Strategic Religious Engagement at USAID - David Hunsicker

David Hunsicker spent two decades at USAID building the institutional capacity for what came to be called Strategic Religious Engagement. That work culminated in the 2023 policy Building Bridges in Development, a framework for partnering with religious communities and faith-based organizations around shared goals. In this conversation, Hunsicker traces the path from a Pennsylvania Dutch upbringing, through conversion to Islam and graduate study in Central Asia, to an unexpected pull into US government work after September 11. We discuss the policy work that followed, what was lost when USAID was closed in 2025, and the new Strategic Religious Engagement Hub at Georgetown's Berkley Center. 

Show Notes:

• Building Bridges in Development: USAID's Strategic Religious Engagement Policy (https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/publications/building-bridges-in-development-usaid-s-strategic-religious-engagement-policy/)

Transcript

Chip Gruen: 0:04

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host, Chip Gruen. If you listened to last month's episode, you'll remember that I talked with a group of local faith leaders who were part of the team that launched the Faith 250 Lehigh Valley initiative. As I said then, I've attended a few of those events and did so again this last May. At that event someone came up to me and introduced himself to me. It was today's guest, David Hunsicker. David worked for two decades at USAID as one of the foremost specialists on strategic religious engagement. He is also, as it turns out, a local to Lehigh Valley who went to the same high school, though some time earlier, that my children went to. Talking with him at that Faith 250 event I knew right away that he would be a great guest for our show. His work is exactly aligned with what we try to do, thinking about religion and the public conversation, and in this case, religion and government and public policy. He was instrumental in the 2023 policy that you'll hear us talk about today, called Building Bridges in Development, a framework for US government partnership with religious communities around the world. That work was done in his capacity as a civil servant at USAID, which of course was closed in 2025 as a part of the DOGE initiative. So in our conversation today we talk about that work, which for him span multiple administrations from both parties and the abrupt closure of USAID. We also talk about how the work continues at Georgetown University's Berkeley Center in a new strategic religious engagement hub, which tries to preserve some of the capacity that was lost last year. So this conversation is longer than our typical episode, but I promise it is worth it. It is fascinating to hear about this facet of government work that I didn't know existed in anything like the depth that David describes. Additionally, his personal biography growing up in a Pennsylvania Dutch household, and then his educational and personal journey that lead him to his work, both in Uzbekistan and then eventually into Washington, DC, is super interesting as well. So, without further ado, here's my conversation with David Hunsicker. David Hunsicker, thanks for coming on ReligionWise.

David Hunsicker: 2:24

It's great to be here, Chip. I really appreciate you inviting me.

Chip Gruen: 2:27

So, before we get into the work itself at USAID and the SRE, and we'll define all of our terms as we go, can you talk a little bit about how you got interested in international policy and thinking about religion as a serious object of study in the first place. What drew you into this work?

David Hunsicker: 2:49

Sure, and a very logical question, for sure. You know, in terms of the policy side of it, you know, I think that was a little bit more of a slow development, but when talking about religion, I mean, I have been fascinated by, interested in, and been a student of history for as long as I can remember. You know, I grew up here in the Lehigh Valley, went to, you know, Sunday school, like many kids do, and you know, enjoyed reading, and so one of the things I would routinely read was the Bible, and you know, I, as I was reading the Bible, I was, you know, became really interested in the stories, but it also produced a lot of questions, and so I went to try and find answers to those questions, both within the Bible itself, but then branching off and looking at other religions to see if I could find answers to my questions, and so, you know, to make a long story relatively short, I had my own theological questions about Christianity that I had trouble reconciling, so I went looking for other religions or philosophies that could help me understand the world around me and my place in it, so I studied Buddhism, I looked at communism, I, you know, looked at all sorts of different faith traditions, and you know, my mom likes to say that, you know, one of her happiest days in that part of my journey was when I burned the copy of the Satanic Bible that I had purchased, you know, I was looking far and wide to try and find answers to my questions, and first time I read about Islam, the theology appealed to me, but then there were all these rules of, you know, no drinking, no pork, no dating, and I'm like, no way, like, who would sign up for something like that, and so continued my search, but still wasn't finding answers, so eventually I came back to looking at Islam and purchased a translation of the Quran from the local, I think it was, oh, what was it even back then? Translate, it was before Barnes and Noble was like the only place you could go, it was another chain bookstore, which I'm honestly not remembering anymore, but I do remember that it was in the Whitehall Mall, so went in, bought a translation of the Quran, brought it home, started reading it, and I couldn't put it down, it answered directly almost every question that I had about the unity of God versus the Trinity, about the nature of Christ being fully human rather than divine. These were things that had weighed on me, and it provided a context for many of those rules that I had read about in my early exploration of Islam, and it helped to contextualize it within the broader prophetic history, going back to, you know, Abraham and Moses, and the patriarchs of the Bible, as well as Christ, and his role as a prophet, and another prophet, Muhammad, coming after him, and it all made very logical sense to me, so at that point I decided I wanted to become Muslim. Didn't know how to do that as a Pennsylvania Dutch kid growing up in Heidelberg Township, Lehigh County, and so just continued to read until I had the opportunity to be an exchange student in Turkey my junior year of high school, so went to Northwestern Lehigh High School, and the Rotary had its youth exchange program. One of my teachers, Fred Phillips, who's my biology teacher, was a member of the Rotary and encouraged me to take part, and I wanted to go to Germany, because, like I said, Pennsylvania Dutch kids grew up in Heidelberg Township, wanted to learn German, so I could understand what my grandparents were saying behind my back, because we didn't grow up knowing Pennsylvania Dutch, except passively, and so that exchange opportunity to go to Turkey allowed me to live separately from my family, grow as a Muslim independently with the guidance of a Turkish family who were religious in some ways, but very secular in others. That's the way Turkey was. It was much more secular in the 80s when I was there than it would become later. Still very secular in a lot of ways, but that was a formative experience for me, and it was also formative for my parents, in that they came at the end of that time, for about three weeks of travel the country, they got to meet Muslims for the first time themselves, and it really helped to allay, you know, the fears that have been created for them by the media about Muslims and Islam and all that sort of thing, and so you know, my parents were extremely supportive of my conversion. Now, you know, there was an element of, you know, he was a Buddhist last week, he's a Muslim this week, we'll see what he is next week, you know, but about 40 years in, I think they're pretty confident that it's going to stick, so, so that was, you know, an important milestone in my personal development, to be sure, and specifically, you know, the interest in religion didn't end there, so you know, I went to the University of Michigan to complete my bachelor's in Islamic studies, because it was the only avenue I could figure out to learn more about Islam again in the late, early, late 80s, early 90s, and University of Michigan was the only undergraduate program in Islamic studies in the United States at that time, so you know there were new Eastern studies, Middle Eastern studies programs, but there wasn't a major in Islamic studies anywhere except the University of Michigan. So that's why I ended up there. Didn't start there, but that's where I ended up. Had a wonderful experience, but that really helped, you know, give me a strong academic footing to go on, and then eventually I didn't go straight into grad school, came back to the Lehigh Valley for a while, was working at a bookstore, just, you know, a stone's throw from here at Muhlenberg College, it was Encore Books over the West End part of Allentown, and worked there for several years, and then also part time I was studying at Moravian Theological Seminary, and so I studied Hebrew and Greek, New Testament, and had an opportunity to be in an interfaith environment, and really learn a lot from a lot of my peers who were going on to be pastors in various denominations of Protestant Christianity, and you know that helped me learn a lot, and that gained a lot of really useful tools that would help me later on when I did go on to the University of Washington out in Seattle, that was one of just a few universities at the time that had a focus on the Turkic languages of Central Asia, because when I graduated from college from the University of Michigan, it was soon after the wall had fallen, and you know, communism had collapsed in the Soviet Union, new newly independent states came into existence across the former Soviet Union, and I saw that as a niche area where I could, you know, leverage my knowledge of Turkish that I had gotten from both my year in high school, but also what I continued to study as an undergraduate, so I decided to focus on Uzbek, which was one of the languages that was offered there, because it's kind of analogous to Ottoman Turkish, except for Eastern Turkic literature, so it's a major literary language, very similar to Ottoman, alongside Persian in Central Asia decided to focus on that, and yeah, and so I then applied for a few fellowships, and at that time there wasn't much competition. This was before 9/11 and so there were fellowships available. I applied for two, got them both, was able to do them back to back, and that gave me two years of full-time study in Uzbekistan that I was able to do as a graduate student, that provided an opportunity for real immersion in the language, do some pre-dissertation research for a dissertation that never got written because 9/11 happened, and when 9/11 happened, some some people that I knew at the embassy, including somebody I had actually studied a different Turkic language at a summer program at a different university, they reached out and they said, Hey, Dave, we know that you have, you know, contacts in the local Muslim community in Uzbekistan, and you know, obviously this horrible attack has happened in the United States, and we want to reach out and we want to reassure the local Muslim population here that any response that comes from the United States to that terrorist attack is not an attack on Islam or attack on Muslims, but you know it's aimed at the criminals who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11.

Chip Gruen: 12:55

So let me, let me take a little, a little, a little diversion here, because you know you've described an academic experience that doesn't seem super foreign to me, or a lot of people who end up doing, you know, what I do in academia, you know, you do the language study, you do the culture study, it was in Islamic studies rather than the international studies program, and then you get this call that's asking you to do really political work. I don't know, I just.. that's a.. that's an interesting disconnect in your story, and I wonder if there is.. is it just that there was not a lot of people with any kind of footing in Uzbekistan, or is there something else that I'm not seeing here?

David Hunsicker: 13:38

Yeah, no, it's a great question, and a very logical question, and you know, I think part of it you've already answered, in that you know there were very few fluent Uzbek speakers among Americans in the, you know, late 90s, early 2000s when I was there, and there were even fewer who were observant Muslims who had, you know, relationships with people in the religious hierarchy, and you know, Uzbekistan and the religious institutions, in particular, are very hierarchical, so you know the neighborhood mosque that I went to was the mosque of the head imam of Tashkent, the capital, and I had, you know, and I would routinely interact with others who were in the publishing industry, you know, putting out articles about Islam in America. I'd written a few of those, so like I was already kind of serving as an informal cultural bridge, like many academics do, and you know, it was about the personal relationship they had, too, with the people at the embassy, and that was also a function of the fact that the embassy community was extremely small, right,? Like the posting to Tashkent was, you know, it's not what most people go into the Foreign Service for, you know, I mean, a lot of people love postings like Tashkent, because nobody else knows about all of the treasures that, you know, are there to be uncovered during a tour in a country like that, and it became much more of an attractive post to many people as the years went on, but at that time, you know, relative, I don't want to call it a diplomatic backwater, but you know, not a high priority for, you know, the United States diplomatic service, right until the events of 9/11 and that completely changed the dynamic, and they didn't have a whole lot of people that the embassy staff were reaching out, but they understood that for them to reach out to a religious community that they didn't have more than just kind of formal, you know, very kind of trying to think of what the best adjective would be, like the best, yeah. I mean, it's just very kind of formal and not personal relationships, and they knew personal relationships would help. Yeah, you know, we all know, whether you like, as we network for a job, or whatever, you know, personal relationships are important, and for something that was at such high stakes, they wanted to take advantage of the personal relationships they knew about, like they were going to do the outreach anyway, but they wanted to leverage my, you know, personal relationships, and I was happy to do it, because it was, you know, I was horrified by the attacks of that day. As other Americans, Peace Corps volunteers, in particular, found out about it. They reached out to me because they knew I had a television that had CNN, and they didn't, you know, oftentimes they were living with Uzbek families, and you know, they didn't have international news, or whatever, and they were calling me, so I had a whole living room full of Peace Corps volunteers, you know, right after 9/11 because everybody wanted the news, and they weren't able to necessarily get it, so you know that's that small community of Americans who were all, you know, experiencing this together, and you know, I wanted to give back to my country, recognizing that I could have a role, and so that was the first opportunity, and yeah, and then the career comes after that.

Chip Gruen: 17:31

Yeah, so you, so you spent eight years, is that right, living and working in Uzbekistan?

David Hunsicker: 17:37

Seven years in Uzbekistan, one year in Kazakhstan, but yeah.

Chip Gruen: 17:41

And so that experience, I mean, we've talked. I love the academic experience, right? I think a lot can happen on a campus, but obviously something different is happening for you in those seven plus one years. What did you learn there, aside from the personal relationships, aside from, you know, that kind of asset that you gained in that time, I mean, what were the kinds of things that, in retrospect, you learned that helped you build your career?

David Hunsicker: 18:10

I think the main thing I learned was the value of listening, you know, you go as an academic, you have your topic that you want to research, and you go and you start doing the work around that, and you know it could be a very linear process if you let it be, and you miss a lot of the context and the nuance, and you know I went with a topic that I thought I was going to find a fair amount of primary source material on, and I didn't find that, and so I had to explore a bit, both in terms of, you know, the academic topics that I was going to, you know, be looking at as part of a potential dissertation, and just spend time talking with people to figure out, like, okay, what is out there, and if it's not this, how about this, and I, you know, I got relationships as part of that. It also helped me learn about myself and what really interested me. One of the reasons I never completed my PhD was the realization that I had that I didn't want to be pigeonholed as an 18th century Uzbek literature scholar. That wasn't my happy place, like I went into academia, I realized as a vehicle towards satisfying my intellectual curiosity, but it wasn't really about publishing or the research. I mean, I love the research, and I'm a lifelong learner. And you know, I just came from the Lehigh County Heritage Museum, where I was in the library doing some local history research, like it never stops, but it really wasn't what I wanted to spend the next 30 or 40 years of my life doing, it was an interesting topic, it allowed me a vehicle to, you know, explore Uzbekistan, explore Central Asia, explore different options, and one of the things I realized really interested me was this idea of diplomatic engagement, and particularly, you know, public affairs, you know, cultural exchange and engagement, and, and that sort of thing, which I didn't know existed prior to that, you know, I thought, you know, the foreign service, the diplomatic service, whatever, you know, they write treaties, and you know, they have soirees where they, you know, heads of state meet with ambassadors, and that's all it was, but the whole side of kind of public diplomacy was something I didn't know existed, and I became introduced, you know, through my time there, and you know, I realized that a big part of that, like I said, was listening and just spending time with people and learning about what their concerns were, and then finding the common interest between what you know the United States was hoping to accomplish through its diplomatic engagements and what people's bread and butter everyday concerns were.

Chip Gruen: 21:37

As an aside, I will just say that there are more than one way to revolt against academia, and another way that one might revolt is by agreeing to become the director of an institute in which you do a podcast and public events, and you get to have lots of interesting conversations with lots of different kinds of people, and you don't get pigeonholed, but that's just between you and me.

David Hunsicker: 21:57

Fair enough.

Chip Gruen: 21:59

So, going back to your story, then you go, you, you finish up your work in Central Asia, and then you come back to DC to join what became the Center for Conflict and Violence Prevention, and that work seems to be a shift in your career, whereas previously it was the Islamic studies centered, you know, regional expertise, and you move to something that starts to look more like an interest in religious engagement more generally as a, as a practice, as something that might be useful in that policy sphere. So, first, do I get that right, and two, can you talk about that shift?

David Hunsicker: 22:42

Yeah, so that's not as much a shift as it is a bridge that we've kind of skipped over in the story so far. So, like I said, I did that outreach for the embassy initially, and you know that was doing a favor, didn't know, you know, where that was going to lead, and then an opportunity came up where a friend of mine was leaving a position in the public affairs section at the embassy, where he was managing a small grants program to civil society organizations in Uzbekistan. Many of them were human rights organizations. Uzbekistan, at that time, unfortunately, had a very poor human rights record that has changed significantly. Uzbekistan is one of the few countries that went from a very short time of having been a country of particular concern for international religious freedom, according to 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, to getting off that list completely, and you know that's an incredible accomplishment, and a credit to, you know, the Uzbek government for, you know, making that significant change, and you know, religious freedom has really blossomed in Uzbekistan, you know, no country is perfect. Uzbekistan still has, you know, some real estate to cover, you know, in terms of improvements, but you know, we're, we have plenty of problems here in the United States as well. So, anyway, had the opportunity to apply, and then got selected to be in this public affairs role, which, like I said, was about human rights primarily, but also other civil society engagement. I did that for about a year and a half, and it was a really great opportunity for me to kind of bridge my interests academically and be able to work with local organizations while that was taking place, you know, Congress was slowly doing its thing in response to 9/11 and the way Congress generally reacts to anything is to appropriate money to things that they feel are important, and one of the things that Congress thought was important was religious engagement. And so there were there were some supplemental appropriation bills that were passed that you know had some really kind of generalized language about you know doing more in terms of outreach, including to religious communities in Central Asia, and so the embassy received these funds, USAID received part of them, and they looked at the pot of money and said, What do we do with this, because we don't have a whole lot of experience or people who are trained in this, and they looked at some university partnerships as a possibility, they, you know, looked at contracting it out. Eventually, what they decided was, let's take some of this money and we'll hire someone whose job it is to think about this, you know, full time. And so they put out a solicitation for a religion, state and society specialist, and it was a perfect fit for both my interests and my background. At that point, I applied and was hired into that role, which I did for three years, and it was a regional position that had me working in all five of the Central Asian republics, in addition to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, it was the engagements weren't all equal. Turkmenistan remains a highly authoritarian state, and so it was very difficult to do work there, both then and, you know I imagine it would be now, but Kyrgyzstan, on the other hand, was in a phase of liberalization, and so there was a lot more opportunity to do things there, so I spent a lot of time going to Kyrgyzstan and working with communities there, and so, yeah, for three years I full time worked was sitting down with religious leaders of all sorts, not just Muslim religious leaders. It was very important, you know, that we make sure that we're not just preferencing one community over another, you know, numerical majority of Muslims across all five of those countries. So, yes, that's probably where the majority of our engagement was was taking place, but you know, we made a good faith effort to engage the Russian Orthodox Church, for example. Political dynamics being what they are, they weren't always the easiest group to engage, but we engaged the Jewish community, Bahaʼis others, and you know, really spent a lot of time looking for opportunities where you know we could partner with these communities on areas of common interest, and you know, so I really developed kind of my, you know, real-world expertise in doing this kind of work, you know, in those three years, if that was the foundational, you know, period that I would go on to build my career with USAID back in Washington when I left Central Asia.

Chip Gruen: 28:09

Okay, so let's fast forward to that, right? So we get to the USAID portion of your career, and in particular we need to talk about the strategic religious engagement policy that you, as a part of a team, created while in USAID, and just to sort of anticipate where we're going, I want to talk about that, but I also just want to say this is one of the initiatives, one of the things that we have lost in the last year or so, as USAID's funding was cut, so I just want to sort of put that out there, that what we're talking about now is something that we had capacity in as a government, as a country, but are now talking about sort of in the past tense, but not 100% right? All right, so let's, let's talk about that. Let's talk about the relationship between the Strategic Religious Engagement policy. So, if you're taking notes at home, this would be SRE, is I'm sure an acronym we will end up using, and its relationship in the larger framework of the USAID universe.

David Hunsicker: 29:17

Yeah, so, yeah, so in terms of my journey, some that allow them to have a more constructive interaction with requires experience of working with the family I would have stayed in Central Asia, probably for several more years. Some family medical issues required that I come back to the United States, and I didn't have anything lined up at USAID or elsewhere when I came back, but within a few months I was able to connect with some old colleagues, there was an opening in what was then the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID, which was a great fit. They, you know, wanted somebody that had experience doing religious engagement, you know, a lot of the work that I was doing in Central Asia also had an element of countering violent extremism, and you know, looking at are there ways that we can partner with communities to build resilience against the communities in which they're working, so that they don't have extremism, because that was, you know, obviously part of the to use lethal force, and when they do, it's much more reaction to 9/11 right? So they were looking for people that had restrained and constrained than it perhaps it otherwise would that kind of background, but not only that, you know, most of be, and that's one of the reasons, too, what the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, you NATO headquarters, as you know, International Security know, did, and in those years was a lot around land conflicts and international resource conflicts across Asia, Africa, Assistance Force, ISAF, where you know my role was as a and elsewhere, so like it wasn't just this kind of extremism development advisor, including on religious engagement issues, angle, but that was one concern, and also religious engagement wasn't only concerned with extremism either, right? So, and military is constantly learning, looking at the ways in which we can partner with religious actors around land disputes, or herders and pastoralists and farmers, and you know, like all those, you know, different folks. There's a religious element of, you look at Nigeria, where you have different groups that are, you know, the farmers are, you know, predominantly Christian, and the pastoralists and you know they know that first and foremost they want to are, you know, predominantly Muslim, and that leads to, you know, kind of these resource conflicts that have this protect the troops, and they also want to, you know, protect religious overlay, so that holistic kind of view of things. life in the communities in which they have to operate. So I came in, and you know, one of the things we started working has

Chip Gruen: 31:31

surprised this topic, because they have to on was a toolkit, because there was, you know, a regular set of requests that would come in, of like, okay, we're working on, you know, these pastoralist farmer conflicts. You know, how do we, how do we address them? Do you have a template? Do you have an example of something we can do? So, another colleague had actually taken the lead on pulling something together before I joined the office, and so we started working very collaboratively together to pull something together, which was a toolkit on religion, conflict, and peace building that we were able to put out in about 2009 We started developing a training put a link to that in the show notes. It's programming in religious contexts that was kind of a available, and it has this framework incorporated in it companion to that we were working with a lot of academics that is the Bridges framework. So, I'm just going to run military is that they do everything that they possibly in the Washington DC area who are part of an advisory board, can to avoid getting to that point where they need to use through what that is real quick. We don't have time to go through lethal force, and one of the advantages they find from doing Mohammed Abu Nimr, who was at American University, you know, every one of them, but I want to introduce it. an expert in Islamic peace building, Mark Gopin at George Mason University was also part of our advisory board, and you know they worked with us, you know, to review the toolkit to help us develop elements for the training, and we realized that, you know, while we started out thinking about conflict. The need was even much broader than that, because there, you know, people in various sectors of USAID, whether it be economic growth or health, or, you know, water and sanitation, and all of the different sectors that USAID worked in, you know, there was a religious element that would occasionally come up more prominent in some places than others, and people weren't be knowledgeable about their theaters that they're in, in always prepared to deal with that element in their work, and order to respond to the humans that they encounter in those so, as part of the programming and religious context training, theaters. I ran across it was from one of the service we wanted folks to just develop a basic comfort with engaging academies, but a syllabus on understanding religion, you religious topics, you know, and recognizing that, you know, the know, for officers in training, and it just blew me away at separation between church and state, or religion and state, actually how enlightened it was. Now, maybe not for purposes that that you know was the bedrock upon, you know, which we worked, you know, wasn't necessarily a barrier to the success of working with communities where religion had an important role, but actually was liberating, because it helped us to know that we could understand religious communities, but we didn't have a role in religion, like it's not the job of USAID or the US government to be involved in religion, particularly outside of our own borders, right? Like, we're not there to define how anybody believes the practices, and that's embedded in our constitution, and that's something we applied internationally as well. But it did create, you know, difficulty for some foreign service officers and others who were brought up on, you know, this basic premise of that church and state are separate, and that we have taboos in America, you know, you don't talk about religion and politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table, right, and so getting over some of those inhibitions about even talking about or religion or with. Religious leaders was really the starting point that we embarked from, and we made good progress. Funding cycles being what they were, you know, it was ebbs and flows, and every new administration had, you know, different priorities. For some, you know, religion was something that was of importance, and would get prioritized, and at other times it wasn't. Individual members of leadership also would prioritize it over the other, you know, we kind of kept on chugging along, and you know, doing what we could as a small office and a big bureaucracy, having partners at different places within government. One of the key events that took place in 2013 really started a few years earlier than that, but the Obama administration put together a an interagency group that developed a strategy on religious leader and faith community engagement, I think that's the formal title, something along the formal titles is slightly different, right, but it was the first time, you know, really that the US government came out with any kind of, it wasn't a policy, but it was a strategy for engaging religious actors, now Department of Defense was a little bit ahead. They had been leveraging the Chaplain Corps, and you know, they had developed doctrine for the chaplains to be able to, you know, do more

David Hunsicker: 36:30

It's, you can remember, it's not just SRE, called it, outreach like activities, you know, as part of their mission, but honestly, the chaplains also turned to us and said, Can you Strategic Religious Engagement, that's, you know, as it rolls help us, you know, think through some of these issues, you know, as we go about implementing it, because the chaplains, when they were recruited into the military, were there for the troops, you know, they didn't have, as part of their mandate, off the tongue because it's short, but Bridges is something you know, work doing engagement with other faith groups, you know, outside of, you know, the truths that they were responsible for, so it was a learning curve for them as well. So we had this, you know, kind of inner agency, you know, you can remember, and it evokes an image because it's really the opportunity to learn and grow from one another and fill one Green, and so it was under their enlightened leadership that another's gaps, and that came out in the 2013 strategy initially. core of what we want to do. SRE is all about building bridges, we're really starting to grow things and realizing that, okay, we can talk about religious the constraints around that was that it was cost and we, you know, both, you know, metaphorically, but also neutral, that was the, you know, the orders that came down from on high in the Obama administration, like you can come up with a strategy, but you can't spend any new money on it. literally, right? When you're talking about development work, So that was a significant constraint, and you need to, you know, work with the community, perhaps to all of us would all be very happy with, right, but the idea of that sort of ability to have kind of a critical distance build a physical bridge over two sides of a river to unite communities that maybe are in conflict, and you want to get them cooperating, you know, like it's real build bridge building, as well as the metaphoric bridge building, and that really was the essence of it, and if I were to boil down, you know, those different categories that you rattled off, it's really about two things, it's about radical empathy, and it's about do no harm, and ideally, so that you can do maximum good. And so all of those different categories, you know, contribute to, you know, those basic values that we put forward in the framework, and you know, just thinking about belonging, and you know,

Chip Gruen: 41:06

It's awfully cute. making sure that people are inclusive when they're doing the work, and you know, making sure that you know nobody's being excluded. I talked about earlier, like working in a Muslim majority environment, but we wanted to make sure that other communities didn't think, Oh, well, this is just about the Muslims. They only care about 9/11 they only care about extremists, and they're going to reach out to the Muslim community, and they don't care about us or our concerns, and similarly, those within the Muslim community who would say they only care about extremism, they don't actually care about, you know, our lives, or, you know, making sure that everybody feels a sense of belonging, and it's a shared effort that's inclusive and listening to everybody, so you know, making sure that you know we're respecting people's inherent dignity and not just reaching out to them because we have an objective. We, as the US government, yes, we're going to have our mission, we're going to have our objectives, and we're going to have certain things we need to get done, but we don't need to do that in a way that instrumentalizes a community or an individual as a vehicle just to get done what we want to get done. We rather it's to form a partnership and a relationship that's authentic and that you know goes both ways, like okay, we need something that perhaps we want help with, and hopefully the objectives overlap that we can, you know, do something that is going to achieve goals for for both the communities as well as the US government, but sometimes it's about being there and listening and finding out, you know, this is really what the community wants or needs, and are there ways that we can help them with that, and you know, just being active listeners, and you know, giving them the agency of, you know, being an active partner in the ongoing conversation and discussion, like I said, have having real authentic relationships that you know aren't just about us using one another for our short-term transactional needs. So, here's my question, and I'm not going to state this eloquently, but when you look at these values, you know, so you talked about belonging, right, and inclusion as sort of some of the values that are there, and you described it as a various religious communities or various factions in religious communities. When I first read this document, and this is addressed elsewhere in the document, but I want to get you to address it here. When I hear belonging and inclusion, there's a lot of gender, race, ethnicity, etc. that carries with it sort of more progressive values that we traditionally have held, right, not all, not everybody, all the time, but even moderate or center right, you know, people would adhere to that, get exported with our foreign policy, and if you're talking about respect and the dignity of religious communities who might have very firmly held beliefs about exclusion of particular identities, those seem to clash to me, right? How how does this framework deal with those sorts of more progressive values that often come with US public policy and the traditional values that might be really, really sincerely held within the communities you're dealing with.

David Hunsicker: 50:53

Yeah, no, no, great question. And you know it's, it's not an easy question to answer, of course, because it's messy, right, and that's humanity. Humanity is messy, but that's also the fun part of the job, is you know, trying to navigate through that mess and find where the common ground actually is, because you know you can be in a variety of environments, where, yeah, it's going to be really hard to have conversations around, you know, gender questions, and there are times when you know it's a policy priority that US government may have about making sure that you know there are women at the table, and that's the right thing to do, to make sure that there's, you know, all voices represented, or at least, you know, all genders represented, but at the same time, that may not be the norm in the society in which we're working, right, and so, like, how do we navigate that? It's sometimes two steps forward, one step back, right, and it's having some initial engagements that prepare the ground, you know, it's not just showing up and saying, yeah, we have a meeting with 12 religious leaders, and we're going to require that four of them be women, right, like you just, or six and six, right? Like, where you're dealing with a patriarchal religious structure, you have to figure out ways in which you know you're able to bring in those voices, and sometimes, like in places in Afghanistan, like Afghanistan, where you know, you know, recognizing I don't want to over generalize, right? Like Afghanistan has very rich and varied history, and if you, you know, you know, look back at the 60s, Afghanistan and Kabul, in particular, you know, some of the gender norms were very different than what we see today, much more progressive, but not across the board, right? So you know, thinking about, are there ways where you know maybe the women aren't comfortable going into that patriarchal environment, and you know, trying to assert their voices, some very well may be, but others, because of this societal context, may not, and so having an opportunity where they can express their views separately from those male religious leaders that can be somehow then brought into the conversation where they're feel free to speak, you know, in that cultural environment, and then you know, have that be brought into the conversation. Now, is that the way we would approach it as 21st century Americans? Most likely not, right? But we're Americans, they're not, and we have to make sure that we're being respectful of the, you know, the way that their society, their culture deals with some of these questions, and it's not going to be a one to one match, and it's going to be a constant negotiating and renegotiating those conversations and relationships, and yeah, I mean, part of what we were trying to get across, and you know, the Bridges policy is, you know, use these principles to navigate that messiness as best you can, you're never going to get it perfect, you're never going to get it 100% right, because as soon as you try doing something, there's going to be a ripple effect that you know is going to perhaps derail what you were trying to do as well, and so you're going to have to re-examine it, redo it again, and it's a living process, but if you have certain principles that can guide you, those principles can help see you through some of that messiness, and you know, kind of give you that north star that you need to navigate it, and, like I said, I mean, at the core, it's about radical empathy, and it's about doing no harm, and you know, if we can keep those two things in mind as we negotiate through or navigate through some of these stickier questions, you know, we'll know when to push and we'll know when to pull back, and sometimes, you know, what I did as part of my work was to go to the American policy makers and say, you can't do that, you're gonna, you know, damage your reputation more by pushing on whatever issue it is than by, you know, recognizing that there's a difference of opinion here, and we need to find where the common ground is, where we can agree to disagree and still accomplish all of the other things that we can do together, you know, and you know, so I always said, you know, we'll talk to anybody who will talk to us, as long as they're not, you know, on a, you know, terrorist list or something like that, you know, we have to be willing to engage with those who don't share our views if we want to make progress in, you know, perhaps changing their views, but we also have to be able to listen and understand where they're coming from, and recognizing that maybe the way that we're doing things isn't right for their society or their country.

Chip Gruen: 56:36

So thinking about, you know, that common ground that you just mentioned, something that I like to think a lot about, and we do a lot at the Institute, and people who are listeners of ReligionWise or attendees at our WorldView sessions will see this just sort of shot through our work that we're really interested in attending to difference, and that the work that you describe on a policy landscape, and also I think the traditional work of interfaith engagement is about common denominators looking for similarity, looking for common ground, looking for places where those connections can be made, as opposed to a more academic perspective that always wants to sort of stress difference, right? Doesn't want to collapse difference as sort of less significant or less important. Can you talk about that tension? Can you talk about how that shows up in the work that you've done? called more public the idea that

David Hunsicker: 57:32

Yeah, in terms of, you know, trying to find that common ground, anytime you're dealing with policy issues, there tends to be a black, a white, and a gray in between, right? And there is, there are strong opinions on all sides of an issue, and sometimes we default to being on opposite sides, you know, black and white, it's this way or that way, but if we really want to get things accomplished, it's usually best to explore the gray, and so I think if you want to be action-oriented, you have to default towards leaning into that gray area and trying to find within that where the overlap is, where the common ground is, and so, as a understanding difference is as important as understanding

Chip Gruen: 58:27

So, just a little now, practitioner, that's what you know we were trying to do in similarity.

David Hunsicker: 58:30

Yeah, no, I, that makes a lot of sense, and like I said, from my perspective, if you don't USAID, you know, like I said earlier, you know, we weren't understand that difference, just about the peace building or even the simplistic, you know, began and it came to the United so for contact theory, peace building. If you know, you know the other side, you know you're less likely to think negatively of them. But, like, what does that mean in practice? Where are you actually going to collaborate? Where are you going to work together to, you know, bring clean water to the community that is divided in other ways, and so emphasizing that common ground is important, but also having a really keen understanding of what the differences are, because that goes to the do no harm element that I was talking about earlier, is yes, there are differences, and you can't just paper over them. You can't pretend they don't exist, because that creates the potential that you're going to the goodwill that was lost among communities do something that inflames the situation by ignoring around the world, you know, the USAID's slogan was From the difference. You are, you know, creating the greater potential American People, and you know we emphasize that all the time, for damage that can be done, so you know we need to, yes, identify you know that common ground that falls between that, because United States ill you know, stark black and white, but we also have to understand States, and it impacted all of our lives. Lots of lives were what those outer parameters are, so that we aren't inadvertently, lost here domestically. Our economy was disrupted, you know, bumping up against them, and you know, doing something that's and we're still, you know, getting back from, you know, really going to inflame things. So, I think both are incredibly bouncing back from Covid. Similarly, you know, I used to work for Admiral Ziemer, who was the Ebola advisor, and, and you important, understanding that difference, and you know, as know, Admiral Ziemer, you know, he had been doing work, you academics do, like really studying what is what is it that we have overseas, it makes us more vulnerable, and, you know, divides, you know, this set of beliefs or values or people, and yet, what are the things that make us all human? What are as I started to say, you know, we all have experience with what those common, you know, elements that we all need our lives? Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Like, we could all share, and you know, I a lot in terms of a lot of the peace building work that I did, including like with Israelis and Palestinians, a lot of it was work with youth, because people can agree that kids deserve to be happy, deserve to have a good future, and to have a peaceful future. So, even if the present isn't any of those things, that people will invest in their kids and they understand why other people would want to invest in their kids as well, and it really creates a lot of common ground, so you know that's that's something that you know I did a lot of work in over my, you know, years, particularly in Washington DC with the Office of Conflict Management Mitigation later at the Center for Conflict Prevention, Conflict and Crisis Prevention. know, on Ebola early warning, and in dealing with Ebola outbreaks in Africa. And then he came over to USAID and continued to do some of that work, and did other preventative work. You know, that's all about keeping problems from ever reaching our shores, and some of that may be medical, some of that may be political, because if we're, if we have disgruntled people in countries around the world who are being oppressed, their human rights are being violated by their governments, and they see the United States government as being an ally with those authoritarian governments, that puts us at risk, because now we're in the crosshairs of those who want to lash out, and you know it's about building constructive relationships, and I think that's essentially what has been lost, is our ability to have some of those constructive engagements at the community level, and not just at the levels of, you know, governments and leaders, but really engaging communities, you know, because people recognize the USAID logo, the two clasped hands of cooperation with that slogan of From the American People, and they understood what that meant, even if they didn't agree with everything else we were doing, but you know that appealed to people, it created relationships and friends that we were able to engage as part of our own protection of the homeland by making sure that you know we had partners when an Ebola outbreak happened, that we were able to, you know, spot it, start to treat it at its source before it ever reached our shores. Or what I worked on was the conflict and violence prevention, you know, helping communities deal with the issues that they were grappling with, so that they didn't fester and become something destabilizing in their country that would then drive migration, that would drive terrorism, that would drive civil unrest that impacts not just that country, but you know, Europe, United States, and elsewhere.

Chip Gruen: 1:09:53

So there is, I mean, this is sort of a silver lining, I suppose, um, that a lot of the people who are affected by the USAID closure, and specifically were involved with the strategic religious engagement policy, have tried to maintain capacity for this work. I sort of say in exile, I don't know if that's the right, the right term or not. At Georgetown University, can you tell us about the Strategic Religious Engagement Hub at the Berkeley Center at Georgetown, and how that project emerged, and what is it doing, and what does it look like in its current form?

David Hunsicker: 1:10:35

Sure, yeah, so at the end of the Biden administration, we knew that there were going to be changes with the incoming Trump administration, that was no secret, and we were trying to position ourselves to best answer what we thought the Trump administration's priorities were going to be, and so one of the last tasks I had was actually working with the then director for the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, as was then called, Professor Peter Mandeville, who is professor at George Mason University, as well as affiliated with the Berkeley Center at Georgetown University, he has spent time in the State Department, was with USAID at the end of the Biden administration, and he and I together had gone to Jerusalem, Israel, the West Bank, and you know we're trying to develop a handover memo of areas where we thought the incoming Trump administration was going to be able to, you know, continue to build upon engagements with religious communities in, in the Holy Land, and, you know, recognizing that October 7 had happened, the war in Gaza was ongoing, to explore areas where they could continue to build on that, so you know, like I said, we knew that there were going to be changes, we were trying to prepare for those changes, we didn't recognize the full scale of what was to come, so you know, when not just USAID, but also the US Institute for Peace was also shuttered, and bureaus within the State Department were similarly downsized or eliminated, including the Unit for Strategic Religious Engagement, as well as the Bureau for Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the State Department, you know, a lot of these entities have been working in this religious engagement space, you know, when they were eliminated, we quickly realized that something needed to be done in order to preserve, you know, what we had learned over, you know, the last several decades of trying to do this work, and it really was Peter, who, like I said, I was working very closely with at USAID at the end of the Biden administration, who leveraged, you know, his academic positions to be able to really pivot and develop kind of a repository for the documents that were being erased, because they were literally being erased, and you know, but thankfully nothing really dies in the, in the internet, right? So things were able to be recovered, and you know, some of the documents have been, you know, put on a repository, but also looking at, okay, where is the human capital that can be, you know, brought into this effort and engaged, so that we can think about, all right, when there will be a change in the policy, you know, whether it's under the current Trump administration or a future Democratic or Republican administration, you know our experience has shown that to be successful in our diplomatic, our military, and our development objectives, we need to be engaging religious actors, and you know that's, you know, what some of us have spent decades trying to do, and we're going to be back doing it again, because it's a religion is an important part of the human experience, and religion isn't going away anytime soon. If you look at, you know, polling across the globe of the importance of religion in people's lives, those indicators are only going up in many countries. There are some places that may be, you know, Western Europe and other places that may be going in the opposite direction, but you know, even the United States is an outlier in terms of religiosity, you know, Americans may not be as attached to specific denominations or organized religion in the way they were, but they're still very spiritual, and a lot of people do identify with organized religion in ways that Western Europe does not, and in the rest of the world, religion never stopped being an important factor, so if we want to be successful in trade, we want to be successful in our diplomatic engagements, we want to be successful in having allies in our times of need, Then we're going to need to continue to engage religious actors and of all sorts, whether they be hierarchical religious leaders or grassroots individuals and communities that identify themselves religiously, we're going to need to be there and have a capacity to engage them, so we need to, you know, maintain what we can for that future, and so that's what the Strategic Religious Engagement, SRE hub is set up to do under the leadership of Dr. Mandeville, but with a robust advisory board of former policymakers and practitioners who have been doing this for a long time, both Democrats and Republicans, and lots of Independents who will continue to contribute to this effort, knowing that you know if we want the United States to be prepared for a world in which religion matters, we need to have these resources available to us.

Chip Gruen: 1:16:36

So, the question I always like to close by asking is, what am I leaving out? What is the important thing that we should be talking about that I haven't addressed with you today?

David Hunsicker: 1:16:49

First and foremost, I do want to state that, you know, anything I say or said in the course of, you know, this conversation are my personal opinions, and based on my personal experience, and is in no way reflective, necessarily, of views of current or past government agencies, including USAID. You can read the policy, the policy speaks for itself, but you know my reflections here are mine, and mine alone, do want to state that. In terms of what's being left out, I mean, you know, there's so many, you know, granular details that we could go into, and you know, tons of stories. I wish we had the time to tell, but I don't know that there's anything really that we've really left out in terms of the big picture. I'm sure as soon as I step away from this interview, something will come to mind that I wasn't able to cover, but yeah, for right now, I think we've, we've covered a lot of real estate.

Chip Gruen: 1:17:55

Well, I always say these conversations are the beginning of our relationship, not the end of it. So, when you have amassed, you know, all of those stories or there are the things that you forgot to talk about. We can, we can come back and we can rejoin the conversation.

David Hunsicker: 1:18:07

I look forward to it.

Chip Gruen: 1:18:08

David Hunsicker, thank you so much. This has been great. I feel like I didn't, I mean, I didn't know you personally, but honestly, I didn't know the extent to which this kind of work was being done on behalf of the American people, and so I thank you for your work, and I hope you get to do more of it in the future.

David Hunsicker: 1:18:31

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Chip Gruen: 1:18:35

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you'll find our contact information, links to other programming, and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.