The gospel of human rights

A secular religion?

There was a time when many Christians believed it their duty to spread their faith by force of arms if necessary. The European wars of the Reformation were fought over which flavor of Christianity each country would adopt. Missionaries accompanied European imperialists across the Americas, Asia and Africa, raising the cross beside their countries' national flags.

Muslims were no less martial in spreading their faith. They carried the religion in all directions from its birthplace in the Arabian peninsula: to the Indies in the east, the Atlantic in the west, the gates of Vienna in the north, equatorial Africa in the south.

Militant Christianity lost its verve over time. Battling rulers in Europe called a truce on the principle of cuius regio, eius religio—whose the reign, his the religion. Individual rulers were free to oppress religious dissidents within their own realms, but it was no longer legit to try to compel religious change across borders.

Islam kept fighting longer. Indeed certain branches, conspicuously Islamic State, are as militant as ever in trying to spread the writ of the Prophet.

Americans never waged a war specifically for religion. Yet the cult of Manifest Destiny that took hold in the mid-19th century included a large dose of militant Protestantism. And advocates of annexing the Philippines in the 1890s appealed to that same spirit, contending that the Filipinos needed to be Christianized. When it was pointed out that most Filipinos were already Catholics, the overwhelmingly Protestant American imperialists countered, "Precisely."

Almost no Americans today would dream of waging a war for religion. Such a war would violate the spirit of the First Amendment to the Constitution and the second of Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, besides trampling the sovereignty of the target nations. Europeans would be even less eager to take up arms to impose religious views, being more secularized than Americans.

And yet several American administrations and some European and other governments have boasted of their willingness to wage war on behalf of a particular moral code—one associated with a liberal interpretation of human rights. Woodrow Wilson's war to make the world safe for democracy, Roosevelt's war under the banner of the Four Freedoms, the American wars to preserve Korea and Vietnam from communism, George W. Bush's war for democracy in Iraq—all shared some of the world-saving mindset that inspired earlier, more patently religious wars.

Human rights advocates would reject this characterization. They would defend their program as thoroughly secular. They simply want all countries to respect the rights of individuals, in the manner pioneered by various countries in Western Europe and North America.

Yet the very idea of secularism has religious implications. Certain countries and cultures reject the premise of secularism—that religion can be separated from the rest of life. It took the Christian West many centuries to reach this conclusion, and in parts of the West the separation is incomplete. The monarch of Britain remains the head of the Church of England. Much of the Islamic world has yet to be convinced that the Koran shouldn’t determine the civil code.

The basic principle of human rights—the equality of individuals before the law—can be a tough sell to societies that take religion seriously. If God distinguishes between believers and infidels—as he surely does, or will do at the Last Judgment—shouldn’t his people follow his lead? Moreover, religions often have rules for living that conflict with contemporary Western notions of human rights. Homosexuality is forbidden and divorce at least frowned upon; men and women are assigned different roles; education should reinforce religious principles. 

What secularists deem the defense of individuals can come across as an attack on the religion and the community it has created. In medieval times Christians in Europe mobilized to defend their religion and their religion-based communities against Islamic attack; it shouldn’t be hard to understand that Muslim traditionalists in Iran during the time of the last shah would mobilize in defense of their religion and its community of believers. Likewise for the Taliban in Afghanistan and other conservative Muslim groups elsewhere.

Secularists preach tolerance as a virtue. But tolerance is anathema to deeply religious cultures. Attempts to impose tolerance—which is to say, to enforce the human rights agenda—can seem intolerant and threatening. Americans often fretted about “godless” communism during the Cold War; the atheism of Marx and Lenin was going to undermine America’s Judeo-Christian values. We shouldn’t be surprised when people in other countries have similar concerns.

People don’t like being told what to do, even when the telling reflects the best of intentions.