Presidential candidate Joe Biden has an initiative to create policy changes that align with religious values. This applies to BYU students of all religions uniting when it comes to political action.

Josh Dickson, the national faith engagement director for the Biden campaign, said religion plays an essential role in the campaign because different faiths can make an impact on policy changes. Dickson explained the campaign’s common good policy agenda aligns with the values people of faith have.

Dickson was previously a recruitment director for Teach for America at BYU and worked for the Obama re-election campaign. In his current role, he leads and promotes functions including interfaith events, phone banking, voter education protection and “off the record” conversations to build relationships with various faiths.

One of his team’s main goals is to ensure that people of faith feel valued and important to the campaign, Dickson said. “We are building this broad, robust, diverse coalition that we think very much aligns with the common good values that the vice president and Sen. (Kamala) Harris are fighting for,” Dickson said.

One of the campaign’s main focuses is to ensure that people of faith are able to engage on the state level. Dickson said BYU students of all faiths can make an impact in local and national elections by connecting based on their shared values.

One of the main ways Biden and his national faith engagement team reach out to people in the religious community and make them feel valued is by hosting interfaith events where the campaign staff hears people of different faiths share experiences and discuss how to better the country’s moral system.

“They may be coming at those values from different perspectives, different faiths, from different traditions, from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. But when they can find those real points of unity, I think that’s where there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for doing great work together,” Dickson said.

Laith Habahbeh, a senior at BYU who is Muslim said he has seen common values between his faith and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Islam is a very conservative religion and has something similar to the Word of Wisdom, Habahbeh said.

When Habahbeh was asked if religion has been a core focus in this year’s local and national elections, he said politicians utilize religion as a way to get ahead. “I feel like most political parties try to include religion as part of the process. This is just my personal opinion, but I don’t think it is genuine or out of actual honesty from the political candidates.”

Kayla Perry, a Baptist, is a junior neuroscience major. She said politics and religion are closely tied because people hold political views based on their beliefs. “I think religion plays a really big factor in politics because religion often goes hand in hand with policies. For example, whether you are pro-choice or pro-life, that’s strongly tied back to your religious background.”

BYU can see greater unity on racial, religious and political issues when people start listening to understand people with different viewpoints are saying, Perry said.

(RNS) — The State Department no longer is making publicly available a number of statistics about refugees admitted into the United States, including their religious affiliation.

A spokesperson for the department cited two main reasons for the changes, which took place Friday (Oct. 9): the development of a new information technology system, which won’t be completed until December 2021, and concerns about privacy.

The department eventually will produce more reports after the system is completed, but the spokesperson could not confirm whether they would include religion data. Meanwhile, the “interactive reporting feature” that contained religion-related data on refugees already has vanished.

“The interactive reporting feature will not return due to privacy concerns,” the spokesperson told Religion News Service. “The specific reports that will be available are yet to be confirmed but will take into account data protection and refugee privacy concerns.”

RELATED: Trump aims to protect persecuted Christians, but some aren’t sure he’s helping

The shift has raised concerns from at least one of the faith-based organizations tasked with resettling refugees in the country. The data helped groups such as World Relief track whether the federal government is living up to its pledges to help those facing religious persecution.

“It certainly will make it more difficult to hold our government accountable to its commitments to protect those fleeing violations of their religious liberty globally,” said Matthew Soerens, U.S. director of church mobilization and advocacy for World Relief and national coordinator for the Evangelical Immigration Table.

Soerens also said he has never heard privacy concerns raised about the information previously shared by the State Department. All of that data, he said, was aggregated and anonymous.

World Relief, an evangelical Christian organization that works with the U.S. government to resettle refugees, relied on State Department data to document what it calls “the startling reduction in the resettlement of persecuted Christians and other religious minorities” in a report it issued last summer with Open Doors USA, Soerens said.

The data showed a precipitous drop in recent years in the number of Christian refugees admitted to the U.S. from the 50 countries at the top of Open Doors USA’s World Watch List. The annual list tracks the places where Christians face the worst persecution. 

President Donald Trump promised in his first days in office to make helping persecuted Christians a priority for his administration.

But the last numbers made available by the State Department — which Soerens downloaded Friday before they disappeared from the department’s website — show the number of Christians admitted from those countries dropped 83.2% from fiscal years 2016 to 2020.

Just 2,811 Christian refugees were admitted to the U.S. from the countries on the World Watch List in fiscal 2020, which ended last month. By contrast, 16,714 Christians from those countries were admitted to the United States in fiscal 2016, former President Barack Obama’s last full year in office.

Overall, 8,720 Christian refugees were admitted to the U.S. this past year, nearly a 77% drop since 2016. At the same time, 2,600 Muslim refugees were admitted, more than a 93% drop since Obama’s last full year in office.

This year’s sharp decline in refugees is partially attributable to the ongoing pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus, but the change predated the virus: Trump has repeatedly slashed total refugee admissions to historic lows each year he has been in office and this year he proposed only allowing a maximum 15,000 refugees into the U.S.

By comparison, Obama set that number at 110,000 his last year in office.

RELATED: Faith-based organizations express outrage over plan to cut refugee admissions to historic low — again

Soerens said the State Department now will only broadly release how many refugees have fled their countries based on “religious persecution.”

That includes those who qualify under the Lautenberg Program, which admits citizens of former Soviet-bloc countries who are members of certain religious minorities and have family in the U.S. They are not required to demonstrate the same individual fear of persecution other refugees do, he said.

The work of helping refugees find a home in America is largely done by faith-based organizations such as World Relief.

Of the nine groups authorized by the U.S. government to resettle refugees, six claim a religious affiliation. Others include Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.