Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004)

With the dawning of the 21st Century a new human rights movement burst unexpectedly onto the global stage. This book is the definitive account of that faith-based quest. Researched and written over a period of six years, Freeing God's Children charts the unlikely alliances that propel new American initiatives on international human rights. The author, blessed with extraordinary insider access, presents a compelling narrative of the personalities and forces, clashes and compromises, strategies and protests that shape the movement. Central to the movement are American evangelicals, heretofore associated with the domestic Christian Right but now increasingly engaged in international humanitarian and human rights initiatives. Hertzke shows how born-again Christians are providing the grassroots muscle for causes joined by Jews, Catholics, Tibetan Buddhists, African American leaders, and feminists. Hertzke argues that the faith-based alliance is filling a void in human rights advocacy. It does so by raising issues - such as global religious persecution, Sudanese atrocities, North Korean gulags, and sex trafficking -- that have languished on the periphery of American diplomacy. To address that void the movement pressed a succession of congressional initiatives that are bearing fruit. Religious persecution, once the stepchild of human rights, is now a basic concern of American foreign policy. The United States is also leading a worldwide campaign against the brutal trafficking in vulnerable women and children. Remarkably, pressure from the alliance forced the government of Sudan to end to its savage twenty-year war against its southern African population. Fueling the movement is the dramatic growth of Christianity in the developing world, where it is nested among the poor and the persecuted. Global church networks ensure that the cries of the suffering are heard in the pews of American congregations. Because the movement reaches the most ardent believers, the religious heartland of America has become an unexpected breeding ground of internationalists and human rights advocates. Thus one cannot understand international relations today without comprehending the nexus of global Christianity and American religious networks. As Hertzke writes, "To comprehend the new politics of human rights we must appreciate how American churches operate within a global context. To grasp something of the global future, we must understand American religion."