Some Thoughts on Religion and Human Rights
Many religious people like to claim that a development for the appreciation of human rights, civil rights, and the like originated from religion. They point to this passage in the Bible, or that page of the Quran, or the leadership of various religious figures from Bartolome de las Casas to Martin Luther King Jr, and say that here lies the basis of the modern notion of human rights, here lies the source of the developments and progress in this area.
This approach comes up against a problem: why didn’t these developments start earlier? For example, if Christianity is such a great source of humanitarianism, then why wasn’t this humanitarianism expressed, say, in the 16th century when about 60,000 people were executed by Henry VIII?
Some cite the leadership of Christian people in abolishing the slave trade. But why wasn’t this humanitarianism expressed as the slave trade was getting off the ground in the 15th and 16th centuries? The response might be that the slave trade arose because of political decisions, not religious ones (that is, by European heads of state and monarchs and traders, not priests). Economics of course may explain the initial origins of the transatlantic slave trade, but were not those traders and heads of state devout Christians? Furthermore, was not the Catholic church, for example, an extremely important political, cultural and economic force in the 15th and 16th centuries?
Take earlier phenomena. If Christianity is truly the source of our modern ideas of human rights and peace, why is it that when Europe was at its most Christian, during the Middle Ages, it was positively riddled with war, torture, genocide and serfdom? Whereas today, when Europe is at its most secular in its history, it is also at its most peaceful in its history. Similar arguments could be made for other religions at other times and other places.
Since, as far as I know, the Bible and the essentials of Christian belief didn’t change much between, say, the 15th and 19th centuries, we must conclude that any changes in people’s behavior were due to cultural changes. That is, people changed their behavior from violent and racist to peaceful and tolerant not because of their religion—the religion was constant—but because of their…yes, their reasoning. They may have subsequently justified their reasoning by pointing to their religion (that is, pointing to a particular peaceful page or passage in the Bible, while ignoring another violent one), but that doesn’t change the fact that it was the reasoning and the cultural norms that was variable, while the religion was constant. In any experiment (hate to use an example from science), the components that are held constant from beginning to end are understood to not affect something that changes from beginning to end, while a thing that is variable necessarily does.
In our historical experiment, the breakdown is like this: religion-constant; humanitarianism-variable; secular cultural, political developments-variable. Which is more likely to have resulted in a change in humanitarianism, the thing that changed, or the thing that stayed constant? Of course the thing that changed.
Therefore our modern ideas and practices of human rights and peace stem from secular cultural, political and social changes that have occurred over the last several hundred years. Religion cannot be the source because it is (essentially) the same today as it was hundreds of years ago. There is no question that people have justified their newfound humanitarianism with their religion, since that was the only explanatory framework at their disposal. But this is irrelevant as to the question of the source, since, as we know, people have also used their religion to justify violence and intolerance. None of this is to say that religion is inherently inimical to human rights, just that it is not the “source” that many of the religious would like to believe. Religious figures have certainly contributed to changes and progress in the area of human rights, but only because secular forces put the ball in motion.
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