As the Second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom gets underway this week, RFI President Thomas Farr took a few moments to speak on the Don Kroah Show about the significance of this unprecedented gathering. After noting its scale – with more than one hundred foreign ministers represented and hundreds of NGOs participating – Farr explained why the Ministerial is needed and what it is intended to achieve. 

“The sum total of all this is to develop an international consensus on what I said a little bit earlier: religious freedom is good for everybody. The problem of course is that there is a perfect storm of resistance to it all over the world.” 

In addressing today’s global crisis of religious freedom, Farr gave particular attention to the dire situation in China, about which he has also recently written and testified before Congress. 

Farr also described RFI’s active part in the Ministerial, hosting five side events and sending RFI representatives to speak at many others.

“We are having five side events on a variety of issues,” says Farr. “The idea here is to get people to see what a multi-faceted issue this thing of religious freedom is and why it is important for everybody.” 

Farr concluded the interview by highlighting a staggering statistic from the Pew Research Center that in itself represents a call to action: “[A]lmost 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where religious freedom doesn’t exist at all….This is a crisis and one that merits the attention of all American citizens.” 

Listen to the full interview below: