is a top concern, then human rights in other places should be a top concern. And I hope it will be because to pull back is maybe be politically satisfying momentarily, but it's just going to allow other cancers to fester, other actors like China and Russia to project their regressive view of governance and human rights. And the American voice is needed. I know there's many who are tired of carrying the mantle of leadership, but we've been blessed with so many resources and such ability to be a force for good in the world. If we can carry that forward,
if we can find that strength and the courage to keep doing it, we can help millions and millions of people have a better life that is ultimately in our long-term national interests from a security perspective and also is a great way to reflect our values. Thank you. What is America to you? America is a wonderful place that I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to call home, especially in the 21st century. Our story is one of always attempting to meet these high ideals that our founders created, having never yet met them. But that commitment that I've seen throughout our history of Americans bravely standing up to say, these are what these rights mean to me and my family and my community and having the courage to be that advocate, I think is inspiring. And our
country continues to create that type of courage and provide the space for that kind of leadership. So I love the country. I think we're one of the greatest countries on earth, but we've got to continue to live up to these ideals. And if we are committed to that, then I think we can fulfill the promises of these foundational documents. Thank you. Knox Dames, you are the author of Ending Persecution, Charting the Path to Global Religious Freedom. I will put a link to your book in the episode notes, so if you're interested, you can find the book there. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Thank you for listening. If you like this episode, please share it with your friends and as always, leave us a review.