Christian Human Rights

by Samuel Moyn

In Christian Human Rights , Samuel Moyn asserts that the rise of human rights after World War II was prefigured and inspired by a defense of the dignity of the human person that first arose in Christian churches and religious thought in the years just prior to the outbreak of the war. The Roman Catholic Church and transatlantic Protestant circles dominated the public discussion of the new principles in what became the last European golden age for the Christian faith. At the same time, West European governments after World War II, particularly in the ascendant Christian Democratic parties, became more tolerant of public expressions of religious piety. Human rights rose to public prominence in the space opened up by these dual developments of the early Cold War.

Moyn argues that human dignity became central to Christian political discourse as early as 1937. Pius XII's wartime Christmas addresses announced the basic idea of universal human rights as a principle of world, and not merely state, order. By focusing on the 1930s and 1940s, Moyn demonstrates how the language of human rights was separated from the secular heritage of the French Revolution and put to use by postwar democracies governed by Christian parties, which reinvented them to impose moral constraints on individuals, support conservative family structures, and preserve existing social hierarchies. The book ends with a provocative chapter that traces contemporary European struggles to assimilate Muslim immigrants to the continent's legacy of Christian human rights.

Genres: History, Religion, Christianity, Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction

264 pages, Hardcover

First published September 4, 2015

About the author

Samuel Moyn is professor of law and history at Harvard University. He is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, and Christian Human Rights (2015), among other books, as well as editor of the journal Humanity. He also writes regularly for Foreign Affairs and The Nation.

Reviews

[Kimba Tichenor · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Harvard University, details the conservative Christian origins of the immediate postwar interest in human rights. However, in making this argument, Moyn is not suggesting that human rights emerged from a long Judeo-Christian tradition, but rather from a fairly recent development within Christianity, particularly within Catholicism -- the rise of personalism in the early 1900s and its emphasis on human dignity. In fact, he argues that for centuries, the notion of individual rights" was anathema to the corporatist and hierarchical churches. In making this argument, he points to a few leading conservative Protestants and Catholics who played leading roles in the advancement of human rights in the postwar era and in some cases were active in the formation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. He argues that for these Christians, the promotion of human rights in the immediate postwar era had less to do with Nazi crimes against the Jews and more to do with their concern about a new enemy -- communism. Thus, the promotion of freedom of religion as a universal human right emerged in a religious framework rather than a secular one, meaning it was intended to protect Christianity and the West from godless communism. He supports this argument by pointing to the larger context in which postwar human rights emerged -- the rise of conservative Christian democracy in Europe, the resurgence of interest in natural law, and cultural conservatism in the United States.

While Moyn makes a very thought-provoking argument, this books is not without its problems. First and foremost, it too often reads more like a polemic than a history. The author's disregard for religion is readily apparent throughout the text; in fact, he seems to suggest that it is the Christian origins of the postwar narrative of human rights that has ruined human rights today -- even though he claims that Christian human rights died in the 1960s, replaced by a secular understanding of human rights in the 1970s. He argues that the reason that the European Convention has repeatedly ruled against Muslim expressions of religion can be traced to the original definition of religious freedom, which was intended to protect Christianity from godless communism. Islam, he asserts, has replaced communism as the enemy of religious (Christian) freedom. Thus, rather than current prejudice and bias against Muslims that finds expression in flawed court judgements of the European Convention, the problem is a fundamental flaw in how religious freedom in the immediate postwar was formulated. Moyn's seeming disdain for religion also finds expression in the break he wants to draw between Christian human rights of the 1940s to early 1960s and secular human rights in the 1970s and thereafter. This break ignores the reality that Christian missionaries in countries such as South Korea played an active role in transnational human rights activism in the 1970s and beyond. In fact, their activism contributed to a new geopolitical orientation in human rights activism. But these missionaries did not engage in human rights activism despite their religious convictions, but because of them.

This brings us to the final problem of the book. It is too selective in its discussion of religious influences on the immediate postwar era. Although Moyn does acknowledge that there was a Christian left (both in Protestantism and Catholicism), he focuses exclusively on the Christian right in his analysis. Thus, he does not discuss the origins of personalism in leftist Catholic circles. In the 1920s, many of those who advocated personalism, were subject to censure by the church and were not rehabilitated until the postwar era. Rather he begins his narrative of personalism's history after it has been co-opted by the Pope. Yet, even then, his discussion is selective, arguing that there is no need to discuss how the Pope deployed personalism for positions on family and labor because it was not yet systematic. For anyone who has read the 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii, this assertion is wrong. In this encyclical, Pius XI utilizes personalism to advance a companionate model of marriage, but one in which there is a clear hierarchical relationship between husband and wife, not to mention between the married couple and the church. Given the late twentieth century discussion of women's rights as human rights and sexual politics, his decision to skip over the importance of this encyclical seems strange, as at one level it would support his argument. However, the incorporation of personalism found in this encyclical would have consequences for the Church, one that opened the door to challenging some traditional arguments about the relationship between man and women, between church and married couple, and between church and society. Thus, by largely ignoring the religious left, Moyn missed an opportunity to offer a much more nuanced argument of how Christianity informed secular human rights discussions in the immediate postwar era and beyond.

Moyn readily admits in his epilogue that this book was only a start point for a further discussion of religious influences on postwar secular society. As such, it is well worth the read, even though at many levels its analysis is flawed. Still in detailing the contributions of many conservative Christians to the postwar narrative of human rights, Moyn demonstrates the ways in which the narrative of human rights can be misused to advance a West and the rest history.

[Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a dense and erudite minority report on the relationship between Christianity and the human rights tradition in post-WW2 Europe. In it, Moyn challenges the common idea that Christianity’s alliance with human rights language was a progression or concession to modernity. Rather, Moyn reads the Christian human rights tradition as a conservative resistance to the twin enemies of failed fascism and secular communism. The book ultimately begs the question of whether or not rights language has any discrete content at all. Moyn’s ideas are combative but well argued. His prose is lithe but difficult. Overall he has produced a volume worth wrestling with.

[Pablo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anyone interested in human rights needs to read this book. More importantly, if you are skeptical or readily dismiss the idea of human rights as a "liberal" pursuit by naive idealist (like many in my evangelical circle), then you ESPECIALLY need to read this book. The main argument advanced is that the language of human rights was constitutionalized by right-wing Christian fundamentalist with ties and hopes for a globalized liberal democracy. I've felt for awhile that we need a new framework for human rights... I finally know why.

[Jonathan Badgley · Rating 5 out of 5]

First a note on style. The writing is difficult for me either as it requires one to hold the subject and verb in mind over too many subordinate clauses, or it simply demands too much background familiarity with its subjects. On occasion there were metaphors, casual language or euphemisms that would have been more easily understood with clearer and direct language. Maybe this is an issue of style for the entire field, or maybe it’s an issue for Moyn, but it would have otherwise caused me to rate the book lower had the content not been so illuminating.

Moyn argues that contemporary readings of the rise, exploration and explication of human rights has long-since rejected or forgotten the crucial role that Christianity played in the introduction of human dignity and subsequently human rights as a defining feature of political theorizing. First, Christians introduced through constitutions like the Irish in 1937 and other organizational or foundational statements. Second, Christians were the first to develop the move to a an individualism that was palatable to non-socialists, Personalism (a distinction of “/cultural meaning/“ and not literal), which moved the focus on rights from groups to individuals, but by way conservatisms such as appeals to natural law. Christians were concerned to protect religious values, practices and political role against the many political and cultural forces at work in the period including the polar forms of totalitarianism, Nazism and Communism, as well as secularism, materialism, and relativism. Third, Moyn describes the emergence of what he calls Christian Realism (adherents include Jimmy Carter, Barrack Obama, and principally Reinhold Niebuhr) which is a Christianity that understands that the world is dangerous and attempts to negotiate the demands of the nebulous and forming human rights with the practical concerns of national and international politics. He provides a background on German-Lutheran scholar Gerhard Ritter who is the first historian of human rights and a Christian Realist (I would call a pragmatists) who had conservative, if not chauvinistic leanings. Finally, Moyn describes the threaded space Christian democracies have navigated between communism and secularism by working out ways in which contemporary secular democracies have abandoned religious freedom while having previously depended on it to engage with communism while those democracies were still Christian.

In the epilogue Moyn considers what Christianity is in relation to political movements, or rather he considers how human rights fails to on its own provide its own basis and humanness, like a good religion would with metaphysics, liturgy and ritual. How can human rights survive? And how can Christianity survive? The epilogue also features a now-favorite quote of mine by Alfred Loisy: Jesus Christ preached the coming of the Kingdom of God; unfortunately, it is the Church that arrived.

[Logan Streondj · Rating 3 out of 5]

While it says this is about "Christian Human Rights", it would be better to say "Christians that supporoted Human Rights". Cause it doesn't mention anything at all about biblical justifications or anything Jesus said, but rather the focus is mostly on people who happened to be Christian and promoted Human Rights in their own way. Many of said promoters didn't even seem to be theologically Christians but rather were lip service Christians but actually Humanists.
The pope said a few things in favour of human rights, that was the most Christian thing in this book.

[Gregory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating history! Although not a Christian himself, Moyn is honest with the evidence that it was Christian theologians, politicians and writers who advocated and implented the notion of "human rights" in the modern period.

[Ivar Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heavy stuff.

[hoffnarr · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, provocative, and as always with Moyn, a beautifully written book. The scope of the argument is a lot less than the title might suggest, and its constituent parts could have told a more cohesive story. There was not enough engagement with the variety of literature on this already.