American foreign policy globalizes human rights as a secularized redeeming duty.

Evidence

The American secular language of redemption, for all its particularity, now works as a force in the field of foreign relations to globalize human rights. For that language does, after all, draw on the idea that “freedom” and “America” are virtually interchangeable—that American political culture is (as the Bible says of the Chosen People) “a light unto the nations.” Hence “democracy,” “human rights,” and “being free” are integral to the universalizing moral project of the American nation-state—the project of humanizing the world—and an important part of the way very many Americans see themselves in contrast to their “evil” opponents. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 713

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading on America as ‘a light unto the nations’ in the bias-of-communication work on how communication technology shapes national conceit, and to the ‘evil opponents’ framing tied to present-mindedness.
• SEED: Angle: how the secularization thesis inverts — a distinctly religious idea of chosenness underwrites the universalist, secular human rights project.