The State Department provided about $500,000 in taxpayer dollars to an organization that promotes atheism in Nepal.
“For the entirety of the Biden-Harris administration, bleeding heart liberals at the State Department have played politics with foreign assistance,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability, said in a statement. “From drag shows in Ecuador to expanding atheism in Nepal to teaching basket weaving in Afghanistan, the State Department is not putting America First. It would’ve been better if they just lit the money on fire instead.”
According to the report, titled “While Taxpayers Were Sleeping: How the State Department Exports Ideology Through Foreign Assistance,” the State Department’s Office for International Religious Freedom (IRF) violated the Constitution’s Establishment Clause and “gave roughly half-a-million dollars to a UK-based, partisan humanist group to teach other humanist groups in Nepal how to proselytize and to expand atheist networks in the region.”
“This grant promoted atheism and humanism over all other religions, contravening the purpose of international religious freedom programs and jeopardizing their bipartisan congressional support,” the report says.
The Department then attempted to hide the grant’s focus on humanist beliefs and instructed the British organization to “avoid using language that implicated humanist recruitment activities in official grant documents.” The group then “doctored materials it used in its grant programming before submitting them to the Department; the Department then produced these materials to Congress and misrepresented them to be the materials as used.”
“The IRF grant promoting atheism abroad exemplifies the Department’s wanton approach to oversight of its implementing partners, disregard for congressional oversight, and willingness to use foreign assistance to push a partisan agenda,” the report asserts.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote in a piece for First Things that “funding for religious freedom initiatives may be diverted from religious minorities around the globe to support agnostics’ and atheists’ right to disbelieve in any deity and to manifest their nonbelief publicly.”
This “novel view” from the State Department suggests that “nonreligious groups deserve the imprimatur of the United States government, sometimes to the exclusion of the truly imperiled faithful,” he wrote. “And supporting these nonbelievers’ ‘freedom’ requires not only reducing state coercion of and societal discrimination against nonbelievers, but also actively promoting their worldviews, at least in certain countries.”
McCaul explained: “In particular, the Department indicated to NGOs that the proposed programs should ‘increase capacity’ of atheists and humanists to ‘form’ and ‘strengthen’ their ‘networks’ in South Asia. If you cut through the diplospeak, that translates to: We want you all to come up with ideas for expanding the presence and influence of atheists overseas.”
