 My name is Peter Mandeville and I'm a senior advisor on religion and inclusive societies at the United States Institute of Peace. In 2013, the White House released the first ever national strategy on religious leader and faith community engagement in U.S. foreign policy. This was a long time in the coming, with many actors and many voices contributing to the creation of it over the years. USIP has been involved in religious engagement work for many years, including supporting the implementation of this White House strategy. So 10 years later, we brought together some of the key players who had contributed to the strategy to take stock of where we are. My name is Sean Casey. I'm the former Special Representative for Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. I served from 2013 to 2017 and I was the inaugural Special Representative who founded and then built the Office of Religion and Global Affairs under John Kerry when he was Secretary of State. I'm Kirsten Evans. I served at USAID as the Director for the Office for Faith and Community Initiatives in the Trump Administration. I served under Ambassador Mark Green and also Administrator John Barza. My name is Wayne McRae, Captain of the United States Navy. In my previous assignment, I was with the joint staff and working on policy that involved religious leader engagement work. And that really was the genesis of my opportunity to work with the United States Institute for Peace. Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, religion forms the very basis of how we view the world, how we view people, relationships with others around us. So to ignore the views that people have on religion, to ignore those who are teaching what religion presents, would be to grievously ignore what makes people think the way they do, what motivates them to act the way that they do, and what causes them to view people in a manner that they do. So when we ignore those things, we put ourselves in the blind as far as understanding what makes people tick. Engaging with religious actors and with religious communities is a vital part of U.S. foreign policy because religious communities are ubiquitous around the planet and their work is incredibly influential along political lines that have deep relevance to U.S. foreign policy. Particularly when you talk about the local actors, you're talking about the actors who are contributing inside of their own communities, but oftentimes from their mosque, from their synagogue, from their church, from their temple, from their own religious perspective. And it gives them an anchor and a cultural relevance, a social credit, an ability to be trusted, to speak the language of their own society, to garnish the trust and the ascendancy of the community and the society that surrounds them to be able to do critical work that needs to be done for that society, but also critical work that we as international actors would like to see done. And we would like to see it done because ultimately it's in the best interest for global security, not just national security. I think the lesson is that if we are not educating our own foreign policy community, not just about policy and politics, but about the religious aspects of the cultures that they're engaging with, we're doing them a disservice and we're doing the work a disservice because we are never going to be able to divorce the religious identity practices and the dynamics and the tectonics of religious communities on the ground. We're never going to be able to divorce that from the work that we do inside of a community. And so if we're not actively engaging it and educating ourselves to understand it, then we're coming into the work with what could be significant blind spots. I think the classic example is the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States government. Had we had a capacity then to understand the religious dynamics and an ability to reach out to the diverse religious communities of Iraq, I think we could have had a very different outcome in that war and that was why we decided in 2013 that the U.S. government needed to deepen its capacity to assess religious dynamics and engage religious communities. I think probably the first lesson that comes to my mind in terms of what I've learned just from the work that I've done is having people in the right place who have the depth of understanding that we need to hear other people and engage with what they think and what they believe. Short-term relationships just passing into a theater oftentimes will not get us to the goal that we need. It requires the long-term dynamic and relationship but of people who understand that we have to be able to hear, empathize, go beyond ourselves to make connection with others.