Among the many obstacles faced by America's foreign policy of promoting international religious freedom (IRF) are the largely negative perceptions about that policy at home and abroad. Unfortunately, U.S. diplomacy has done little to overcome these perceptions, including the ones that are true. I was reminded of this problem in reading Margarita Mooney's fine piece on how France and Canada do not afford religious freedom to Haitian immigrants as does the United States.

One of the most damaging and deeply entrenched views about U.S. IRF policy is that the U.S. seeks to protect only Christians, and that the policy is basically a front for American missionaries. This is simply wrong. Neither the 1998 IRF Act as passed nor the policy as implemented has focused on Christians. Ironically, U.S. foreign policy has actually tended to downplay the fate of Christian minorities in places like Iraq and Israel-Palestine. Neither Arab nor domestic opponents of U.S. policy, however, seem to have noticed.

Another damaging (and contradictory) perception is that the United States seeks to banish religion to the margins of public life, much like the French system of laicete. Such a policy, to put it mildly, is a non-starter in most Muslim nations. And yet (as I have argued in Foreign Affairs) many American diplomats  think religious freedom means exactly that: the privatization of religion. Our failure to overcome this muddled thinking, and to present a coherent working definition of religious liberty, has increased the confusion over what U.S. IRF policy actually seeks to do.

That confusion is abetted by a particular religion-state model, that of 20th century Turkey, which many in the Middle East associate with democracy, the West and (the irony!) America. Designed by Kemal Ataturk, that model was explicitly based on French laicete. It sought to ban Islam and all religion from the public square. It is unfortunate indeed that religious groups worldwide think the United States, in its democracy promotion and religious freedom policies, seeks to impose French-style secularism. Even worse, to some extent they are right.

This problem is not simply the result of the leftist tilt of American diplomacy. Some conservative American Christians are also "French," at least to this extent:  while they seek to have their own religiously inspired voices in the public square, they applaud the French project to privatize Islam.

Whatever one thinks of Islam theologically, the idea that it can be banned from politics is unrealistic and self defeating. Like many religious people, and perhaps more than most, Muslims have religion-based notions of what their laws and national policies should be. Many of those notions, including on religious freedom, are clearly illiberal.

But the trick is not to separate Islam from politics. That's a fool's errand. We must help those Muslims who are capable of a liberal political theology, i.e., who want to achieve stable, lasting democracy, and are willing to accept its limits. In the end, democracy and religious freedom (not Arab authoritarianism) will enable Muslims to eliminate Islamist extremism.

The most striking irony in all this is that if any nation has come close to solving the religion-state problem, it is the United States; it is certainly not France.  America's IRF diplomacy should rediscover American history. And as for Turkey, that nation continues to struggle -- thus far successfully -- with the difficult task of balancing Islam-based politics with the secularist legacy of Ataturk. The Turks, as it were, are moving beyond laicete. It is in America's interests to help them succeed.