Thomas Farr, defender of religious freedom

Editor’s note: On the evening of November 13, the Washington-based Religious Freedom Institute gave its “Defender of Religious Freedom Award” to Dr. Thomas Farr: a devout Catholic who had a distinguished career in public service before working in the academy and the think-tank world as a promoter and defender of the first freedom. George Weigel’s keynote address at the award ceremony, held during a dinner at the Mayflower Hotel, follows.

Thirty-five years ago, I imagine that virtually everyone in this room was giddy, stunned, somewhat incredulous, and beyond happy, thanks to the events in Berlin that had unfolded seventy-two hours before, on the night of November 9-10. Then, as you’ll remember, that monstrous, grotesque physical embodiment of the communist plague and the post-war division of Europe, the Berlin Wall, was breached, and ecstatic Berliners, both east and west, took sledgehammers to the obscenity that had divided them for decades—and that over 100 brave souls had died trying to get across.

How did that happen? Indeed, how did the entire Revolution of 1989 happen, when it did, and how it did?

After all, the usual 20^th-century method of effecting dramatic, comprehensive social change was mass violence. Think of the Bolshevik Revolution; Stalin’s Ukrainian terror famine, the Holodomor; the Nazi takeover of Germany and Kristallnacht; Mao’s “Great Cultural Revolution;” and all the rest of that litany of wickedness and sorrow. Yet in 1989 a tyranny that had held central and eastern Europe captive since 1945 crumbled in a few months, and, in the main, non-violently. What happened? And why did it happen then, and in that way?

What happened was that a revolution of conscience had taken hold of a critical mass of courageous men and women behind the Iron Curtain in the 1970s and 1980s. And out of that revolution of conscience, in which the demand for religious freedom played a crucial role, came new forms of political action and resistance that proved stronger than communist guns, tanks, truncheons, water cannons—and the Berlin Wall.

That revolution of conscience began to take shape in the mid-1970s and was given a first, brilliant definition in 1978 when Vaclav Havel’s samizdat essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” began to circulate underground, proposing the strategy of “living in the truth” as both the personal antidote to the communist culture of the lie and the most effective forms of resistance to political oppression when the bad guys held a monopoly on physical power..

“Living in the truth” was, in essence, a spiritual strategy: it called men and women to live nobly rather than supinely, tapping into the powerful resources of the human spirit—the “power of the powerless”—in order to counter the blunt, brute power of the powerful.

That strategy of spiritual renewal and resistance got turbocharged the following year, during John Paul II’s first pastoral pilgrimage to Poland: when hundreds of thousands gathered around the Polish pope in Warsaw’s Victory Square on June 2, 1979, chanted “We want God! We want God!”, as John Paul called upon the Holy Spirit, on the eve of the feast of Pentecost, to “renew the face of the earth—of this land!”

And over ten hard years of struggle, the human rights resistance in east central Europe was sustained by faith, by prayer, and by the witness of martyrs like the man we now know as Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko.

In 1992, when I published the book The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, I didn’t get a lot of love from Tom Farr’s then-colleagues in the Department of State, who couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea that religious conviction could still play a defining role in shaping events in the modern world. Yet within a decade and a half, America’s leading historian of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis of Yale, would write that the beginning of the end of European communism came when John Paul II stepped off the plane at Warsaw airport on June 2, 1979. So at least some people were beginning to get it.

Tom Farr, of course, always “got it,” and that is why we honor him tonight. The bright line running through a distinguished career in the Army, the Foreign Service, the academy, and the independent sector is Tom’s conviction that the truth sets us free in the deepest meaning of freedom—and that religious truth is thus liberating, not constrictive, as so much post-Enlightenment thought would have it.

In a 1957 letter to Harry Truman, Dean Acheson drew a distinction between those who say, “I have to do it,” and those who say, as one of his older law partners had habitually done, “I have it to do.” “What a vast difference!” Acheson wrote. “In the first, one is coerced into action; in the other, a free man assumes an obligation, freely contracted.”

Tom Farr has been an “I have it to do man” for as long as I’ve known him. Tom freely assumed the obligation to defend and promote religious freedom; no one forced him to do this; it was not necessarily a smart career move. He did it because it was the right thing to do. And he was certainly the right man to do it.

Tom has also understood why religious freedom is the first of civil rights—a priority whose deepest conceptual roots are found, I suggest, in the New Testament, when, in the twenty-second chapter of St. Matthew’s gospel, the Lord Jesus memorably told his critics to “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what’s God’s.”

Think about the implications of that familiar dominical instruction. If there are things of God that are not Caesar’s, then Caesar is not omnipotent. If Caesar is not omnipotent, then there are places where Caesar’s writ does not run. If Caesar’s writ does not run everywhere, then the state—ancient or modern—is by definition a limited state, and there is “room” or social space for those natural and free associations that comprise what we know as “civil society.” By defining the limits of state power, religious freedom—the acknowledgment that there are things that are of God’s into which Caesar’s writ does not run—makes all the other freedoms of civil society possible.

Blindness to the centrality of religious freedom in any meaningful scheme of human rights, and blindness to the dynamic role that religious conviction continues to play in international public life, remain, alas, defective chromosomes in the DNA of much of the American foreign policy establishment, and in the DNA of the main foreign policy, national security, and intelligence institutions of our government. Thus, among Tom Farr’s many heroic and noble efforts, which of course include the founding of the Religious Freedom Institute, perhaps the most challenging was his work as the first director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom—an office the bureaucracy didn’t want to see established, and whose work the entrenched powers-that-be often tried to throttle.

But because Tom Farr combines intellectual sophistication and political savvy with the manners of a Southern gentleman, he fought the good fight in Foggy Bottom as perhaps no one else could have done. And with RFI, he and his colleagues have continued to work to educate our diplomats, our serving military officers, and our armed forces chaplains about the importance of religious conviction in shaping world affairs, and about the fundamental role that religious freedom plays in building and sustaining self-governing democracies.

None of this has been easy. And so we honor Tom Farr tonight, not only for his insight and effectiveness but for his perseverance and courage in living vocationally. He remains a great public servant, even in the years since his formal public service, and the nation owes him an enormous debt of gratitude. May this evening in his honor be a small payment on that debt, from those who know him best—and who can thus appreciate him in full.

Things have not exactly worked out the way many of us had hoped thirty-five years ago when the Wall came tumbling down. But as long as there are Americans like Tom Farr who are willing to lead the defense of religious freedom, our country will remain true to its best self—and true to its vocation in the world.

Thank you, Tom. Thank you from the bottom of all our hearts.