Vice President JD Vance rebuked the twisting of federal religious liberty efforts overseas, observing that aid dollars have been used to bankroll projects such as promoting atheism.
Vance spoke last week at the International Religious Freedom Summit, telling attendees that “too often has our nation’s international engagement on religious liberty issues been corrupted and distorted to the point of absurdity.” The senior official referred to efforts that spread atheism overseas, saying that “is not what leadership on protecting the rights of the faithful looks like.”
USAID and State Department funds have been used to spread atheism abroad, such as through one grant that offered $450,000 to promote “the expansion of atheism in Nepal,” according to a recent release from House Foreign Affairs Committee Brian Mast, a Republican from Florida.
The release also revealed $21,000 for a drag show in Ecuador, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, and $80,000 for a homosexual and transgender community center in Slovakia.
Similar grants have been highlighted by the White House as the new administration places a pause on most foreign assistance and seeks to end USAID, the agency responsible for distributing foreign aid overseas, while noting the abuse of such programs for leftist causes.
Vance added in his remarks that the administration must “possess the moral clarity” to respond when religious minorities abroad are persecuted, specifically noting the plight of Iraqi Christians over the past three decades. He vowed that “this administration stands ready” to intervene.
The forty-year-old Roman Catholic and former member of the Senate also referenced the importance of the church in American civic life, noting that the institution “was a place, and still is, where people of different races, different backgrounds, different walks of life came together in commitment to their shared communities and, of course, in commitment to their God.”
“Because one of the wonderful apparent paradoxes of religion is that in connecting us to the sacred and to the universal, it deepens our commitment to the particular, to our neighbors, to our obligations, to one another, to the individual communities that all of us call home,” he added.
