At the end of this bloodiest of centuries, humanity seems to have been given a second chance; the world seems to have entered a new “springtime of nations.” This new climate has much to do with the human-rights revolution that has swept the globe in recent years.
What do we mean when we talk of human rights? It obviously means different things to different people. To heroes of freedom like Lech Walesa and Václav Havel, the term meant respect for basic human decencies; it meant protection from coercive and tyrannical state power; it meant a “normal” society. And on behalf of that kind of “normality,” Walesa and Havel and others like them led a nonviolent revolution in 1989.
But in established democracies like our own, human rights has taken on an ever-more-elastic meaning. Some would have it that abortion on demand and legalized homosexual “marriage” are human rights. But that cannot be true.
What, then, does the phrase mean? And what does it have to do with religious freedom, which has been called the “first freedom”? If human rights are not to degenerate into a kind of rhetorical trump card, to be played on behalf of the counterculture when reasonable arguments fail, we must go back to the beginning and try to set the notion of human rights on a more solid foundation. Who is the author of human rights? Who is the bearer of rights? What is the relationship of rights to obligations?
We must begin by considering what freedom is—and is not. In the contemporary world, freedom has too frequently meant doing what we like—so long as nobody else gets hurt. But that is not the concept of freedom that grows out of Christian tradition. Nor was it the concept that animated our country’s founders. For them, freedom was not a matter of doing what we want; it was a matter of having the right to do what we ought. Rights had the characteristics of means to a larger end; they weren’t an end in themselves. They were the means to the fulfillment of obligations.
Consider, for example, what our country’s founders meant by free speech. The citizen had obligations to the community; thus, he or she had the right to speak freely, and without fear of state persecution, on matters of public policy. For the citizen, free speech was not simply being able to say anything that came to mind just because it “felt right.” Freedom of speech was a means to a public good: the open, civil conversation that is the lifeblood of democracy.
The First Human Right
Over the past 25 years, there has been much talk in our churches about “rights” to education, food, health care, employment, and so forth. (Some have asserted a “right” to cable-TV access!) It surely detracts from the power of the concept of human rights if every imaginable human good is considered a right. But we should also have learned, through the witness of the heroes of freedom in the ex-communist world, that some rights must make other goods possible. For example, until a society can ensure political freedoms and such civil rights as freedom of assembly and an independent judiciary, it cannot produce and justly distribute the economic, social, and cultural goods that are important to a fully human life.
But the most basic human right of all—and the foundation for any morally serious scheme of civil rights—is freedom of religion. Religious freedom is the first human right for two reasons. First, it teaches us that within every person is a privileged sanctuary of conscience into which no earthly power can tread. Any earthly power that tries to invade that sanctuary—as communism did—is fundamentally illegitimate and immoral.
Second, by establishing that zone of freedom at the deepest level of our person, religious freedom sets a barrier against the pretensions of the state. The state is not omnicompetent—indeed, in matters that lie at the heart of our humanity, the state is incompetent. Thus it was no accident that those who led the nonviolent revolution that overthrew communism in central and eastern Europe cared first and foremost about religious freedom.
Religious freedom is not simply a matter of respect for the consciences of others (although it surely involves that). The right of religious freedom has to do with our obligation, as creatures endowed with intelligence and free will, to seek the truth. We cannot embrace the truth fully unless we can search for the truth freely. Coerced faith is no faith. Or, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger put it in 1986, “God wishes to be adored by people who are free.”
Put another way, human rights—including the right to worship freely—are not benefits that the state distributes at its pleasure. Human rights, properly understood, are immunities from coercive state power. And men and women enjoy those immunities precisely because they are human beings. We have human rights because we are persons—created in the image of God—not just because we are citizens. The good state will be the one that understands that citizenship, while important, is secondary to personhood.
One Sure Foundation
No discussion of rights is complete, however, without reference to a larger issue: Can a society that respects human rights sustain itself without a vibrant faith in the God of the Bible? Many have tried over the past two hundred years to construct a defense of human rights without references to the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Some arguments have a certain intellectual elegance about them. And we cannot deny that people who have not received the gift of faith have, in fact, been brave and effective witnesses to the truth about freedom.
But the surest foundation for a scheme of human rights that both protects individual conscience and resists the temptation to dissipate into libertinism is the conviction that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God: as creatures with intellect and free will, as created beings with rights and obligations. And that is why the worldwide human-rights revolution of recent years has been so fervently supported by millions of Christian men and women and tens of thousands of Christian activists.
Christian participation in the human-rights movement—in Latin America, east Asia, Africa, central and eastern Europe—has been vigorous, sustained, and irresistible. Why? Because Christians have known that, in serving their oppressed human brothers and sisters, they are serving the God who wishes to be adored by people who are free.
