This essay has two parts. It begins with an introduction to the 1998 U.S. International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) and the bureaucratic and administrative structures it created. This programming is the latest installment in a history of U.S. attempts to promote American strategic interests through social and religious engineering projects abroad. During the Cold War, the U.S. sought to secure "global spiritual health." Today it promotes religious freedom. The second part analyzes the political consequences of employing the discourse of religious freedom in a specific context. It explores responses to the Arab spring and the conflict in Syria that emphasize the dangers of Christian persecution. By foregrounding religion over other social ties, it is argued, this response lends itself to interpretations of the Syrian war as a sectarian conflict in which the rights of Syrian Christians will be threatened by the political empowerment of a Sunni majority. Relying on religion as a policy category thus obscures complex causal factors on the ground, and, by reducing conflict to "religious" warfare, makes it more difficult to respond intelligently to the complex causes of violence in Syria.