Congressional Report Slams State Department for Funding Atheism Abroad

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The Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs has issued a damning report revealing the U.S. State Department’s promotion of atheism abroad in the name of “religious freedom.”

At the culmination of a two-year congressional investigation into the State Department’s funding of “ideologically charged foreign aid projects overseas,” Chairman Michael T. McCaul wrote in a summary report Wednesday that the current administration has failed to be an effective steward of the cause of religious freedom abroad, preferring instead to support atheism.

McCaul and his team obtained “information the Department of State tried to keep hidden,” he notes, showing that funding for religious freedom initiatives has been “diverted from religious minorities around the globe to support agnostics’ and atheists’ right to disbelieve.”

This choice has involved snubbing “the truly imperiled faithful” to promote the worldview of nonbelievers.

In his report, McCaul cites the example of a 2021 “notice of funding opportunity” for $500,000 issued by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. The notice specifically solicited proposals for programs that would “promote and defend religious freedom inclusive of atheist, humanist, non-practicing and non-affiliated individuals.”

It also indicated to participating NGOs that the proposed (taxpayer-funded) programs should increase the capacity of atheists and humanists to “form” and “strengthen” their “networks” in South Asia.

According to McCaul and his team, such a notice translates as: “We want you all to come up with ideas for expanding the presence and influence of atheists overseas.”

The report is quick to note that the State Department’s promotion of atheism abroad does not arise in response to a situation where nonreligious people were being persecuted, but seems to be simply an ideological choice to promote non-belief.

In countries such as Nepal and Sri Lanka, the text observes, certain Christians and Muslims have recently faced persecution, whereas atheists or humanists have been left in peace. Yet the State Department “deliberately chose to spurn the religious groups most in need of assistance in the relevant countries and devote funds instead to a pet project, one that appears to have been tailored for the grantee.”

Moreover, there were no countervailing religious freedom grants to support persecuted Christians and Muslims in Nepal and Sri Lanka. These groups were simply ignored.

Official grant documents, some of which were obtained by subpoena, proposed “translating and disseminating various humanist content (declarations, textbooks, guides, etc.) into the relevant national and local languages.”

Other documents made clear that the grant targeted atheists and humanists as the preferred recipients, noting: “Applicants will be required to provide information on their humanist activism [and] their past and current affiliation with non-religious groups.”

Turning the concept of religious freedom on its head, the training program implemented in Nepal promoted freedom of nonbelief but suggested that a so-called “freedom of religious belief” does not entail manifestations of faith such as Christian priests’ distribution of the Eucharist.

It also asserted that when a Christian adoption agency, acting on sincerely held religious convictions, denies services to same-sex couples, it violates human rights, a stance that contradicts U.S. policy.

Related training programs focused on recruiting for antireligious organizations and converting people into active “humanists,” McCaul notes.

In the Nepal case, the State Department grant from U.S. taxpayer money was awarded to Humanists International, an anti-Christian group whose CEO has stated that people should be ashamed to be associated with the Catholic Church and that his job is “to combat the Vatican policies and to push against them.”

We observe “an elite, professional class that has no qualms about using taxpayer money to export its own secular agenda overseas, attempting to keep the details from being known outside the Department,” McCaul writes, while calling on Congress to put an immediate halt to this new model of atheistic proselytism.