. >> come >> host: professor thomas farr. his book is world of faith and freedom. why international religious liberty is vital to american national security. professor farr, why is it vital? >> guest: for two reasons. one is that religious freedom is a fundamental human right. most people accept that proposition. and it's under siege around the world. the pew forum on life and they said 70% of the world's population lives in countries in which religious freedom is severely restricted. that's almost three out of four people on the planet. and what's associated with this is a lot of violent religious prosecution, torture, rape, ungist imprisonment, injust execution. so it's a humanitarian crisis, and the united states has traditionally stood with the persecutor, but it's also a strategic crisis, because the data show -- and i would argue both history and common sense confirm it -- that without religious freedom you cannot, particularly in a highly religious society -- have a stable democracy. so, you think of this countries in the arab spring, all of them highly reli

by thanking georgetown's berkley center for religious freedom and particularly timothy shaw and thomas farr for their kind invitation to be among the distinguished experts and policymakers. i'm really grateful for the opportunity. given the time limitations, i'm going to limit myself to two general points. the first relates to this overall proposition that the greater religious freedom leads to greater moderation among religious movements. and conversely, the less religious freedom leads to greater radicalism. so what i'm going to argue in my talk today is as much as we'd like to believe that this is true, and we hope it is try, because we all want repressive regimes to reap what they sow, and to also be blessed with moderate organizations, but anecdotically from the middle east, and north africa, and much of the muslim world more generally what we see is it's not as clear cut. i'm going to point out of contrarian examples not to make a normative argument we should repress. i'm actually against that and writ an book "against repression" but just to say that as a social scientist, it's a bit