Religious Freedom Summit

State Dept. Hosts Largest Religious Freedom Summit in World History

The U.S. State Department launched on Tuesday its second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, a three-day summit being touted as the largest religious freedom event ever held.

Featuring remarks from survivors of some of the most recent religious-based massacres, around 1,000 global civil society and political leaders are expected to gather in the Harry S. Truman Building for a week filled with testimonies, relationship building and dialogue about strengthening religious freedom worldwide.

"Much effort has been put into making this a very special week," U.S. Ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback said during his introductory remarks.

"This is the largest human rights event ever hosted at the State Department and the largest religious freedom event ever done in the world. I hope you can sense and feel the importance of this moment in time. A global human rights movement centered on religious freedom is being launched from this meeting."

At a time in which 80 percent of the world lives in a place where religious freedom is restricted, the Trump administration has made it a priority to advocate for religious freedom abroad.

Although Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world today, religious-based attacks are impacting people of all faiths.

Survivors of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue shooting last October and the New Zealand mosque shootings in March addressed the hundreds gathered for the ministerial's opening session.

. . . Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were killed during a shooting last October, told the ministerial that last year's attack made some children and congregants too afraid to attend worship services.

"The perpetrator of the massacre of the Tree of Life not only stole 11 beautiful lives that he had no God-given right to do, but he [also] stole the faith of countless Jews," Myers stated. "Brick and mortar can be repaired but how do you repair, or in many cases restore, one's faith in God, especially when faith is not instantaneous but evolves over the life of an individual?"

. . . "Imagine this, if the late-evening news offers 20 minutes of the wonderfully amazing acts that good people perform and hide the depressing news somewhere within the broadcast, I think that the mood of every nation will improve significantly," Myers said. "So the challenge is what TV news station is brave enough to try that?" Myers also stressed that people need to "tone down" emotional language.

"I took a pledge two weeks after the massacre in my synagogue to not use the word hate, which I have only used once," he said. "It is a four-letter word in the English language and this is the case with all four-letter words that are obscenities, you don't use it publicly or even privately."