Sarah Thomas

Sarah Thomas interned with RFI’s South & Southeast Asia Action Team in the summer of 2018. As part of her duties, she contributed edits and data visualizations to landscape reports on religious freedom in South & Southeast Asia, tracked references to RFI in the press, assisted with social media and photography for events, and conducted independent research on the religious freedom implications of the first principle of Indonesia’s state philosophy, “belief in the one and only God.” According to Sarah, “working at RFI deepened my appreciation for the fascinating connections between religion and world order. I came to see the importance of multi-faith coalition-building for the common good. In my own work, I’ve been inspired by RFI’s work uplifting diverse religious voices all committed to the same key principle: religious freedom is important because religion is important.”

Since interning at RFI, Sarah completed her degree at Stanford and received a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies and a minor in Data Science in 2019. At Standford, she served as editor-in-chief of the Stanford journal of Christian thought, Vox Clara, where she worked with Catholics, evangelicals, and mainline Protestants, drawing on her time at RFI. At the journal, she was pleased to publish a Zoroastrian student’s article on religious freedom, which engaged Ryan Anderson, Sherif Girgis, and John Corvino’s work as well as the insights of RFI’s Ismail Royer.

After graduating from Stanford, Sarah served as associate director of the Zephyr Institute, studied metaphysics in Leuven, Belgium, and then returned to Washington, D.C. where she worked with several partners to promote religious freedom. She currently works as a writer on the science of liberty portfolio at Stand Together, a classical liberal philanthropic network. She also holds a Fellowship with the North American Paul Tillich Society and a Jean Bethke Elshtain Fellowship in Christian Realism with the Institute on Religion and Democracy. She is also pursuing an M.A. in Human Rights at The Catholic University of America. She credits her experience at RFI for instilling in her a passion for the principles of religious liberty, an appreciation for the intersection of ideas and action, and a greater awareness of the ways human beings symbolize their relationship to the sacred.