2026 International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit co-chairs Sam Brownback and Katrina Lantos Swett offered a fresh assessment of the current state of global religious liberty and the movement’s growth.
The IRF Summit, which concluded in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, is a broad coalition of religious and human rights groups that advocate for religious freedom for all people across the globe.
Co-chair Brownback previously served as ambassador at large for international religious freedom during the first Trump administration and Lantos Swett is president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice and a former chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).
Assessing the current religious freedom panorama, “we see more countries putting resources into this issue, appointing high-level envoys focused on freedom of religion or belief,” Lantos Swett told EWTN News. “So that’s on the good side of the ledger.”
“On the bad side of the ledger, the evidence now is that over 80% of the world’s population live in countries where there is some degree of repression, persecution, and societal and legal imposition on this fundamental human right,” she said.
Current concerns right now include what is known as “transnational repression.” She explained: “We increasingly are seeing some of these very bad actors in the world reaching the long hand of violence, threat, intimidation, harassment beyond their national borders.”
Lantos Swett detailed China, Iran, and Russia are at the “top of the list” of worst countries when it comes to religious freedom matters.
“We’re very concerned about the efforts by the Chinese government to engage in what I would view as a hostile takeover of the Catholic Church by appointing their own bishops and controlling what the Catholic Church is allowed to do in China,” she indicated.
There is also present “false propaganda” and even potential issues with artificial intelligence (AI) and how it “will impact for good and for ill, the defense of conscience rights.”
Infringement upon religious freedom around the world is “a massive problem,” Brownback said. “It’s probably one of the most abused human rights in the world.”
“It happens to all different faiths everywhere. It’s time the world wakes up and pushed us back against this,” Brownback said.
Agreeing with Lantos Swett, Brownback said China is “No. 1” when it comes to the worst countries for religious freedom. He also noted Nigeria and the Indian subcontinent.
In China, “they oppress their people, but then they also produce the technology that goes out to, we think, nearly 80 countries for oppression,” he said.
How religious freedom movement can take action
Those involved in the IRF movement have “been climbing up the backside of the mountain where nobody could see us for a long period of time, and now we’re up at a perch that a lot of people are shooting at us,” Brownback said during a Feb. 2 summit panel.
“Now that we’re in the center of the debate and the discussion, we’ve got to act like it. We’ve got to have our factual settings together. We’ve got to be careful and cautious, but bold and courageous,” he said.
“At the same time, we’ve got to form alliances and pull people in, not just from religious freedom, but also from democracy movements, from security movements to make this … a global movement, a grassroots movement, because that’s where we win as a global grassroots movement.”
Lantos Swett expanded further on what the movement needs to do next. She said the cause for religious liberty is bigger than the “politics of the day.” The cause “is more profound and ultimately more unifying than the many things that pull us apart.”
“We have become deeply divided, deeply hostile towards those who don’t agree with us politically or on some other criteria. But Ambassador Brownback and I certainly have felt that as it relates to the fight to defend religious freedom for everyone everywhere, it is of paramount importance that this remain really not just a bipartisan cause but a nonpartisan cause,” she said.
The “movement is growing” in part to “an unease about the pervasive nihilism we see in the world around us,” Lantos Swett said. “You know, nihilism, this philosophy, either moral nihilism, there’s no such thing as right and wrong. Or as existential nihilism, life itself has no meaning, no purpose. It’s a terrible way to live. It’s a terrible way for a community and a society to feel.”
“I do think, especially maybe even among young people, that you sense that they’re moving away from that somewhat aimless and nihilistic view of life and searching for something more meaningful.”
“I hope that that will also help us recruit a new generation of leaders to this movement because they are starting to understand how important it is to have a defining purpose and sense of meaning and consequence to your life,” she said.
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