In historic Relief Society Building, former U.S. ambassador says religious freedom needs to be more than a ‘boutique foreign policy issue’
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On Wednesday, ahead of the 2024 International Religious Freedom Summit, a group of nearly 50 community members, educators, activists and business and faith leaders gathered in the Relief Society Building in downtown Salt Lake City for a luncheon focused on global religious liberty.
The event was a nonsectarian, civic convening organized by The International Religious Freedom Summit. Led by former U.S. Ambassador Sam Brownback and former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom Katrina Lantos Swett, the International Religious Freedom Summit brings people together across political, religious and geographical lines to discuss pressing human rights issues involving religious freedom.
Registration for the group’s 2024 gathering in Washington, D.C., opened Wednesday.
Brownback, a onetime U.S. senator from Kansas, focused his remarks on making a call to action.
“This is going to be the biggest human rights movement in the history of mankind if we’re successful in establishing religious freedom for everybody, everywhere, all the time,” Brownback said.
Religious freedom must go from “a boutique” subject to a major “foreign policy issue,” he said, because of how it impacts global safety, human rights and the economy. “If we’re unsuccessful, you’re going to see greater restrictions on religious freedom and you’re going to see it not be a freedom of religion anymore, but a freedom of worship,” he said. “You may be able to say whatever you want to when you go to church ... but outside that, you got to keep those values out of the public square.”
Brownback said a grassroots movement will help religious freedom prevail. “If we will, and if all the religions and various groups will stand together, there’s no way they can whip us.”
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Swett opened her remarks referencing Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who she said is facing health struggles and recently lost his wife Sister Patricia Holland.
Swett first met the Hollands as an undergraduate student at Yale University.
“I owe him an incalculable debt that can never be repaid,” Swett said. “So much of what I believe about human dignity and the conscience rights of other human beings I really learned from Jeff Holland.”
General Authority Seventy Elder Matthew S. Holland, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s son, was present and delivered brief remarks. He recalled Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s friendship with Swett and Swett’s father, former congressman Tom Lantos.
“You put them in a room together, it was like nuclear fusion,” he said to audience laughter, noting how they loved to engage in conversation.
Elder Matthew S. Holland noted his own academic studies at Hebrew University as a Raoul Wallenberg fellow were inspired by what he learned from the Lantos family. Katrina Lantos Swett previously told the Deseret News that Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, was responsible for saving thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, including Swett’s parents Tom Lantos and Annette Tilleman.
After Elder Holland’s remarks, Swett engaged in a dialogue with Seng Mai Aung, a recent graduate of BYU Law School, about her family’s experience as minority Christian living in Myanmar, a country with a record of religious persecution against minority Muslims and Christians.
In recent years, minority faith groups in Myanmar have “faced persecution, denial of citizenship and mass atrocities,” Swett said. “Over the last seven years, it’s really accelerated.”
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Mai Aung watched as her grandfather, a Baptist Christian, faced government scrutiny for his beliefs. Military personnel would “come inside our house (looking) for the communication devices that he tried to use to communicate with the missionaries in the U.S. from the school that he went to,” she said.
When Mai Aung went to school, her classmates noticed she didn’t participate in the Buddhist chants, and that made it clear to her classmates she was different. “They would say something like ‘you’re very naive, you’re from the mountains, right? Maybe that’s why the Western missionaries think that you’re a very easy target convert,’” she said.
Mai Aung also discussed the extreme persecution of minority Rohingya Muslims in her country, the evidence of which U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has suggested could constitute “genocide and crimes against humanity.”
While some people saw what was happening, Mai Aung said a lot of people “just believe in the military saying that we are the ones keeping the peace.”
The world has become more aware of what’s going on in her country in part due to people like Mai Aung’s family friend who she didn’t name. In 2019, she said, her friend traveled to the U.S. to speak to former President Donald J. Trump about how religious minorities are persecuted in Myanmar, but upon returning was arrested.
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Among his alleged crimes was a Zoom meeting he had where he asked young people to build “the nation in Christ,” she said. The government interpreted this as “inciting terrorism and resistance.” He was reportedly arrested and went to prison, according to The New York Times. In April 2023, he was sentenced for a total of six years in prison in April.
“We take so much for granted. And this story is not headline news,” Swett said. “This story is not widely known, but it absolutely underscores for us that societies that decide they are going to persecute a minority, it never stops with just that one group.”
Mai Aung concluded on a hopeful note, saying religious minorities are increasingly working with the majority in Myanmar.
And Swett emphasized the importance of protecting everyone’s human rights, paraphrasing the famous prayer from Pastor Martin Niemöller made in reference to the Holocaust, first they came for others, he said — communists, socialists, trade unionists and Jews — “Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
