The mainstream national media downplayed a tie-breaking Senate vote by Vice President Mike Pence last week that has major ramification for persecuted minorities worldwide.

The vote confirmed Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback as the Trump administration’s U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom.

In a culture that increasingly marginalizes religion, the appointment may seem trivial. Don’t be fooled.

Brownback’s job is not to promote religion. It is to defend religious liberty as the most fundamental component of the quest for world peace.

Religious freedom, as protected domestically in the First Amendment of the Constitution, means all are free to believe as they choose. It allows all to embrace or reject belief in one god, many gods or no god.

Without religious liberty, we cannot have avowed atheists, secularists, Buddhists, Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Satanists, Muslims or others openly expressing, practicing and standing for their beliefs. We cannot have diversity and peace.

It was only on a basis of religious liberty the Supreme Court voted unanimously in 1971 to allow boxer Muhammad Ali to refuse a draft order to serve in Vietnam. Based on the First Amendment, the court ruled Ali’s beliefs “are founded on tenets of the Muslim religion as he understands them.”

Ali stood on religious liberty for its intended purpose. He helped maintain the sovereignty of individual beliefs as a cause higher than federal authority to compel military service. He kept the scope and power of government in its rightful place, as have other conscientious objectors since the Civil War.

Ali’s action did not lead to widespread abuse of religious liberty, because the courts are not easily fooled by frauds trying to exploit religion for scurrilous personal gain. Americans of all beliefs ultimately respected Ali’s stand as heroic. He wasn’t generally perceived as a draft dodger, so much as a man of genuine conviction in something he would rot in prison to defend.

As international religious freedom ambassador, Brownback faces imminent resistance from governments and uprisings that do not share American values.

The Islamic Republic if Iran wants to decimate Jews by wiping Israel off the map.

The anti-religion atheist state of North Korea torments and punishes groups and individuals for expressing or exercising religious beliefs.

The Theravada Buddhist government of Myanmar persecutes hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority.

Other persecution and killings of Muslims continue over widespread regional disputes that pit Sunni and Shiite denominations against one another.

The nondenominational mission Open Doors reports 215 million Christians – 1 in 12 – experience high levels of persecution worldwide. During the most recent annual reporting period, the organization documented 3,066 Christians killed for their beliefs; 1,252 abducted and imprisoned or detained; and 1,020 raped or sexually harassed. Enemies of Christianity attacked nearly 800 churches in the past one year of data collection.

The United Nations and the Obama administration acknowledged widespread, overseas genocide of Christians.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared Christianity “the most persecuted religion worldwide” in 2012, before anti-Christian atrocities escalated.

Huffington Post columnist Kelly James Clark, who highlights intolerance by American Christians toward American Muslims, writes “Christians in the U.S. are rank amateurs compared to the Muslim persecution of Christians in the Middle East.”

Islamic faith in the God of Abraham, as exercised by 3.3 million other American Muslims, is not the cause of overseas genocide and persecution of Christians and other religious minorities.

Islamic extremism and theocracy perpetrate most contemporary religious persecution and genocide against multiple religious demographics.

Governmental tyranny survives only in the absence of religious liberties upheld by governments founded to protect and serve individuals, without favoritism or prejudice toward their religious identities or lack of beliefs.

America’s founders knew suppression of religious liberty forms the cornerstone of tyranny, just as defense of religious liberty provides the foundation of freedom and justice.

The absence of religious liberty, as shown by Islamic oppression, allows abuse of gays and others with sexual orientations or lifestyles that do not comport with a theocracy’s values. It means the absence of equality for women and ethnic minorities. Without religious freedom, individuals have no voice in government, they lack property rights, and have no reasonable access to participation in civic life.

Brownback will advance world peace if he advocates foreign policies that promote the freedom to openly exercise any peaceful religious belief, on nonbelief, on every square inch of the planet.

Freedom, at its core, requires defense of individuals to believe and worship as they choose. Anything else leads to oppression, violence and death. That is why religious liberty became the first order of business in our country’s First Amendment.