Religion and rights.

Catholic Insight happily welcomes a new contributor to our pages. Dr. Roney tackles the clash between aggressive secularism and religion, currently much debated in North America. He adds a much-needed historical perspective.

--Editor

Recent rulings of the Canadian Supreme Court, notably those on gay "marriage," pit human rights against religion, as though these were competing interests.

The notion has become widespread. Heather Mallick in the Globe argued that freedom of religion means "churchy people ... have no say in government." (1) Arundhati Roy scolds U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft for the comment "freedoms are not the grant of any government or document, but our endowment from God." (2) This is apparently religious intolerance. An Orwellian inversion, this, repression of religion redefined as religious freedom.

A single, divine Father

For what Ashcroft says is plainly true. He paraphrases the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Note the assumptions that there was a creation, and that there is a Creator. According to Jefferson, human rights are a gift from God.

Attacking religion in the name of human rights seems like sawing off the limb on which we sit. Or were the framers of the Declaration of Independence mad in seeing human rights as itself an essentially religious concept? If so, Sir Ernest Barker is also mad. With earlier writers, he traces the doctrine of inalienable human rights directly to St. Thomas Aquinas, a.k.a. "the first Whig." (3) Aquinas, developing earlier Church principles, argues in De regimine principium that government is a human creation, and may be revoked or limited by the community if tyrannical.

John Locke too was mad. Philosophical godfather of the doctrine of human rights, Locke spills much ink arguing that human inequality is a human, not a divine, creation. "There [is] ... nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species ... should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above the other." (4) Creation by a common God, whose will is revealed in Scripture, is the basis for human equality.

So too the Levellers, who were arguably the first modern egalitarians. In the 17th-century English revolution, they summarized their doctrine of political equality in a little jingle: "When Adam delved, and Eve span,/ Who then was the gentleman?" Locke indeed takes pains to show the impossibility of tracing any particular line of descent from Adam. This, to his religious mind, demonstrates equality: there is no senior branch of the human family.

So it all goes back to the Bible. The New Testament commandment to love others as yourself necessarily implies human equality. Locke quotes the passage to make his point: "It is no less their [men's] duty, to love others than themselves." (5)

For in what other sense are humans equal? Not in accomplishments or in innate ability. Wishful thinking aside, it is fairly obvious that Einstein or Li Bai had abilities I do not. Not in the mathematical sense, of being identical or interchangeable. Anyone can see I am not Jennifer Lopez. It is in the sense of all being in the same fundamental relationship to ultimate value; that is, all equally creatures of the one Father God. All men are therefore, as the slogan of the French Revolution (Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite) had it, "brothers," hence all equally loved by Him, as children are equally loved by their parents. As Locke puts it, "Men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master.... there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us ... as if we were made for one another's uses." (6)

In sum, the concept of a single divine Father, a common Creator, is essential to the doctrine of human equality. "Men," Rousseau explains, "as all being children of the same God, look on one another as brothers." (7) The equality of man is not otherwise "self-evident." It was not self-evident to Caligula or to Aristotle. (8)

What about an alternative?

Let us consider the alternative. For pagans, for polytheists, it is plausible for certain groups to claim direct ancestry from this or that god, at this or that time. Zeus raped Leda and conceived dynasties. Japanese emperors descended directly from the sun, as did Egyptian pharaohs. Such dynasties may claim absolute superiority: they are semi-divine. The average man is born only of rocks or clay. At the very least, men are not brothers. Shamanic tribes can see themselves uniquely as descendants of a divine ancestor. Their name for themselves as a tribe is often also their word for human beings. The implications of this are commonly forgotten, but sinister: other groups are not human.

Politically, Christianity's innovation was human equality and human dignity, human rights; and this is underlined by the commonness of Jesus, by his opposition to the law, by his blessing of the poor, of the little. Two centuries ago, when Korean Confucian officials first acquired translations of Christian texts, their reaction was universal: this was a radical new political philosophy demanding human equality.

Important too is Christianity's separation of church and state. The Bible calls for this explicitly: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; render unto God what is God's." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no democrat, no advocate of human rights, but a believer in the social contract, saw Christianity's significance as this separation: "Jesus established on earth a kingdom of the spirit. The result of this was that a schism developed between the theological and the political systems.... "(9) This in turn makes it possible for citizens to appeal to an objective standard of right and wrong, beyond the present laws of the present government. In practical as well as theoretical terms, from this flow inalienable rights.

Rousseau is no friend to clergy, nor Christianity, nor to any organized church. Nevertheless, even he asserts that "no man can be either a good citizen or a faithful subject" without a belief in "the existence of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent, and bountiful God." Those who do not believe this, he insists, shockingly enough, must be banished from the state. They are, he believes, incapable of the social contract. (10) The case seems clear; although Rousseau's intolerance of atheism would scandalize later liberal thinkers like Mill, the doctrine of human rights at least requires a foundation of religious belief in the society as a whole. Those opposing religion now may claim that, whatever the history, human rights are now established. We can accordingly dispense with God. The child has outgrown the Father's house. True, the doctrine of human rights is now accepted, in theory, worldwide. Something like liberal democracy can be found in traditional territories of all the world's great religions: Hinduism's India, Judaism's Israel, Buddhism's Japan, Islam's Malaysia.

But all these universalistic faiths hold the concept of a supreme Creator God. That may still be crucial. This includes, contrary to common misconception, Hinduism, conceded to be monotheistic by Islam centuries ago; and Japanese Buddhism, conceded to be monotheistic by Freemasonry generations ago. These universalistic faiths are very different from paganism, or secularism.

And the expansion of human equality and human rights continues to be a generally religious enterprise. Barker speaks of "a large clerical tinge." (11) In 1599, the Jesuit Mariana already advocated a right to tyrannicide. (12) The enshrinement of human rights in the U.S. Constitution evolves directly from America's creation by religious groups seeking freedom of conscience. Lord Acton, the greatest liberal mind of the nineteenth century, was a devout Catholic, and saw his two passions, religious and political, as profoundly linked. The abolition of slavery was a religious movement; review the lyrics to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The civil rights struggle of the 1960s was a religious movement, led by Rev. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Decolonization was a religious enterprise, led a fact now oddly forgotten--by missionaries, and by Mahatma Gandhi, influenced, he claimed, by the Sermon on the Mount. In Korea, democratization is still led by the Christian minority. In the Philippines, democratization is still led by the Church.

What about Canada?

But what is now developing in Canada? What of a return to polytheistic paganism or shamanism, now rather fashionable, or a move to "scientific' secularism?

Inequality can return. We have seen it happen. Buddhist Japan is democratic; but an officially Shinto Japan only recently rejected human rights. In Germany, Nazi racial theory was based on the rejection of traditional Judaeo-Christian ethics, which Nietzsche called the "morality of slaves." Depending on their personal preference, Nazi ideologues called either for a return to properly German, pagan values, or for a more "scientific" view.

Science cannot show that humans are equals, much less that they possess inalienable rights. Rather, the application of proper scientific principles to human society--"social Darwinism"--suggested survival of the fittest: an eternal struggle of race against race for evolutionary dominance, supposedly producing a new species, the "Superman." There is a reason Christ was crucified: religions are troublesome to the powerful. Religions mean moral checks and independent appeals; religions suppose and defend human rights. Better for the unprincipled to clear them from the agora.

The current drive for abortion rights and specific protections for homosexuals has nothing to do with human rights. There is no philosophical reason to make these behaviours, and not other behaviours, "inalienable human rights." Nobody conceives an inalienable right to smoke or watch TV. What this is about is a presumed right to relatively unrestricted sex. No human right is involved, but something a self-indulgent ruling class might well want, as Caligula sought it, as Henry VIII sought it, as Fascist Japan or Germany sought it with forced prostitution. As Pope John Paul and John Locke have both noted, freedom is not licence, sexual or otherwise, but its opposite. Freedom is not freedom "for every one to do what he lists," but freedom to do what is right according to one's conscience. (13)

But demanding sexual licence has the added advantage of being a direct assault on religion. Pushing religion out of politics is the removal of a check on the actions of a ruling group. Which is to say, in both theoretical and practical terms, what is now called "human rights" is a direct assault on human rights. Theoretically, because all human rights, historically and philosophically, spring from the right of conscience, from freedom of religion. Practically, because the existence of religion as an independent moral authority has been a check on government, since the days of the prophets. The pope has many legions--of angels.

God forbid that this Orwellian gambit should cause thoughtless believers in human equality to oppose religion. The two are one. Those who believe in the dignity of man, and those who believe in God, are and must stay on the same side now. It is the price of liberty.

Endnotes

(1.) "Dear John Paul: Don't Even Think about It," Saturday, August 9, 2003

(2.) "Seize the Time," In These Times magazine, July 2003.

(3.) Barker, Social Contract (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. ix.

(4.) Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government, II:4. Emphasis mine.

(5.) Ibid., II:5.

(6.) Ibid., II:6.

(7.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, VIII.

(8.) Aristotle, Politics, I:5.

(9.) Rousseau, op. cit.

(10.) Ibid.

(11.) Barker, op cit., p. x.

(12.) De Rege et Regis Institutione, 1599.

(13.) Locke, op. cit., II:6.

Stephen Roney teaches English at University College of the Cariboo, Kamloops, BC.