HUMAN RIGHTS & RELIGION: An argument with Michael Perry.

Now that the campaign season is over, we can get down to serious arguments over the role of religion in American politics. Some sea change seems to have taken place--beyond the use of religious rhetoric to win votes. Dogmatic secularists sound more tentative as they reiterate the received faith that religious belief has no place in public policy debates. I even find myself newly convinced that people who are religious should raise their voices in the public square. Until lately I had been more or less brainwashed by the secular elite to feel that the faithful should keep their convictions to themselves. But why should secularists effectively establish the religion of no-religion, and declare off limits the deepest moral commitments of the faithful?

Yet some proponents of the validity of religious argument in public life go too far. At the moment I am engrossed in the books of legal scholar Michael J. Perry, a thinker I credit with helping me change my mind about the correctness of resolutely secular public discourse. I enthusiastically agree with most of Perry's positions in The Idea of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 1998), but balk at his assertion that the idea of human rights is "ineliminably religious." Ineliminably? Perry is not claiming that those without a transcendent religious faith won't defend human rights in practice, or that they will be personally immoral. But he contends that those without faith will not possess an intellectual foundation sufficiently grounded to sustain a commitment to the inviolability of individual human lives. When push comes to shove, Perry argues, those without a transcendent religious belief in the benevolent meaning of the universe will wilt under utilitarian pressure and fail to justify and protect human rights as inalienable and inviolate. Only a commitment to sacred reality can maintain the sacredness of human life.

Perry makes his argument sound convincing by quoting reams of the rantings and ravings of Friedrich Nietzsche as he asserts the nonexistence of morality and the hypocrisy of religion. OK, so dogmatic atheists and nihilists could never defend the inviolable value of human life, since everything is meaningless. In a moral void, might might as well make right since only the triumph of the will exists.

But most secular unbelievers we know are not dogmatic atheists or nihilists. The elites that make up current intellectual establishments are agnostics, unconvinced that the Alpha and Omega sustains all being. A typical expression of skepticism, which I found recently in an issue of Free Inquiry, has Quentin Smith asserting that "the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing."

This may sound like a case of invincible nihilism. But note that Smith bases his doubt on an affirmation of reason, as in "reasonable belief." I would contend that any skeptic who affirms the reality and meaningful authority of reason can defend the moral reality that undergirds the existence of human rights.

Suppose I had been born on a huge ship that had been sailing for billions of years on an endless sea. I might doubt those who told me why and where our voyage had originated and where it was destined to go. But I could not deny the accumulated historical record of the passengers' life on board. Human beings possess self-consciousness, powers of reasoning, innate emotion, and loving attachments. Unimpaired adults regularly give allegiance to internalized moral standards of worth, known as conscience. Human beings create families, religions, art, science, politics, ethics, and literature. Yes, evil exists, as in the many instances of violence, slavery, deceit, torture, cruelty, and selfish exploitation among the passengers. But these manifestations of evil never prevail on the ship. And those passengers most universally admired as wise and good always condemn evil and proclaim the intrinsic values of compassion, justice, and equality. Does not reason have to acknowledge the existence of moral truths as a central reality informing the human story?

Discussions of moral truths, with a small t, can be carried on with skeptical agnostics who live this side of Nietzscheland. Almost all scientists, thank God, are unpolluted by postmodern excesses and remain card-carrying members of the party of critical reason. Even if it is getting near the remains of the day, we can still count on the Enlightenment's commitment to reason. Agnostics and secular humanists can be allies in maintaining the barricades against barbarism. Think of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

I could also cite the cloud of witnesses who affirm the reality of human rights although going to the grave as unbelievers. (I think of George Orwell, whose biography I have been reading.) In some cases, those who doubt the existence of God have put all their eggs in humanity's basket, and rationally endorse the sacredness of human rights with more fervor than the faithful. If, by chance, you are now beginning to feel doubts about whether the powers of reason can knock out the forces of nihilism, turn again to John Paul II's Fides et ratio. The pope vigorously defends human reason as a gift of our Good Creator and reiterates the optimistic Roman Catholic belief that faith and reason can never remain in contradiction.

So as we gird for future political struggles, let believers confidently carry their faith convictions on the sacredness of human life into the public arena. And as the faithful seek to persuade their fellow citizens, they can be unrelenting in relying on reasonable arguments. Remember, the Hound of Heaven pursues us and attracts us through the force of reason as well as love.