Religious Engagement in Contemporary British Foreign Policy: the Birth of a Postsecular Paradigm?

In recent decades, an upsurge in religious engagement initiatives by international organisations and ministries of foreign affairs has seen religion become both object and subject within international policy domains. This thesis explores the FCDO's involvement in this religion-policy nexus: the drivers behind British engagement with religion, the roles and boundaries the FCDO identifies for religious involvement in foreign policy, and the strategies religious actors have used to engage policymakers. Based primarily on elite interviews, I use a multifaceted, historicised theoretical framework to analyse three contemporary case studies: de-radicalisation programmes, and their impact on religious engagement in international policy; Britain's bilateral relationship with the Holy See; and Freedom of Religion or Belief advocacy.
The FCDO's engagement with religion has stemmed from multiple factors: transnational religious dynamics and policy narratives; politico-religious activism levying political pressure against foreign policy bureaucracy; all conditioned by historically formed British religion-state arrangements, religious-secular norms and religious-national imaginaries. Across these case studies, the FCDO has approached religious engagement through a post-secular, problem-solving lens: considering religion a source of new resources to solve policy problems, whilst maintaining core secular principles. This approach is enabled by a dominant paradigm of religious engagement. In contrast to nascent attempts to engage religious belief or belonging, this dominant paradigm frames 'religion' as a set of influential socio-political actors to engage through conventional diplomatic techniques. This paradigm structures religion's return to international policymaking institutions, through answering a more fundamental question: how the modern state should relate to religions' political manifestation, once privatization is no longer considered desirable or feasible