Religion and Rights : The Oxford Amnesty Lectures [1 ed.] 9780719095214, 9780719082559

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Religion and rights

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The Oxford Amnesty Lectures Also available War on terror: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2006, ed. Chris Miller Incarceration and human rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2007, ed. Melissa McCarthy

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Religion and rights The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2008 edited by

Wes Williams

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2011 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 07190 8254 2 hardback ISBN 978 07190 8255 9 paperback First published 2011 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Notes on contributors Preface and acknowledgements Introduction Rights and religion: spaces for argument and agreement Wendy James

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1 Race, faith and freedom in American and British history Simon Schama Response to Simon Schama Matthew Spooner

21 40

2 Pentecost: learning the languages of peace Stanley Hauerwas Response to Stanley Hauerwas Pamela Sue Anderson

49 67

3 Human rights in the Roman Catholic tradition Charles E. Curran Response to Charles E. Curran Nicholas Bamforth

73 83

4 Worldviews and universalisms: the doctrine of ‘religion’ in Islam and the idea of ‘rights’ in the West Hisham A. Hellyer Response to Hisham A. Hellyer Chris Miller

86 97

5 Terror and religion Ronald Dworkin Response to Ronald Dworkin John Tasioulas

104 116

6 Can human rights accommodate pluralism? Chantal Mouffe Response to Chantal Mouffe Stuart White

121 133

7 Symposium: Freedom of belief, freedom from belief 7.1 The tolerance policy: way out or compromise? Asma Jahangir 7.2 Religion and rights A. C. Grayling

138 138 142

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7.3 Freedom and human rights John Pritchard 7.4 The right to believe Andrew Brown 7.5 Out with ‘religion’: a novel framing of the religion debate Emma Cohen Index

145 149 151 157

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Notes on contributors

PAMELA SUE ANDERSON is Reader in Philosophy of Religion at Oxford University and

a Fellow of Regent’s Park College. She is the author of (amongst other works) Ricoeur and Kant: Philosophy of the Will (1993), and A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (1998); she also edited (with Beverley Clack) the landmark collection, Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings (2004). NICHOLAS BAMFORTH is University Lecturer in Law at Oxford University and a Fellow of the Queen’s College. He is the editor of a previous series of Oxford Amnesty Lectures, Sex Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2002 (2005), and author (with D. A. J. Richards) of Patriarchal Religion, Sexuality and Gender: A Critique of New Natural Law (2007), and (with M. Malik and C. O’Cinneide), Discrimination Law: Theory and Context (2008). ANDREW BROWN is a journalist who has written widely on science and religion, and currently writes regularly for the weekend Guardian. He is the author of The Darwin Wars: The Scientific Battle for the Soul of Man (1999), and Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared (2008). EMMA COHEN is postdoctoral researcher in Comparative Cognitive Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. She is the author of The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an AfroBrazilian Religious Tradition (2007). CHARLES E. CURRAN is a Catholic moral theologian and Elizabeth Scurlock Professor of Human Values at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He has frequently questioned the Church’s teaching on moral issues, and was dismissed from the Catholic University of America as a dissident in 1986. Among his recent books are: Catholic Social Teaching 1891–Present: A Historical, Theological and Ethical Analysis (2002), The Moral Theology of Pope John Paul II (2005) and Loyal Dissent: Memoirs of a Catholic Theologian (2006).

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is Bentham Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London, and Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Jurisprudence at New York University. Author of many books, he is one of the world’s most highly respected legal and political philosophers, and has written on many subjects related to religion, tolerance and the limits of free speech. He is the author of Taking Rights Seriously (1977), A Matter of Principle (1985), Law’s Empire (1986), A Bill of Rights for Britain (1990), Life’s Dominion (1993), Freedom’s Law (1996), Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (2000) and Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (2006). A. C. GRAYLING is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is the author of many books, including: The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life (2001), Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life without God (2004), Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness (2007) and To Set Prometheus Free: Religion, Reason and Humanity (2009). STANLEY HAUERWAS is a theologian, ethicist and professor of law. He is currently Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School of Duke University. His most celebrated works include: A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (1981), Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America (1993), Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (1994), Sanctify Them in Truth: Holiness Exemplified (1998), The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (2007). HISHAM A. HELLYER is a Fellow of the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, Warwick University. His is author of Muslims of Europe: The ‘Other’ Europeans (2009). ASMA JAHANGIR is Pakistan’s most celebrated human rights lawyer and activist, who has spent most of her career defending the rights of Pakistani women, religious minorities and children. Author of Divine Sanction? The Hudood Ordinance (1988, 2003) and Children of a Lesser God: Child Prisoners of Pakistan (1992), she was UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-judical Killings and Executions, and is now Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief. WENDY JAMES is a Fellow of the British Academy, and Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University. She has previously taught in the Universities of Khartoum, Aarhus and Bergen. Her interests are in long-term patterns of cultural history and the relations between minorities and majorities in post-colonial states in Africa, mainly the Sudan and Ethiopia. Recent publications include: Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research, co-edited with P. Dresch and D. Parkin (2000), Remapping Ethiopia: Socialism and After, co-edited with D. Donham, E. Kurimoto and A. Triulzi (2002), The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology (2003), The Philosophy of RONALD DWORKIN

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Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism and Anthropology, by R.G. Collingwood, original manuscripts co-edited with D. Boucher and P. Smallwood (2005) and War and Survival in Sudan’s Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile (2007). CHRIS MILLER, translator, critic and editor, co-founded the Oxford Amnesty Lectures. He is the author of Forms of Transcendence: The Art of Roger Wagner (2009), and the editor of The Dissident Word, OAL 1995 and ‘War on Terror’, OAL 2006. CHANTAL MOUFFE is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Westminster in London. Recent works include: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, co-authored with Ernesto Laclau (1985), The Return of the Political (1993), The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (1999), The Democratic Paradox (2000) and On the Political (2005). JOHN PRITCHARD was ordained in 1972. A former Warden of St John’s College, Durham, he has been Archdeacon of Canterbury and Bishop of Jarrow; he was inaugurated as the forty-second Bishop of Oxford in June 2007. He is the author of many books including Beginning Again (2005), How to Explain Your Faith (2006) and Practical Theology in Action (new edn, 2006). SIMON SCHAMA, University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, New York, is one of our most celebrated and respected historians. Recent books include: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1990), Dead Certainties (1992), Landscape and Memory (1996), The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1997), a threevolume History of Britain (2000–2002) and Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2006). MATTHEW SPOONER is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, working on nineteenth-century American history, and on slavery in particular. JOHN TASIOULAS is Reader in Moral and Legal Philosophy at Oxford University and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Recent publications include: ‘Punishment and Repentance’, Philosophy, 81 (2006), pp. 279–322, ‘The Moral Reality of Human Rights’, in T. Pogge (ed.), Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right: Who Owes What to the Very Poor? (2007), pp. 75–101 and ‘Taking Rights out of Human Rights’, Ethics, 120 (July 2010), pp. 647–78. STUART WHITE is Director of the Public Policy Unit, University Lecturer in Politics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Jesus College. Recent publications include: The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship (2003), Equality (2006) and Building a Citizen Society: The Emerging Politics of Republican Democracy, co-edited with Daniel Leighton (2008). WES WILLIAMS is University Lecturer in French at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall. He is author of the study, Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: ‘The Undiscovered Country’ (1999), and of Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: ‘Mighty Magic’ (2011).

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Preface and acknowledgements

The Oxford Amnesty Lectures (OAL) is a registered charity. Its purpose is to raise funds for Amnesty International and to raise awareness of human rights in the academic and wider communities. It is otherwise independent of Amnesty International. It began as a fund-raising project for the Oxford Amnesty group and is now one of the world’s leading lecture-series. To date, Oxford Amnesty Lectures has raised well over £100,000 for Amnesty International. The aim of the series of lectures on which this book was based was to address the relationship between human rights and religion. This relationship has been of special and long-standing concern in disciplines as diverse as philosophy, theology and law; history, politics, psychology and literature all contribute to the debate. For believer and unbeliever alike, the influence of faith in contemporary experience is undeniable. The ongoing negotiation between religion and human rights has profound implications for a number of contemporary issues. Perhaps the most urgent of these is the policing of free expression, and the degree to which restrictions of freedom of speech should be observed in the name of tolerance. Stated as questions, the issues might be expressed as follows: how should we measure individual claims to freedom against the demands of religious communities and traditions; and how are we to assess the claims of religious communities when they run counter to human rights enshrined in law? Many people consider that the very idea of human rights belongs within a distinctly secular tradition. The roots of that tradition, they suggest, can be found in the Enlightenment; its originary gesture is a blow against religion’s empire. For such people, theistic belief exists not only in tension, but often in open conflict with the concept of ‘human rights’. Contesting the forms of (sometimes exclusionary) community which religious allegiance fosters, they argue that we are invested with rights in virtue not of our faith, but of our humanity. For others, by contrast, the relationship between faith and human rights is not so much one of conflict as of productive complicity. To present human rights as inherently secular is to ignore

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the role religion has played in defining the value of the human. The human rights tradition and its concomitant theories of tolerance arose, after all, in a fiercely religious age; religious traditions continue to play a central role in forming the conception of the human and its relation to the world. People who argue in this way sometimes further claim that the defence of human rights is both most powerful and most coherent when derived from, and underwritten by, religious conviction. The OAL 2008 series set out to explore the extent to which particular historically and culturally inflected religious languages and traditions have influenced the rights of both individuals and communities; it aimed also to suggest new directions for the – sometimes difficult – relationship between ‘Religion and Human Rights’. For while the universal claims made for rights often put them at odds with the revealed truths from which religions derive their authority, it remains true that many people’s sense of human worth and dignity nevertheless depends on recognising the divine in each of us. Where rights and revelation diverge, how – the essays which follow ask – can the differences be negotiated? The Oxford Amnesty Lectures are a collective enterprise. The members of the organising committee for OAL 2008 were Cathryn Costello, David Guthrie, Liora Lazarus, Melissa McCarthy, Chris Miller, Nick Owen, Fabienne Pagnier, Richard Scholar, Kate Tunstall, Katrin Wehling and myself. As editor, I would like to thank both the lecturers – Charles Curran, Ronald Dworkin, Stanley Hauerwas, Asma Jahangir, Chantal Mouffe, Tariq Ramadan and Simon Schama – and the contributors to the Symposium for coming to Oxford to speak and (in all but one case) giving us permission to publish their lectures and contributions in aid of Amnesty International. I should also express my thanks to the respondents – Pamela Sue Anderson, Nicholas Bamforth, Chris Miller, Matthew Spooner, John Tasioulas and Stuart White – for their contributions to this volume. Hisham Hellyer generously agreed to write a chapter without lecturing. I am especially grateful to Wendy James not only for taking on the unenviable task of writing a cogent and satisfyingly complex introduction to a distinctly diverse set of lectures, but also for doing so with such intelligent generosity: she has performed the better and greater half of the editor’s role. My thanks, finally, to Chris Miller, Nick Owen, Kate Tunstall and Katrin Wehling for their early work on the text, and for later encouragement and advice.

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Introduction Rights and religion: spaces for argument and agreement Wendy James

The pursuit of rights, for oneself or on behalf of other human beings, grows from our common capacity for passion, as much as from that for reason. Even the austere pronouncements made in the name of established authority – by governors, bankers and judges as well as priests – can be informed by shared human feeling and made effective through rhetoric and symbolic acts. It is not surprising that advocacy against authority commonly evokes and embodies the heightened emotions associated with ‘religion’: by quotation from the rich language of the scriptures, through the bodily gestures of supplication and prayer, or ritual acts performed at dedicated special sites – the steps of the law court or prison gates as well as overtly sacred places such as churches, synagogues and mosques. Most claims for the rights of human beings as individuals or small groups appeal to feelings of personal empathy, often evoking some of the oldest metaphors in human history, metaphors of shared kinship – ‘brotherhood’, ‘sisters under the skin’ – however these might or might not be justified in terms of a divine origin. In the nineteenth century, the German scholar Adolf Bastian coined a phrase which was later to become something of a slogan in (liberal) anthropology. Popularised in Britain by Sir Edward Tylor, the phrase is now best translated as ‘the psychic unity of humankind’.1 While this concept does not necessarily entail a ‘religious’ view of our nature, and does not quite equal the idea of the sacredness of the person as such, it does invoke a view of the human potential to create, and to make widely intelligible through sharing, forms of language and action including – as music, art and language do – both reason and feeling. In any given situation of encounter, the way this ‘potential’ for empathic communication works out is what anthropologists like to call the domain of sociality. With the help of this pragmatic concept of human life as lived, and potentially always liveable, in emotionally charged games of give-and-take with others, we can find a way around the over-specification of ‘cultures’ as distinct objects – and, by extension, ‘religions’ as singular, self-defining and separate phenomena. The

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cultural relativism of which anthropologists have long stood accused has also been a stumbling block for historians dealing with periods and regions over-determined by the conventional narratives of the major World Religions. In introducing an earlier volume of essays on human rights, culture and context, the anthropologist Richard Wilson points to the pragmatic circumstances in which questions about rights arise, initially as part of local events and arguments, but with the potential to transcend these. He puts forward the view that ‘human rights are not founded in the eternal moral categories of social philosophy, but are the result of concrete struggles. Rights are embedded in local normative orders and yet are caught within webs of power and meaning which extend beyond the local.’2 In today’s extraordinary global means of communication, such cases may get a very wide hearing indeed. As the essays in the present volume illustrate, claims to human rights have always tended to surface when specific people feel a case needs to be made; when by definition the claim is made in the face of authority and is likely to be resisted. In such debates and contests of the past, ‘religion’ may well be engaged on all sides. As understood in the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, it may effectively constitute worldly authority in itself, and as such become a regular target of rights claims; marginal socio-political movements may by the same token become a vehicle of opposition to constituted religious authority, even as their language takes on religious overtones, fuelling passions for liberation. Simon Schama’s opening chapter in this volume is a wonderful example of the latter, showing how biblical inspiration (both Old and New Testament) fuelled the anti-slavery protests and later the civil rights movement in the United States: ‘Baptist theology with its emphasis on free will, on self-deliverance and adult rebirth … communicated itself most forcefully to a captive population yearning for redemption.’ He sketches the widening horizons of freedom and the promise of redemption fostered in the world of the Spirituals and multiple religious revivals, and suggests that over time, this vision of American democracy has fed into the mainstream, informing the oratory of Obama himself. He asks if it is also not a fact that ‘many of the difficulties that threaten us proceed directly from theologies proclaiming monopolies of wisdom and impatient of religious pluralism?’ Matthew Spooner recalls in his response to Schama’s argument that Abraham Lincoln himself pointed out that those who fought to preserve slavery, as well as those who fought against it, ‘read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and both invoke His will against the other’. While slaveholders – their ‘manly love of liberty’ celebrated by Edmund Burke – nevertheless supported white Methodist and Baptist missionaries in their efforts to spread Christianity, as a form of social discipline, the figure of the black evangelist remained a threat. In endorsing Schama’s emphasis on the potency of Christianity in ‘redemptive liberation’, Spooner proposes that the origin of such ideas lies not in Christianity as such but

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in a ‘plainer fact’: ‘Slaves, and all other oppressed people, negate their condition not in their faith but in their humanity, and it is from that most basic and deepest of wells that the world might draw a fuller understanding of freedom.’ Rhetoric, emotion and symbol have always been a part of human communication, and doubtless especially prominent in the spontaneity of ‘rights’ discourse whatever the formal conventions, and whatever the scale of argument for or against existing socio-religious controls. However, our post-Enlightenment orientation towards the possibilities of universal rational law and secular morality creates a new kind of autonomy, or potential autonomy, for persons in relation to authority itself. We also find a growing gap between those modern nation-states which have accepted the ideal of moving towards secular egalitarian citizenship, and some which have adopted or are planning citizenship founded on the socio-legal framework of one or other of the major organised religions. At the same time, I do not need to remind readers of the astonishing degree of population movement between countries which is now a part of the world we live in. As we see from the essays which follow, Human Rights, the Modern State, International Law and the World Religions have become counters in a new generation of political games. Their antecedents go back at least as far as the French Revolution, but they have taken on a distinctive form since the 1940s and were most recently shaped by the end of the Cold War. ‘Human rights’ and ‘religion’ in the modern arena Within the broad canvas of the modern Human Rights movement, Amnesty International has a fairly specific and some might say narrow brief. While religious issues are often entangled with the kind of causes and cases that Amnesty pursues, it is not set up to tackle religious confrontations or the mistreatment of persons by religious authorities as such. In this essay I have found it useful to distinguish between ‘Human Rights’ as indicating the modern movement founded in the series of famous Declarations dating back to the French Revolution, now spawning a mass of detailed legal apparatus in specific countries; ‘human rights’ as a kind of moral compass to traverse a larger historical and anthropological landscape; and ‘people’s rights’ as a pragmatic recognition of the way that social relations operate with reference to some rule-of-thumb principles of fairness on the ground everywhere. The importance of such distinctions is illustrated in a study by Martin Mills of what became known as the Tibetan Shugden controversy.3 In 1996, the current Dalai Lama and his government in exile (the Central Tibetan Administration or CTA) banned worship of the deity Dorje Shugden among the exiled Tibetans in India (a matter with its own long history in the region). This meant, in effect, the withdrawal of democratic legal rights within the refugee structure from Shugden worshippers, as they were purged from CTA institutions, denounced through a signature

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campaign, subjected to house-to-house searches and sometimes assaulted with their families; while monks and nuns were expelled from the monasteries and Shugden statues and shrines were desecrated.4 AI received allegations of Human Rights abuses by the Dalai Lama and his government in exile. These came mainly from Shugden supporters in Delhi and London, who claimed that the ban had infringed the rights of these Tibetan refugees to religious freedom and that subsequent events constituted the persecution of a religious minority. Amnesty responded that the material it had received did not contain evidence of the kind of grave violations which fell within its mandate (torture, arbitrary detention etc). ‘While recognizing that spiritual debate can be contentious, Amnesty International cannot become involved in debate on spiritual issues.’5 The report also recalled its own campaigns on behalf of Tibetans persecuted within China. As Mills points out, some fine distinctions were being drawn by Amnesty, which implied a view that the principal abuses that could be tackled by them were the acts of nation-states; other acts of religious intolerance remained in the sphere of civil or criminal law. This tradition, which opposes the immunity of states to persecute their own citizens, goes back at least to the Nuremberg Trials, and in so far as it represents human rights claims as a ‘dialogue against power’ it has moral strength.6 The key to understanding Amnesty’s response to the Shugden case is of course that the Dalai Lama’s government in exile is not a nation-state. Other responses were, and are possible, as Mills discusses. One of these, from the London supporters, asserted that religious freedom depended upon the separation of religion and state; they identified the Dalai Lama as de facto head of a refugee ‘nation-state’ and therefore responsible to all his ‘citizens’.7 The case is a strong reminder that in the arena of modern Human Rights, claims made by on or behalf of individuals can only be effective in relation to national or international law. In the world as now constituted, it is legally the nation-state, perhaps having endorsed international conventions, which has the capacity to protect, or otherwise to violate, what is claimed in the name of Human Rights. Religious authorities can perhaps offer charitable protection to those whose rights have been trampled on, or indeed violate the ‘human rights’ of persons (especially outside their boundaries of membership). But appeals to such protection cannot be made in terms of a mandatory obligation – they are made in the name of supposedly shared values and transcendent beliefs, and depend upon a charitable response, ultimately in the framework of a specific religious belief system. Asma Jahangir’s contribution to the present volume reminds us that it is individuals who have rights, not religions as such. The confusion arises because of the very pressures on liberal democracy to maintain a neutral position with respect to the rights of persons, whatever their religion; but as the cases in Asma Jahangir’s study illustrate, many states do associate their core citizenship with one or other ‘Religion’, and difference here can make citizens the target of abuse. Modern conditions seem

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in fact to have intensified this problem, from the viewpoint of the Human Rights movement. Jahangir’s cases, such as the convert from Islam to Christianity in Afghanistan who faced the death penalty for apostasy (though he was later decreed mentally unfit to stand trial and found refuge in Italy), form a clarion call in today’s world where Human Rights campaigning and law-making is a growing industry. It is in the inter-state arena where ‘Religion’ has sometimes become a contested factor, where states or state-endorsed authorities have aimed to give protection to ‘religious law’ as such, and to extend their support to the campaigns of co-religionists elsewhere. Some nation-states have managed to maintain, as an ideal, the separation of religion from the very definition of citizenship, with France and the United States offering early examples – though strangely with contrasting outcomes. John Bowen has given us a very clear account of the wide range of competing (and relatively peaceful) arguments over the place of Islamic practices in France, where the policy of laïcité (the endorsement of lay custom, not quite the same as ‘secularity’) has sought, since the educational reforms of the late nineteenth century and the laws first introduced in the early twentieth, to challenge the role of the Catholic Church and latterly other religious authorities in shaping social norms and attitudes among the French.8 The role here of schools, and questions concerning the authority of teachers, is as prominent today as ever, as illustrated by the recent headlines over French Muslim schoolgirls wearing headscarfs. In July 2010, France’s lower house of parliament voted 335 to 1 (with many abstentions) to ban the wearing of the burqa, the full facial veil, in public (at time of writing, still to be ratified). Soon after this, the new UK Immigration Minister described the French as ‘an aggressively secular state’, and suggested that such a ban would be at odds with the UK’s ‘tolerant and mutually respectful society’ (BBC news online, 13.7.10; Guardian news online, 18.7.10). Current debate among public intellectuals, including Muslims, focuses on how far Islamic observance can become purely an individual matter (faithbased) or how far the state should recognise social practices, for example elements of the shari’a law, and the growth of an ‘ethnicised community’ (somewhat on British lines).9 Bowen mentions that there are Muslims who recommend the reworking of Islamic legal traditions in the context of the modern Western state, referring to the campaigns and writings of Tariq Ramadan, whose lecture as delivered in the 2008 Amnesty series pursued this line of argument. Within the history of Islamic thought, Tariq Ramadan pointed to those who have advocated the role of human rationality, alongside divine revelation in the holy texts, as a source of truth. Hisham Hellyer’s chapter in the present volume develops the particular relevance, for current arguments over human rights within Islam, of the writings of the medieval philosopher Muhammad al-Ghazali who justified an openness towards constructive engagement with other traditions. While philosophical debate about the interpretation of texts as such will no doubt go on for ever, Bowen does point

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out that the forces of social change have always tended to precede the reform and reinterpretation of the Islamic norms – the latter finding a very particular context in France. We could say that the modern discourse of Human Rights in respect of religion finds its most comfortable setting in a country like France where the abstractions of state and religion have become theoretically quite separate. But in practice, they are of course more than abstractions. Recall Foucault: Modern society … from the nineteenth century up to our own day, has been characterised, on the one hand, by a legislation, a discourse, an organisation based on public right, whose principle of articulation is the social body and the delegative status of each citizen; and, on the other hand, by a closely linked grid of disciplinary coercions whose purpose is in fact to assure the cohesion of this same social body.10

One thing that we may find wide agreement on is that any religion worthy of the name itself imposes ‘a closely linked grid of disciplinary coercions’ through which its practitioners may be said to constitute a ‘social body’. And where state and religion are theoretically separate, there will of course be competing and sometimes contradictory claims made in the name of discipline upon the citizens. Religion cannot easily be reduced to ‘individual faith’ when questions of a basic kind concerning the social body are integral to it; such as the nature of marriage, inheritance, sexuality, gender relations etc. Freedom of religion in the USA has produced a diversity of self-contained groups on the basis of this openness, as Anthony Grayling underlines in his contribution to the closing symposium in this book. But it has left many ‘modern’ rights undefined in the secular spaces between them: consider for example current conflicts over homosexuality and same-sex marriage; or between a woman’s ‘right to choose’ over an unwanted pregnancy, and the ‘right to life’ of the unborn. Of course not all states today do rest upon a purely lay or secular definition of citizenship; some embrace one or other of the world religions as a fundamental component of their ‘social body’, and here the issues of human rights vs. religion become somewhat cloudy. And here we have to confront the questions of comparisons of value and human hierarchies; of how far the modern Human Rights movement is specifically Western, and how far that itself implies a connection with Christianity, although from some angles that religion is distinctly protected by its own forms of authority from open debate. The heirs of Abraham: religion and the body politic The prominence of the Abrahamic religions in current modern Human Rights discourse is significant because they have long had a deeply authoritarian legal-political character within their own makeup. In Foucault’s sense they have retained and even

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developed over time the disciplinary practices which define their ‘social body’. Believers have more in common than a susceptibility to attractive teachings about God or the afterlife. Stanley Hauerwas points out in his contribution here, following the Chief Rabbi, that ‘Judaism was born as a protest against empire’; and we cannot over-emphasise the ‘liberation struggle’ aspects of the early Christians in the context of the Roman Empire. Islamic traditions too preserve many historical memories of early political struggle. These religions came to impose quite hard mental and bodily regimes of prayer, scriptural learning, fasting and hygiene, along with prescribed forms of ritual concerning birth, marriage and death on their members. They have constructed institutional forms of central authority which have successfully drawn economic support and loyalty from their members over centuries. They have typically been able to establish a territorial ‘footprint’, supporting and becoming partners in chiefdoms, kingdoms and even modern political forms of the nation-state. Their prestige is maintained through various kinds of scholarly, ‘priestly’ elites who embody and transmit their traditions, often acting as advisers and mediators in respect of personal and family law and neighbourly disputes. This substantive social presence of organised, and often competing, forms of religion in the history of those lands which have seen the ups and downs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – including the expansion of ‘Christian’ empires, the foundation of the state of Israel, and the politically active, prosyletising phases of Islamic history – have all helped shape the conflict-ridden modern arena of Human Rights argument. In his contribution here, Chris Miller states baldly: ‘I believe that little stands between Islam and Human Rights other than the envenomed history of the two imperialisms, Christian and Islamic’; and again: ‘The unbeliever scrutinising the precepts of religion sometimes finds the prejudices of a ruling (or victimised) class mounted on a metaphysical pedestal.’ Such arrangements can of course change; Miller points to the demise of (Dutch Reformed Church-backed) apartheid, and admits a controversial parallel with the treatment of women, by certain religions, as jural minors. The Abrahamic religions seem to have been particularly prone to fierce projects for distinguishing between those who belong, and those who are outside, the community of believers – itself ordered by territorial claims and behavioural rules as much as by ‘belief’. Initially no doubt following some remembered experience of struggle against oppression, the religious movements which developed in the Eastern Mediterranean have retained the potential for developing a deeply authoritarian relationship to their followers. Prosyletising, imperial conquest, notions of a chosen people, claims to land on the basis of sacred scripture and holy places, jihad against the unbelievers and punishments for apostasy, have variously marked the history of these religions and the ‘rights’ of their followers. As the anthropologist Talal Asad has convincingly demonstrated, it is in their image that Western perceptions take as self-evident what ‘a religion’ or ‘ritual’ in general might be; but

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then how far can this starting point adequately reflect the question of ‘religion and rights’ elsewhere in the world?11 While disciplinary practices and guidance over personal and family matters are also a core of Hindu, Buddhist and other ‘Eastern’ religions, these have not asserted authority over territory and the body politic, nor drawn strong lines against ‘unbelievers’, in the way that the Abrahamic religions have. Over time, these latter have certainly allowed space for debate internal to their own systems, based upon their own (partially overlapping and analogous) sacred texts (as illustrated in the chapters here by Hauerwas, Curran and Hellyer). But their relationship with nonbelievers, alongside emerging forms of the modern state and international law, has been notably one of tension, contradiction and negotiated compromise. Against this background, it is difficult to see how widely acceptable or understandable a claim might be which locates the prime source of any general vision of human rights in the scriptures, visions or values of any specific religion. Ronald Dworkin argues forcefully here that the moral source of human rights must lie outside religion, as divine authority itself must derive from a logically prior existence of moral judgment among human beings. ‘I do not question the widespread assumption … that the Abrahamic God … really is good, and that his commands do have moral authority. I only ask what the source of his goodness and moral authority is.’ He insists on the moral aspect of any theory of human rights, which must be more than a ‘legal analysis’; and that ‘if we want to defend religious freedom as a human right, we must locate religion within a broader category of human values and ideals’; a position largely endorsed by John Tasioulas in his response to Dworkin. Nevertheless, traditional arguments for sourcing human morality within religion are strongly endorsed by several of the present contributors, though in generously open and liberal form; Hauerwas, following Herbert McCabe, points to the unique coming of Jesus as being like the coming of a new language of hope and love: ‘It is in Christ we see our common humanity.’ John Pritchard reminds us that ‘to the person of faith human rights are ineluctably rooted in religion … our European understanding of rights has its roots in Judaeo-Christian theology and the view that God is the giver and guarantor of the rights of every human being created in God’s image and likeness.’ Hellyer portrays Islam in a perhaps surprisingly similar way: as a ‘holistic’ religious system in which ‘worldly’ and ‘sacred’ domains are one, and inseparable. ‘In the believer’s worldview, the individual is a representative of God himself on earth … The human being’s heart in Islam is said to contain the Divine.’ We might recognise here, notwithstanding, the way that religious belief has prompted many to advocate human rights on a very broad, even ‘universal’ platform, and set up or support political movements on this basis – including Amnesty itself. We should not forget the role that principles of charity, and charitable actions towards strangers of any kind, have played in general social history – with

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or without ‘religious’ prescription or justification. In Pamela Anderson’s response to Hauerwas, she proposes that we admit ‘that there will be different universal attributes ascribed to humanity and that particular convictions will also exist’. But if we also accept the possibility of a ‘positive freedom’ for people to think and act autonomously, then ‘rights-talk’ – not necessarily theorised – can address the problems of individual persons who suffer unjustly; and ‘then there is at least a chance for a peace worth having’. Perhaps surprisingly, there are church people who have claimed that religion as such has not been a significant ‘source’ of human rights – especially when we look at the churches’ practice, rather than their theology. One of the few contributions in earlier Oxford Amnesty Lectures volumes to deal directly with religion and human rights was by Professor Patrick Collinson, in an essay concerned primarily with Protestantism.12 There he made some very valuable observations about the non-worldliness of the Lutheran tradition and the conservative nature of the great religious traditions in general. These have been concerned, internally, not so much with ‘rights’ as with ‘duties’, the duties of those bearing status or authority within the religious order. In the ‘Protestant moral-social universe’ duties were ‘enforced only from on high, by God.’ There was ‘no space for rebellion or divorce’, writes Collinson, then recalling Romans 12.19: ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay saith the Lord.’ And quite explicitly, ‘Protestant doctrine placed very great limitations on any doctrine of human rights as nowadays defined. The rights of a existed only in the form of the duties owed to a by b.’13 Within the European state, the law allowed for the redress of wrongs; but the rights which could be pressed were those of legal entities and not human beings as such. If now one can appeal to the doctrine of ‘universal human rights’, in Protestant England you could appeal only to God. Much the same would apply, according to Collinson, in the context of the other major religious traditions, which in the case of Islam places the onus of seeing that justice prevails upon the ruler; and in many cases ‘communitarian values’ may ‘ensure the worth and dignity of the individual only through and within the community’.14 Despite his conservative approach on the basis of timeless theological tenets, Collinson did admit in an aside that the Quakers ‘addressed themselves to human rights long before the days of the United Nations’, though it was doubtful whether they should be classified as Protestants at all.15 He did not elaborate, but the Quakers were and are a classic case of a marginal sect, anti-authoritarian if ever there were one, evoking, with a passion no less intense for its silence, the ‘inner light’ of every person as their guidance from the divine. It was perhaps from a growingly liberal acceptance of schism, difference within the broad bracket of Christianity as a whole, as well as encounters with rival organised faiths, especially in the context of overseas imperial adventure and missionary enterprise, that the Western notion of religion as a ‘thing’, distinguishable from government, nationality or even culture, emerged. In both lay and academic

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Western discourse, ‘religion’ although sometimes taken for granted as meaning Christianity, is perhaps too easily generalised; the term itself assumes a category of similar phenomena across the world which can or should fall under that broad heading. However, in Arabic, for example, we run across a problem with such generalization; not only should the holy Koran not be translated willy-nilly into a thousand other tongues, as the Christian missionaries do with the Bible, but the very term for ‘religion’ or ‘faith’, al-din, means exclusively the Islamic faith, as Hellyer explains below (though respect is accorded to other ‘Religions of the Book’). For Western anthropologists who have attempted to teach subjects like social anthropology in a predominantly Arabic-speaking context this is an almost insuperable difficulty. How do you translate a course on ‘The comparative study of religion and society’? – it has to be a comparative study of customs and practices, al-ada. ‘Traditional’ beliefs and practices remain outside the pale: scorned and heathen customs, which – even while feared as courting the occult – cannot be dignified as ‘religion’, in the way that Western anthropology from the early twentieth century attempted. Sudanese students I have taught were quite taken aback at books on the ‘Religion’ of the Nuer or the Dinka, indigenous peoples of the South of that country.16 These studies have become classics in anthropology, but they could scarcely be translated into Arabic without diminishing the dignity of the beliefs, practices and indeed people they describe. Beyond the religions of the book The original blurb for the Oxford Amnesty Lectures of 2008 invited speakers – and audiences – to ponder arguments for the God-given source of human rights. While evident to many through their sense that human worth and dignity depends on ‘recognizing the divine in each of us’, such universal claims do not sit easily with ‘the revealed truths from which religions derive their authority’. Most of the chapters in this volume are critical of the proposed divine source of human rights, though the focus is on the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions and there is little discussion of the Eastern religions, let alone traditions from the remoter regions of the globe, or from early history. If, however, we extend our definition of ‘religion’ to include a wide range of the world’s beliefs and practices, we can point to theories of human consciousness, memory, psychological capacity and their links to a wider cosmology; these, if brought in to the argument, would enable us to agree, if not upon a ‘divine spark’ within, then, at least on the idea – recalling Tylor – of ‘psychic unity’ as a basis for what humans are, how they recognise each other, and what scope they have to engage in mutual debates over ‘rights’ – debates which themselves are open to translation and can be historically transmitted. Michael Carrithers, in discussing Marcel Mauss’s landmark studies, has shown how the history of changing legal and public definitions of ‘a person’ in society does not

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preclude the even more difficult challenge of tracing the history, if there is such a thing, of the internal consciousness of ‘self’, of the ‘moi’ as against the ‘personnage’.17 If we then ask about the nature of our perception of another as ‘like oneself’, as related in some way (even remotely), does this have to be relatedness through the divine? An alternative approach that targets human experience directly, as against interpreting the formalities of religious or legal texts, is offered in the work of Paul Ricoeur – especially his discussion of the way that a sense of self is implicit in our mutual interrelations with others.18 The fieldworking anthropologist himself, or herself, now accepts the necessarily personal standpoint from which any observations have to proceed. Anthropologists do not have one ‘academic voice’; they write from one religious persuasion or another, or from none. Godfrey Lienhardt, himself a Catholic convert, has left us with a vivid, and I imagine to all readers, believers or not, a very ‘believable’ picture of the religious world of the Dinka people of the Southern Sudan. There is a deep sense among them of people’s rights, and the justice of pursuing wrongs, along with accepted modes of mediation and peacemaking. Together with some of the other Nilotic-language peoples of the region, most notably the Nuer (as Evans-Pritchard has shown), the Dinka have provided a classic case of the way that political-religious order can work through extended agreement in a broadly egalitarian and ‘stateless’ society (or at least did so in the pre-colonial past). While there is no doubt about the high value placed by Dinka on individual agency, persons are however encompassed, indeed embodied, within a wider whole. One’s being is conferred by being part of a patrilineal descent group, linked at the same time through one’s mother to her lineage, and to the lesser divinities which may be associated historically with either side. For men, the name is transmitted down from father to son; and nhialic, the over-arching Divinity above, is commonly represented as the father of humanity. Something within the person responds to this wider, ordered and hierarchical world of other human beings, and the world of divinities. Lienhardt noted in a paper on the nature of the person in Africa: And if egotism and egoism were condemned among the Dinka, as they certainly traditionally were, it is not because of some democratic and secular ideal of the [e]quality and brotherhood of man (though equality and brotherhood were probably actually achieved among them more than among many who politically profess them), but because of the profoundly religious orientation of their thought, their respect for the gods.19

There is no space here for me to elaborate, except to mention also the subtle analysis Lienhardt also offers of the response of the Western Dinka to Catholicism and the complex shifts that took place in the necessary translation and realignment of words and concepts dealing with the human person and divinity in that context – they were indeed shifts of meaning rather than a complete break.20

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I took a rather different line in my own ethnography of what might conventionally have been termed the ‘religion’ of the much smaller community of the Udukspeaking people of the central-eastern Sudan. I decided to focus rather on a sphere of moral notions which for them made sense of their world at that time, and (often ‘cultic’) practices dealing with the dilemmas of life, death and human consciousness. They too had, and have, a strong pragmatic sense of the individuality and equality of persons (coloured by sharp memories of having been at the wrong end of slave raiding in the nineteenth century, and having successfully adopted many strangers and destitutes); but until contact with Islam and Christianity there was no divine hierarchy to which people were related in some way. The sheer life that sustained people (arum) was talked of in similar ways to that which also sustained animals, and it survived death in rather impersonal ways. ‘Ancestors’ were not celebrated. Human consciousness, including the awareness we have in dreams, was part of the ‘shadow’ of a person that did not survive death – it died with the body. But one could point to this kashira, along with other bodily-based capacities and feelings, as a key to the idea of living consciousness and an implicit human knowledge of others. The impact of North American-derived evangelical mission teaching was rather different from the case of Catholics among the Dinka, and did create a break in many ways from the older practices. But some of the former sociomoral attitudes to the present world and its all-pervasive political powers, in which most of the Uduk have been international refugees for a generation, are still recognisable alongside public church allegiance.21 Human empathy, sociality and the moral sphere Andrew Brown comments in his contribution to the concluding symposium here that both human rights and deities ‘have a metaphysical dimension’ and exist even if they are ignored. While he does not want to say that human rights are a form of religion, or even a form of atheism, he thinks that ‘commitment to human rights involves – and must involve – some of the same aspects of belief as a commitment to organised religion must do … it demands that we act as if certain things existed whose existence is in fact unknowable’. And he refers to the picture of the young man with his arms outstretched in front of a tank as it rolls towards Tiananmen Square. ‘We know nothing about him, and nothing about what happened after the picture was taken. But when we look at it, we believe his cause must triumph; and we are right – I think – to believe.’ Emma Cohen, privileged to have the last word in the present volume, argues rather that we should be sceptical about the very category ‘religion’, on the grounds that there are universal cognitive tendencies which render conceptions of the afterlife fairly commonplace. Colin Blakemore has even asked: ‘When we understand how our brains generate religious ideas, and what the Darwinian adaptive value of

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such brain processes is, what will be left for religion?’; his question concluded a piece in The Observer, drawing attention to his TV programme the same day on God and the Scientists.22 The piece was entitled ‘Science Is Just One Gene Away from Defeating Religion’ – a phrase no doubt cooked up by the newspaper hacks, as I listened for it in vain during the TV broadcast. Blakemore did however conclude both presentations with an acknowledgement of the ‘social’ nature of human beings. In the newspaper piece his intended meaning became clearer: he argued that our feelings of freedom, the personal experiences and intentions on which we base our assumptions of similar consciousness in others, are based on a false model. Such feelings and intentions are increasingly seen by scientists as ‘an illusory commentary on what our brains have already decided to do’. But are we to ‘explain’, or more bluntly to ‘dismiss’, the whole of human history so easily – along with those religious phenomena which have been so central to it (if extraordinarily diverse)? Neither Cohen nor Blakemore considers the shared social, bodily character of religious practice – even individual prayer – let alone its entanglement with music, art, language, architecture, medicine, diet, work, politics and so on.23 Can the complex entirety of such history really be merely the outcome of one or more ‘false models’ of ourselves and others, leaving religion as a misconception ‘no more significant’ (as Blakemore suggests) ‘than a visual illusion’? And where, for that matter, does this leave the interpretations of scientists; surely experiments, along with theory, do not stand independently of human intention? Although I find the reductionism of the brain scientists unhelpful (and morally blind), the evidence from the ethnographic and historical record would support a certain scepticism about the universality of the category of ‘religion’, unless one chooses to define it simply as some ‘fantasy belief’ in complete opposition to reason. This was certainly how some early anthropologists saw the problem, and envisaged a future free of religious delusion. But surely the opposition needs to be mediated: from the perspective of the social or human sciences, at least in my view, religious belief is not a matter of individual brains in isolation. We should properly acknowledge a fundamental sphere of moral interaction shaping people’s character throughout life, based on a consciousness of one’s self in its exchanges with other, like, selves. Such mutuality of recognition, imbued with feelings that no doubt have a genetic base but are everywhere shaped distinctively by language, ‘culture’, political circumstances and so on, makes possible arguments about people’s rights in the here and now. An acceptance of the existence of ‘like selves’, of relatedness, often applied through history in varying ways and different scales but surprisingly often in terms of extended brother-and-sisterhood, might qualify as the ultimate source of ideas about human rights. Here we would recognise those forms of shared life into which even anonymous strangers or the unborn may be drawn, those debates over how others ‘ought’ to be treated. The dark side of this is its denial, in the various forms of racism or demonisation of persons with which we are only too

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familiar. ‘Religion’ does not always have to figure in the question of moral recognition; a peasant does not have to justify her claims as to what is just and fair in her own world (to echo Rawls’s terms) on the grounds that she is a child of God.24 However, the micro-politics of human rights does draw upon those elements of significant social practice that evoke emotional convictions, even impassioned conflict, about what ‘ought’ to be the case. To remind ourselves of real communities on the ground, is to recall that while ‘rights’ are often discussed in a disembodied way as abstract concepts – words – enshrined in the ideal forms of legal or religious texts, or in the language of political campaigns (see Mouffe below on ‘political language games’), rights in practice are ‘grounded’ too in the framework of practical productive life. Below the level of the abstractions are communities using the land and the forests, rivers and pastures, taking action to define and protect their interests in the local political economy. Nomadic hunter-gatherers or seasonal migrant herders, for example, may seem at first to wander at random; but in fact, their movements are strategically chosen against the background of conventional rights to resources recognised not only among the members of locally co-operating groups but also the subject of agreement between such groups, sometimes over very wide regions. Breaches of understood rights lead to what may be seen locally as ‘just’ wars, argued in terms of ancestral charters and political loyalties. Such communities are no nearer, in a moral sense, to that state some call ‘nature’ than anyone else is. The modern discourse of Human Rights, it is sometimes forgotten, is also anchored in specific ways of organizing productive life, and of course on a vastly enlarged scale. Our focus on the individual as the bearer of such rights can be elaborated in a modern property-holding democracy which recognises individual citizenship and legal personhood, but as Mouffe argues in her chapter, there are other ways of recognising the dignity of the person within related schemas of family, within the ‘harmony’ of (no doubt hierarchical) local social forms. Persons are never, in practice, completely isolated as ends in themselves, but always located within schemes of connection between kin, neighbours, friends and various categories of strangers. That human ‘dignity’ discussed by several contributors here (including Hauerwas, Curran, Bamforth, Tasoulias and Mouffe) can never be visualised in isolation from the circumstantial history of the persons in question, and their relationships with others. The rights dilemmas which are so prominent today in relation to the unborn illustrate this well; what dignity does a foetus, or an infant have, who is yet to be acknowledged in relation to someone else, whether mother, uncle, potential adoptive couple, the church, the state, or whoever? The young human being cannot claim rights on his or her own behalf. Survival at all has to depend on protection being granted one way or another by the adult world. The question of who should extend such protection, and to what kind of infant or embryonic life, and with what ultimate purpose, is an area of debate by no means limited to

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the era of advanced medicine, and the ongoing debates that have been provoked among the faithful. It is perhaps a universal human issue, and a core one for thinking about ‘rights and religion’. It is touched on by Dworkin in his contribution here, and is a good exercise for recalling Mouffe’s point that we have to set individual persons within the interlinked framework of communities. One is not ‘born free’, an independent agent; one is born into, and grows up in, a matrix of dependencies, and shifts one’s position within the reciprocities of family life as one gets older. Charles Curran points out that while the Catholic Church has shifted both to and fro with respect to liberal notions of individual freedom, ‘Catholic anthropology sees the human person not as an isolated monad but as a relational being in relation with God, neighbour, world and self. Catholic anthropology recognises the dignity of the human person but also the social nature of the person who is called to live in solidarity with others.’ It is in relation to specific others that we can achieve and demonstrate some tangible kind of ‘dignity’, though of course the basic premise of Human Rights is that this can be metaphorically extended from kin and neighbours to Homo sapiens as a whole. Mouffe has shown the difficulty of defending both general moral theory and due respect for local cultural norms and values. Her essay illustrates the challenge of taking the real world of human practice seriously while avoiding simplistic arguments for pluralism or relativism (her respondent Stuart White seems to me, by contrast, to be dealing in quite unhistorical abstractions; the invention of human rights is ‘like the invention of the washing-machine … the product of a particular culture’). I have suggested that what anthropology can offer to current discussions is a constructive appreciation of the extendable nature of human sociality. Introducing the collection of essays by anthropologists on human rights in global perspective I referred to in opening here, Richard Wilson and Jon Mitchell argue that a general human capacity for mutual understanding and co-operation is the proper foundation for recognising rights in liberal political philosophy and social theory. This is recommended as an alternative to either the rationality and reason of human nature (stemming from Aristotle), or the elemental human being stripped down to ‘bare life’ – represented by the refugee.25 Anthropologists would not deny social personhood to the refugee. They have focused upon those very networks of mutuality and reciprocity which exist even among the dispossessed. International rights institutions should provide ‘greater openness to views of human rights based in the shared moral spaces of everyday life as well as respond to claims and entitlements not made in the language of legality’; moreover they should listen to the messages from anthropological studies and ‘incorporate in their historywriting more socially embedded forms of narrative and moral recognition’.26 Kirsten Hastrup’s essay in the same volume probes these themes. Noting that a recent Asia-Pacific symposium on Human Rights described the 1948 Universal Declaration as distilling ‘many of the values inherent in the world’s major legal

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systems and religious beliefs including the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic and Jewish traditions’ she considers that even such a liberal-sounding distillation seems to escape historical and local context.27 Hastrup’s own approach retains a focus on the kind of moral agency which operates within ‘the sense of a shared moral space’; without this, she suggests, there can be no sense of self. Football reminds us that social action requires an ‘other’; ballroom dancing that social life has a particular rhythm. Hastrup offers ‘the ordinary conversation’ as an example of the dialogical act; language sets up ‘spaces of common action’.28 Her observation allows me to draw attention to the salience of conversation, spaces for debate, and paths to social agreement in the arena of human rights discourse, as represented by many of the contributions to the present volume. As Hauerwas points out, we are essentially ‘talking animals’ who live in distinctive linguistic communities. But we must surely add that at the same time translation is one of the distinctively human gifts, and multilingualism far more common among real human communities than commonly supposed. The moral sphere of our common humanity must extend beyond one language or local cultural form, firstly in a pragmatic sense to make it possible for us to account for history at all, and secondly in the more abstract sense that translation between levels, between speech codes, between dialects and so on is at the very heart of speaking and responding even in the same language; and thus at the heart of what language is. A potential for translation is a capacity we all share, as I have already suggested with reference to the Dinka, and along with music, dance and the always innovative spatial choreography of our social lives, it is qualitatively different from anything found in the world of the other animals – a theme I explored in my book The Ceremonial Animal.29 Without the anticipation on which all our social interaction depends, including guessing the meaning of others’ words and actions – always perhaps including an element of translation – we would scarcely have morality, legality or religion, let alone legal wrangles about the human rights of distant others we know to be, in some way, ‘brothers-and-sisters’. Conversations and liberations If we accept that ‘rights’ are essentially a matter of claims and counterclaims, within a history that itself has provided the scale, communication possibilities and scope for the claims of modern Human Rights, we can point to positive links between the varied contributions to this volume. At first sight, each approaches the topic from a different point of view, whether philosophical, religious or legal. However, they do have something quite striking in common – each does focus on the way that rights are not merely defined in language or law or the World Religions but debated and contested between different parties through the events of life as it is lived. Even the formal prescriptions of ‘rights’ to be found in the most conservative of

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sacred texts or authoritative of institutions are shown in the present volume to be open to reinterpretation over time. Such debates can be divisive of the very authority of the religious body itself, as illustrated by the current rifts within both the Catholic and Anglican churches over the rights of women and homosexuals, not simply as lay persons, but in respect to ordination and eligibility for ‘priestly’ status. Here, external pressures from the lay world are entering in a remarkable way into the protected core of religious authority itself. In America there are even signs of a similar, and parallel, movement among Muslim women – an even more fraught ‘debate’. A quieter (but no less significant) style of ‘conversation’ between religious and philosophical traditions runs through several chapters here. Within all major traditions there are changing conversations about the interpretation of ancient texts. For instance, Hauerwas, engaging with Jonathan Sacks, gives attention to the emerging dialogue which can be pondered between Judaism and Christianity. Dworkin’s argument sets religious claims against those of rational philosophy and identifies the source of human rights within a humane version of the latter; an argument for which I believe empirical studies of the kind I have been mentioning here would provide support and reinforcement. At the start of this essay I drew attention to Schama’s evocation of the religious fervour which helped feed the long struggles for liberation among American slave communities. Slavery is an extreme case of the lack, or denial, of human rights; the human individual is treated as property. Through protest, slave revolts and a wider dialectic of debate, emancipation may be granted or achieved, and ‘rights’ defined.30 Moses Finley long ago demonstrated how it was that ‘freedom’ was not first spelled out in the abstract, but in the very concrete terms of emancipation contracts.31 In recent times too, ‘liberty’ sounds well, but rights have to be pursued and spelled out one by one by advocates before they find a place in the law books and can be appealed to. We can recognise what look quite modern varieties of ‘rights’ struggles from the past. Ancient Rome provides an example, being a strongly ‘centralised’ political, and indeed urban space, where a kind of debate could occur that you might not imagine taking place in a rural village. Marcel Mauss traced that acquisition of the rights of the (free male) person, succeeding those of family name, gods and insignia, to a struggle of the generations: I imagine that legends like that of the consul Brutus and his sons and the end of the right of the pater to kill his sons, his sui, signify the acquisition of the persona by the sons, even while their father was still alive. I believe that the revolt of the Plebs, the right to full citizenship that, following upon the sons of senatorial families, was gained by all the plebian members of the gentes, was decisive. All freemen of Rome were Roman citizens, all had a civil persona … the persona had … become synonymous with the true nature of the individual.32

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Mauss then pointed out that of course the slave was excluded from the citizenry; he had no ‘personality’; he did not own his body, nor had he ancestors, name, cognomen or personal belongings. Old Germanic law too distinguished him from the freeman; ‘But at the time when the laws of the Saxons and Swabians were drawn up, [slaves] already had a soul, which Christianity had given them.’33 The struggles of the Plebs, and later the slaves of the ancient world, opened up a space into which Christian teachings of individual salvation and liberty could easily enter – an early example of its political appeal to the marginalised, and no doubt of the continuing role it has played in nurturing debates over personal rights. Mauss noted that from the Enlightenment onwards ‘the revolution in mentalities was accomplished’: ‘Each of us has our “self” (moi), an echo of the Declaration of the Rights of Man’ – which, he pointed out, had predated both Kant and Fichte. Nick Allen underlines the point that these philosophers earn their place in the essay mainly because they articulate the concepts of the person that were expressed in society more or less contemporaneously with them, that is in the sectarian movements or in the Declarations of Rights: The ‘sacred character of the human person’ may be important in the philosophy of Kant and his followers, but it is relevant in [Mauss’s essay] because it is presupposed by the social and educational ideals of a liberal democratic state. No doubt, in so far as the philosophers suppose themselves to be working a priori, purely by means of reasoning from first principles, they exemplify the characteristic error of non-sociologists who, unaware of the history and pre-history of the fundamental notions with which they operate, naively regard them as natural.34

Surprisingly this point is confirmed by Collinson, in the essay discussed above. He offered a reassuringly supportive quote from Marx – who wrote of the so-called rights of man as ‘the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community’.35 The theologian and the historical materialist were here in sympathy over the recent departure of ‘egoism’ from the (supposed) older harmonies of social relations; their moral agreement on this point had little to do with religion as such. The impetus for debating rights must take a longer and wider perspective on human affairs than the immediate currency of ‘consumer individualism’ allows, and as John Bowen put it, ‘the notion that religion is a matter of incompatible systems of beliefs is a post-Enlightenment one … The challenge for political theorists is to develop a normative framework that recognises a moving object, a set of public reasoning processes, as themselves the basis for a legitimate, pluralistic political order’.36 The comments I have assembled here echo this vision: the best guarantee for rights in relation to religion must be effective social spaces opening up, in a variety of places and moments of time, both for theoretical reflections on ideological argument, and for pragmatic actions in creating human agreement.

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Notes 1 E. B. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation (London: John Murray, 1865); Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom (London: John Murray, 1871). 2 R. A. Wilson, ‘Human Rights, Culture and Context: An Introduction’, in R. A. Wilson (ed.), Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives (London, Chicago, Illinois: Pluto Press, 1997), p. 23; see also R. A. Wilson, ‘Introduction: The Social Life of Rights’, in R. A. Wilson and J. P. Mitchell (eds), Human Rights in Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–15. 3 M. A. Mills, ‘This Turbulent Priest: Contesting Religious Rights and the State in the Tibetan Shugden Controversy’, in Wilson and Mitchell (eds), Human Rights in Global Perspective, pp. 54–70. 4 Ibid., p. 54. 5 AI Index: ASA 17/14/98, June 1998, quoted ibid., pp. 56–7. 6 Ibid., pp. 57–8. 7 Ibid., p. 66. 8 J. R. Bowen, ‘Two Approaches to Rights and Religion in Contemporary France’, in Wilson and Mitchell (eds), Human Rights in Global Perspective, pp. 33–53. 9 Ibid., p. 41. 10 S. Lukes, ‘Conclusion’, in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 282–301 [295]; Lukes quotes M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by C. Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. 106. 11 T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 12 P. Collinson, ‘Religion and Human Rights: The Case of and for Protestantism’, in O. Hufton (ed.), Historical Change and Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1994 (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 21–54. 13 Ibid., pp. 45–6. 14 Ibid., p. 47. 15 Ibid., p. 53. 16 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956); R. G. Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); both are discussed a little further below. 17 M. Carrithers, ‘An Alternative Social History of the Self’, in Carrithers, Collins and Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, pp. 234–56; see also, in the same volume, M. Mauss [1938], ‘A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self’, pp. 1–25. 18 P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 19 R. G. Lienhardt, ‘Self: Public, Private: Some African Representations’, in Carrithers, Collins and Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, pp. 141–55 [153].

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20 R. G. Lienhardt, ‘The Dinka and Catholicism’, in J. Davis (ed.), Religious Organization and Religious Experience, Association of Social Anthropologists Monograph 21 (London: Academic Press, 1982), pp. 81–95. 21 Wendy James, ’Kwanim Pa: The Making of the Uduk People. An Ethnographic Study of Survival in the Sudan-Ethiopian Borderlands (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion, and Power among the Uduk of Sudan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Paperback edition with new Preface, 1999; War and Survival in Sudan’s Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 22 C. Blakemore, ‘Science Is Just One Gene Away from Defeating Religion’, Observer, 22 February 2009, p. 31. 23 See M. Mauss, On Prayer [1909], trans. S. Leslie, ed. and intro. W. S. F. Pickering (New York/Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn, 2003). 24 [See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (revised edition) (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999) – ed.] 25 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 26 R. A. Wilson and J. P. Mitchell (eds), Human Rights in Global Perspective, p. 13. 27 K. Hastrup, ‘Representing the Common Good: The Limits of Legal Language’, in Wilson and Mitchell (eds), Human Rights in Global Perspective, p. 17. 28 Ibid., p. 29. 29 Wendy James, The Ceremonial Animal: A New Portrait of Anthropology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). [See also, W. James (ed.), The Pursuit of Certainty: Religious and Cultural Formulations, Association of Social Anthropologists Decennial Conference Series (London: Routledge, 1995) – ed.] 30 See Orlando Patterson’s contribution to an earlier OAL volume, ‘Freedom, Slavery, and the Modern Construction of Rights’, in Hufton (ed.), Historical Change and Human Rights, pp. 131–78. 31 M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980). 32 M. Mauss, ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self’, in Carrithers, Collins and Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person, pp. 16–17. 33 Ibid., p. 17. 34 N. Allen, ‘The Category of the Person: A Reading of Mauss’s Last Essay’, in Carrithers, Collins and Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person, p. 30. 35 P. Collinson, ‘Religion and Human Rights: The Case of and for Protestantism’, in Hufton (ed.), Historical Change and Human Rights, p. 47. 36 J. R. Bowen, ‘Two Approaches to Rights and Religion in Contemporary France’, in Wilson and Mitchell (eds), Human Rights in Global Perspective, pp. 49–50.

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1 Race, faith and freedom in American and British history Simon Schama

‘The Americans, they’re not really like us, are they?’ said the lady beside me at a lunch in the Welsh countryside last spring, pretending, only momentarily, a kind of grand bafflement before going on to pronounce her own answer: ‘they’re so religious’. To which one could only concede, yes, they were, but possibly not in the way she assumed – which was of course to classify them as credulous devotees of right-wing fanatics sworn to uproot the teaching of Charles Darwin and the last abortion clinic; trembling prophets of the Last Days; Holy Rollers in the grip of unhinged rapture. British embarrassment and disgust at the excesses of American enthusiasm have a long pedigree, going all the way back to the earliest nineteenthcentury writers on the United States like Captain Basil Hall1 and Anthony Trollope’s mother, Frances. She tried to make a go of it in the 1830s with a gas-lit emporium in Cincinnati, failed, but scored a hit with her Domestic Manners of the Americans. One night, the intrepid Frances tells us, she ventured into a forest clearing on the border of Ohio and the Indiana territory, to one of the Camp revivals she had heard about, where she saw crowds of swoony young women seized by fits of ‘hysterical sobbing, convulsive groans, shrieks and screams’, all ‘most appalling … I felt sick with horror’.2 Mrs Trollope was especially distressed by all the touching that went on, especially when preachers moved rather too close to the weeping and wailing women and murmured: ‘Sister’. Her prose reddening with indignation, Frances insists ‘that such a scene could [not] have been acted in the presence of Englishmen … without instant punishment being inflicted; not to mention the salutary discipline of the treadmill’.3 Neither Mrs Trollope nor my lunch partner was entirely wrong. The craving for ecstasy – only an extreme form of the founding fathers’ peculiarly eighteenthcentury promise of a right to the pursuit of happiness (can’t imagine, say, the Levellers4 offering that can we?) – does indeed, represent for Europeans, who like to think of themselves as cool-tempered, sceptical, and allergic to hyperbole (except of course when they happen to fall for it in, for example in Churchillian

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speeches and Nuremberg rallies), a disconcerting feature of American public as well as social life. But religious enthusiasm resonates through American history and politics in ways subtler than the stereotype of hysterics, theocrats and charlatans allows for. To take the most obvious cause for pause, the cliché of Christian politics being the principal preserve of the right collapses the minute one realises that without it the movement to abolish slavery would never have happened in the United States (or in Britain); nor arguably would the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have found its authority to shame and eventually its power. At the heart of the history of post-revolutionary Christianity in America is the relationship between race and salvation. Lest you doubt whether this still matters, the present, electrifying contest for the allegiance of American voters will remind you. After weeks of tiptoeing around the issue of race, of affecting a liberal loftiness incapable of stooping to down-anddirty business, out it popped, right in the middle of a Democratic Party television debate at Saint Anselm’s College, Manchester, New Hampshire. Of course, you needed some care in parsing what was actually said by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, to see that the relationship between race and rhetoric was the real issue. But many did. Here’s what happened. On the defensive after an unanticipated loss in the Iowa caucuses, the Clintons – and I use the noun collectively to mean the whole formidable apparatus of their political machine – had decided to turn what was being lauded in the press as Obama’s most potent weapon – his mastery of inspirational rhetoric – against him; to suggest that his gift of the gab was in inverse relation to his substance; a siren-song that delivered nothing but itself; a content-less verbal melody. ‘It’s deeds not words that matter’, said Hillary, pursing her lips as if to demonstrate that hot air would have to force its way past them. And then later in the same debate she repeated what has since become a campaign mantra ‘you campaign in poetry but you govern in prose’. Back came Obama right away ‘words do matter’, claiming, you might suppose uncontroversially, that words are deeds: speech-acts as I believe they used to be called in philosophical circles in these parts. Lately he has been, in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense stepping up to the podium, positioning himself within the oratorical canon of James Otis,5 Frederick Douglass,6 William Jennings Bryan7 and Jack Kennedy – this in a culture where until quite late in the nineteenth century all high-school and college students were required to pass exams in practical rhetoric (not an oxymoron then) in order to graduate. (Black politics may actually be the last place it survives in the age of the blog.) And Obama might have added: American history’s most decisive moments, those in which positions thought radically unviable became orthodoxy, were all conjured from the force of words. America was born with a declaration; with words that impenitently restructured reality: those of Thomas Jefferson8 and John Adams.9 Thirteen years later it was the sententiousness of the Constitution that generated the institutions of governance, not the other way about. They were

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not a codification of existing practice. Only in the United States does the supreme branch of the judiciary take as its fundamental brief, an almost Talmudic investigation into the original meaning of language acts performed by the framers and amenders; one which would do credit, in theory at least, to the most rigorous historical investigations in late eighteenth-century semantics. Thus, for instance, mighty minds are at work attempting to nail the relationship between the two sentences of the Second Amendment ‘a well regulated militia being necessary for … the right of citizens to bear and keep arms shall not be abridged’. Cross the Atlantic and it’s hard to think of comparable moments when rhetoric has had both explanatory and prescriptive power in the way it did in the Gettysburg address10 or in FDR’s first fireside chats.11 With the exception of Churchill’s rhetorical strikes against the rump of appeasers, our own tradition has often been more ornamental than constitutive. The glaring exceptions have occurred when religion was very much to the fore: Oliver Cromwell and William Wilberforce. Granted that American capitalism and American firepower have also had something to say in the shaping of its national destiny, you could nonetheless make the case that American history is scarcely more than the sum of its words. And there is of course one chapter of that history that is uniquely imprinted with the force of logos: the history of African-American captivity and redemption. Obama’s defence of the word-as-deed put me in mind, right away, of a book he has most certainly read: the most intensely poetic document in the canon of AfricanAmerican self-determination, W. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, and in particular the chapter ‘Of the Wings of Atalanta’ where Du Bois extols the ‘Preacher and the Teacher’ as embodying most completely the ideals of his people. (He had himself been a graduate of black colleges like Wilberforce and Fisk and of white ones like Harvard and had taught school in Appalachian Tennessee.) In that passage he pleads for the endurance of those ideals striving as they do ‘for another and juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing’ but warns that faced with enticements – ‘the question of cash’ – those ideals ‘with their simple beauty and weird inspiration’ might be no match for the pot of gold, and that ‘progress’ would be defined by the magnitude of its accumulation and the magnetism of its glitter.12 The story of America in the future would be this life-and-death struggle between idealism and positivism: Lincoln’s ‘better angels of our nature’13 pitted against raw economic heft. Which is why, Du Bois believed, America needed black idealism quite as much as vice versa. To understand why Obama likewise wants to play that chord as best as he can – one which presupposes the recapture of moral authority – you have to remember that deep history that went from the slave and free churches through Du Bois and poets of the Harlem Renaissance like Langston Hughes all the way to the Civil Rights movement, and always most effectively enacted in preaching and teaching, those two speech-work vocations, indistinguishably honoured in that community as liberators.

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On this side of the ocean, American religious fervour is more likely to get coverage as the rantings of apocalyptic conservatism. In Adam Curtis’s television documentary The Power of Nightmares, Christian fundamentalism is the mirror image of the Islamic theocracy that has declared itself America’s lethal foe. But this is to look at American religion with just one eye open. Christian fervour has also been the animating spirit of progressives and populists and without it, as I’ve said, there would have been no abolition alliance across the colour line; no Civil War and emancipation; no fifteenth amendment; and certainly no Civil Rights Act in 1964. Martin Luther King’s two titles – Reverend and Doctor – were not just successive items on his curriculum vitae: the preacher and the teacher. Like Du Bois, these two titles inhabited the same political personality on an equal basis. For King knew first hand the truth of Du Bois’s assertion in the chapter called ‘Faith of our Fathers’ that for African Americans, the churches had always been not just a spiritual sanctuary but a ‘government of men’.14 A great black church like the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church15 with more than a thousand members at the turn of the nineteenth century was the only functioning and elective black commonwealth in the Republic after the dismantling of Reconstruction.16 The Church, as Du Bois wrote, made laws through its elected councillors, raised revenues, and was responsible for its own schools and cradle-to-grave welfare; it even had its own militia. In every sense its word was Gospel and Law. Now back for a minute to that TV-debate moment. What was Hillary Clinton’s response to Obama’s insistence that words were, in fact, deeds; that moral suasion was the precondition of legislation? It was essentially that of Franklinian17 if not Jamesian pragmatism. Just poke through the gauzy balloon of high-drifting utterance, she implied, and it would deflate, collapse and crash. In place of the beauteous dirigible of sound, Hillary offers esoteric knowledge of process. This is the claim encapsulated in the mantra ‘experience’, although, despite the repetition of decades in public life (and the misrepresentation of Obama as some sort of greenhorn), it is hard for her to offer that particular wisdom without invoking the government of the 1990s as a kind of dual monarchy: the famous ‘Billary Years’. That claim is further reinforced by positioning herself as the provider of solidly tangible things – universal health care, for example, and other forms of government undeluded by metaphysics. A day or so later the Clintons operating in reverse – with Bill as bad cop and Hillary as smiley-face went still further – the President characterising Obama’s claims to have always opposed the war as fantasy – ‘a fairy tale’ – and Hillary herself asserting that while Martin Luther King’s part in galvanising the civil rights movement was all very well, it was indeed, to quote King’s speech to the Washington marchers, merely ‘a dream’. It took, she said, executive power – in the hands of a Southern white President, Lyndon Johnson, known for his eagerness to grab the balls of the pusillanimous and squeeze them until they signed on to legislation – to carry through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The patronising tone

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of the assertion instantly got Hillary in a lot of trouble (which she attempted to shrug off), above all for the aspersion that Martin Luther King’s true realm was that of piety while LBJ’s was that of unlovely accomplishment. What she was not called out on – not by Obama or anyone else so far as I know – was the factual inaccuracy of that history. What made the Civil Rights Act possible in the fall of 1964 was the conversion – and it was indeed a quasi-religious experience – of a group of mid-western white Republican senators all from the Amen Corner of the Party like Bourke Hickenlooper18 of Iowa and the greatest public rhetorician of his age, Everett Dirksen19 of Illinois who, joining the Democrats in a vote of cloture, preempted the filibuster that would otherwise have doomed the Bill. There is no question that the conversion of that crucial group had not come about through any pressure the pressure-happy President put on them but through the savage spectacle of dogs being set on protesters and marchers in the Freedom Summer that year; of Fannie Lou Hamer addressing the Democratic convention with a terrifying account of her physical abuse in a Mississippi jail;20 of the murder of the young civil rights workers, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, at the hands (no one much doubted then and it was subsequently proven) of the Ku Klux Klan.21 But the Bible Belt Republicans were moved, above all, by the rhetoric of Dr King proclaiming in the spirit of the Gospel, as if prophesying his own transfiguration in Atlanta four years later, that ‘I would rather die than hate my enemies.’ Now for the un-deluded I’m sure it would be very nice if the history of AfricanAmerican liberation had unfolded differently: a slave population and its leaders like David Walker 22 and Frederick Douglass so able to make a secular case against the atrocity that the gates of captivity, violent abuse and segregation would have come tumbling down before the trumpet blast of pure logic. I would have liked that too. But that is not how it has been – and for particular reasons that I want to look at more closely a little later. Suffice it to say at this point that of course there was a deist, if not atheist, case made for the abolition of slavery in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson. Given the fact that the Declaration begins with an assertion of divinely ordained natural equality, Jefferson the Virginian had no option but to grasp this thorny nettle. But he was damned quick to put it down again, striking out the paragraph ‘in complaisance’ to the objections of delegates from the Lower South, especially in Georgia and South Carolina. Jefferson then attempted to wash away the stain on the Declaration’s egalitarianism by displacing blame for the slave trade onto the hapless figure of George III and his predecessors – rather as if the institution had been foisted on Americans along with tea duties. But then of course the deist Jefferson was a hopeless mess of glaring inconsistencies: a lifelong slave-owner who unlike Washington did not emancipate his slaves at his death; the master of a black mistress and someone whose belief in the mental inferiority of blacks led him to condescend offensively to the poetess Phyllis Wheatley23 and the astronomer Benjamin Banneker24

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(both of whom sought his respect). The argument from reason then, cut little ice, not least because its pragmatic side also cautioned against any kind of impulsive move that would jeopardise the fragility of the union – and indeed the outcome of the war itself. Both John Adams (a Christian opponent of slavery and the slave trade) and Jefferson (a humanist opponent) accepted that they would be held to ransom by the Lower South if they made any immediate attempt to outlaw the trade; both respected slavery as a form of property and refused to take seriously a proposal to arm a slave regiment that would win freedom for its service (the counterpart to what the British were doing). Compared with all this busy Enlightenment rationalisation, the unequivocal egalitarianism of Christian salvation – the admissibility of all to saving grace – had a much more obvious appeal to those in immediate need of bodily and spiritual redemption. To be sure, the postponement to the hereafter of guaranteed deliverance meant that Christian optimism was freed from the test of validation. But it was also true that the first encounter that slave populations usually had with disinterested white concern for their plight was almost invariably the product of expressly Christian interventions: Pennsylvania Quakers like Anthony Benezet 25 and Benjamin Rush26; then the charismatic preachers of the dissenting missions – Wesley27 himself whose time as a minister in Savannah in the heart of the slave-owning oligarchy nourished his fierce attack on the institution just two years before the revolution – and George Whitefield, the fiercest flame of the Great Awakening, who began as slave-owner and ended as evangelist to African Americans.28 But it was Baptist theology, with its emphasis on free will, on self-deliverance and adult rebirth, that communicated itself most forcefully to a captive population yearning for redemption. The earliest cases of free churches around the time of the revolution (such as Silver Bluff, South Carolina),29 of free itinerant preaching and teaching – the ancestry of the civil rights movement – were almost always Baptist precisely because they repudiated the fatalism of Calvinist predestination – though as we’ll see Methodism did have a following among African Americans of the next generation, its more strictly austere forms and calls to submission sat less well with what was, in effect, already a liberation theology. Now at this point some of you may feel the need to register incredulity at this old lapsed Jew presuming to talk to you about the fine points of Christian theology and their implications of the confessions for the enslaved; but I promise you, your disbelief could hardly outmatch mine, speaking as I do a bit like Satan rebuking Sin. This whole subject was not what I had in mind when I set out on the research that turned into Rough Crossings, although I should also say – if you’ll forgive an autobiographical digression – it was always impossible to engage seriously with Dutch history without educating oneself on the intra-Protestant battles of the Netherlandish Reformation; Remonstrant and Counter-Remonstrant contentions as doctrinally unsparing and lethally ferocious as anything separating Sunni and Shi’a,

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and initially just as mysterious for this scholar. For that matter, when I had finished filming and writing A History of Britain, I would often be asked if any surprises had come out of my research. A bit like M. Jourdain discovering that he had, all along been speaking Prose, I owned up to my surprise that until deep into the twentieth century almost every great conflict in British history had been in its essence one of religion. That was as true of the seventeenth and the nineteenth century as of the sixteenth and the time of Becket’s murder – and probably truer than any of us liked to admit of the eighteenth as well. For what was the resistance to Jacobitism and the French, around which (Linda Colley tells us) British national identity crystallised, except a visceral paranoid horror of being subjected to French Catholicism either by invasion or stealth. Just look at the adversarial protagonist in Hogarth’s Gate of Calais, a slobbering friar caressing a haunch of British beef, and you can see the anti-Catholic riots of 1780 rehearsed. Now I am not much one for mea culpa, but it’s fair to say that the notion of Christianity being the great fulcrum on which British historical conflict was balanced was not exactly what my generation at school in the 1950s and at university in the 1960s had been educated to believe. ‘Well, boys’, said my cheerfully agnostic history teacher in 1958 – his convictions seemed all the more plausible for his uncanny facial resemblance to Houdon’s bust of Voltaire – ‘we may not know what the rest of the century holds but of this we can be sure; it won’t feature either nationalism or organised religion’. So much for the prophetic power of historians! At university, it went without saying that once history had emerged from the Middle Ages, the rantings (for so we dismissed them) of the doctors of divinity were assumed somehow to be expressions of or pretexts for something more obviously powerful: the drive towards the centralisation of a monarchical state if you were G. R. Elton; the upward and onward march of the middle classes if you were Christopher Hill (in his classic phase that is, rather than the finer scholar bewitched by Muggletonians – though even then it was the socially revolutionary implications of the World Upside Downers that interested him rather than the theology). For E. P. Thompson, Methodism was important essentially as a tool of social control, for its emasculation of class-consciousness – and so on. In the case of race-history in the British Empire and in particular the history of the abolition of the trade, I had of course read and subscribed to Eric Williams’s denunciation of what he took to be the sanctimonious, self-serving hypocrisies of the evangelicals.30 In the 1960s, we were very much in the business of knocking saints off their pedestals, including or even especially focusing on the Clapham Sect.31 Wilberforce? A man who once the trade had been abolished took no interest in slavery itself but turned to Henry Thornton32 and said ‘Well Henry, what shall we abolish now?’ The answer was ‘the lottery’. All the same to them. How could they be taken seriously? They were after all High Tories, devout believers in the subordination of ranks and the absoluteness of authority. We bought into

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Williams’s assumption that abolitionism became credible only at the point when the slave and sugar traffic became unprofitable; at which point the demands of laissez-faire capitalism needed the window-dressing of a free-labour doctrine the better to enslave the next class of peons, the industrial working class. Even at the time I had my suspicions about the adequacy of a model of explanation for individual and collective action that was so reductively equated with the imperatives of political economy. We were, some of you may dimly remember, a generation fairly well-attuned to the ecstatic. And then we discovered from the empirically incontrovertible research of Seymour Drescher33 – and almost every serious scholar since, that there was a little problem with the chronology. For, pace Williams, the abolitionist crusade, culminating in the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, occurred precisely at the height of its sustained profitability (and that of the international sugar business) and not at all on their downswing. If late eighteenth-century man was, above all, homo oeconomicus, abolitionism – embraced eventually by the vast majority of the governing class, Tories and Whigs alike – was a supremely irrational act. This in turn made it an act of conviction and – for its most impassioned, eloquent and ultimately persuasive champions – an act of Christian obligation meant to usher in the dawning of an expressly Christian empire. How fitting, then, for the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade to have been commemorated in 2007 in Westminster Abbey where – with the statue of Wilberforce as well as his flesh-and-blood descendants looking on – the Queen was regaled by West African drummers sounding the slave-raid alert from the choir screen, not to mention being upbraided by a militant in African dress for a good five minutes. The authenticity of the religious impulse in abolition helped me survive the absurdity of yours truly standing in the pulpit of All Saints parish church, Fulham, delivering a belated eulogy to the sainted Granville Sharp,34 in July 2007, 194 years after his demise. The reason for the delay – and the significance of this for our discussion will be apparent in a minute – was that in 1813 Sharp, the great patriarch of abolitionism, had been denied a church funeral by the incumbent vicar, not because Sharp was a militant agitator for slaves in the British empire and beyond, but because he had shown suspicious signs of liturgical deviance from the Church of England to the point where the vicar thought him a thinly disguised dissenter. On the face of it arcane, this dispute was actually significant because while the Quakers had kick-started the Christian offensive against the slave trade, virtually all of its most conspicuous foot soldiers – Wilberforce himself, Henry Thornton, the Clarkson brothers, and Zachary Macaulay – were staunch Anglican evangelicals.35 This matters because while it seems to me an exaggeration to accuse the Clapham Sect of using the slave trade as a vehicle for their true concern, the saving of their own souls and those of their fellow white Britons, it is true and important, that their ultimate target was the cleansing of the commanding heights of the British constitution. A common refrain of the evangelicals was that defeat in

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America had been a providential chastisement for many kinds of turpitude: the evil commerce in humans itself but also the corruption of Parliament, the Erastian36 indifference of the episcopacy, and the blindness of the judiciary to its most precious charge, the English common law. Granville Sharp, the son of an archdeacon and the grandson of an Archbishop of York, thus felt moved simultaneously to educate himself in the Common Law while mounting a targeted campaign of conversion within the episcopacy of the Church of England. Long before Thomas Clarkson and Wilberforce took up the cause, Sharp was delivering a fusillade of pamphlets on the un-Christian nature of the slave trade to the Archbishops of Canterbury, London and elsewhere. When Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of Chester who had been persuaded by Sharp’s campaigning, became Bishop of London in 1787 – the same year that the Abolition Committee was formed – Sharp felt the prelacy as a whole would follow.37 It took another two decades but it was indeed the conversion of the bishops of the Church of England that ended what had been the greatest stumbling block to parliamentary abolition – resistance in the House of Lords. It was in the same spirit that Sharp took on Lord Chief Justice Mansfield – the spirit of vindication of sovereign institutions. And in June 1806 when the great issue was debated most thoroughly, the motion having been introduced by Charles James Fox two months before his death, the most impassioned speeches came from the likes of the Solicitor General Samuel Romilly, precisely because its passage would restore the integrity of Parliament itself, then under assault as the nest of Old Corruption. ‘When’, said Romilly ‘it has been established by evidence that the African slave trade is carried on by rapine, robbery and murder ... I do say that this trade ought not to be suffered to continue one hour. It is a stain on our national reputation and ought to be wiped away.’38 Now this is not to say that the evangelicals were in any sense revolutionaries overturning established institutions. It is significant that (except for the Clarksons) they were precisely the opposite. A Britain cleansed of what Sharp called ‘the Accurst Thing’39 would be the answer to both its upstart rivals, the American and French republics, in respect of the very principles those revolutions claimed to embody: equality before the law. When taxed by defenders of the slave trade that this was wartime and the French, Spanish and Americans would like nothing better than to have a lucrative trade handed to them on a platter, Romilly replied it was precisely at such a moment that such a manifestly disinterested legislation should be executed, the better to show the world that there was at least one empire founded on the ‘rules of justice’ (he anticipated correctly that Napoleon was about to reintroduce the trade into the French Empire). Romilly was Whig enough to hope that abolition would open the doors to a more general reformation. But for the Tory evangelicals, once the Good Work had been accomplished, it would be legitimate once more to require submission to the sovereign order of ranks. This was why, for example, Spencer Perceval, the Prime

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Minister who presided over the passage of the Act, was at the same time the most zealous of abolitionists and the most reactionary of High Tories. In all this work, it is fair to say, the abolitionists saw themselves – very much as paintings, prints and sculpture depict them – as bestowing liberty from the shackles on grateful Africans and were (with the exception of Sharp and John Clarkson) much less keen on the Africans and black Americans taking their destinies in their own hands. The most famous image of the campaign, ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother’, reproduced as a Wedgwood medallion, on abolitionist tokens and coins and in countless other forms, features (you will remember) an African on one knee, his hands still manacled, in an attitude of supplication. Entitlement to being treated as a human rather than a commodity was not, for most of the abolitionists, a licence for immediate general emancipation and especially not in an age of revolution. Nonetheless, the sense that tackling the iniquity was doing the work of remaking Britain and evangelising it into Christian virtue; that it was an enterprise involving all the constituencies glaringly missing from the realm of Old Corruption, such as women, the provinces and new industrial towns, all this meant, I think, both at the time and two hundred years later, that it was possible to celebrate the event as an act of national rebirth; as a restoration, if you like, of a long vanished Christian order. In 1807, the Act was supposed to have laid the foundations for an empire that, freed from the taint of blood money, would miraculously be capable of reconciling power, money and morals. Two hundred years later in the re-branded Britain of 2007, remembering that moment also became an occasion for an outbreak of optimistic inclusiveness: the harbinger of a pluralist Britain, rejoicing in, or at least engaging with its post-imperial plurality of faiths and races. Here were Ghanaian drummers at the choir screen; here were black cabinet ministers, black notables, indeed knights of the realm called Trevor. It was a reassuring message of harmony between ruling institutions, Christian belief and the fraternity of races. In the United States, on the other hand, both two hundred years ago and today, the same event was hardly noticed, much less commemorated. This is all the more extraordinary because in fact President Jefferson signed the abolition of the slave trade into law three weeks before King George III gave the royal assent. Two hundred years ago the abolition was in force – at least legally – in the United States whereas 1 March was the bicentennial of its implementation in the British Empire. But there was and is a big difference in the way this was read on different sides of the ocean: inaugurally, you might say, in Britain; prophylactically in America. In Britain’s case there was attention to enforcement and the centralisation of authority at Westminster meant that the Royal Navy would indeed try to enforce the liquidation of the trade on the African coast, taking prisoner violators and smugglers and liberating slaves from their chains. In America’s case there were no comparable resources, especially when the infant navy was busy dealing with the Barbary

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Coast corsairs that preyed on its shipping. But more significantly, the debates in the ninth Congress, unlike the debates in Parliament, were not about a heady moment of national rebirth; on the contrary they were about the perils of national dissolution should the Act press too hard on the already tenuous union of North and Lower South. So instead of great issues of principle, the debates in Congress, such as they were, dealt with critical details: the penalties for smuggling and the fate of contraband slaves taken from illegal traders. Northern zealots wanted the penalties to be equivalent to those for capital crimes since they equated the traffic with a form of manslaughter. The South – to which Jefferson’s own allegiance (not to mention his status as a slave-owner) inclined him – insisted it would never stand for illegal traders being executed for what they could regard only as a misdemeanour rather than a felony. More seriously still (bear with me over these arcane details), while Congressmen from the North assumed that slaves taken as contraband would be liberated, those from the South assumed they would be re-auctioned since they were most likely to be seized at ports like Savannah and Charleston. Interference with such property rights, the most adamant Southern Congressmen like Peter Early of Georgia and John Randolph of Virginia said, would represent such a violation to the federal nature of the constitution as to warrant secession.40 And they said it not least because the presence of tens if not hundreds of thousands of freedmen at large in the South would be, they all assumed, the dry tinder of insurrection and of massacre. And that was because they knew and deeply feared the kind of insurrectionary Christianity they believed to be walking at large among their fields and slave cabins. And they were right. Nat Turner believed he had been directly appointed by God as a seer and prophet; Denmark Vesey and the other black Methodists who were hung with him for rebellion in 1822 likewise took their authority for rebellion directly from Scripture.41 So you might say that the gospel of slave liberty in Britain was the founding feature of the Tory evangelical dream of a harmonious Christian restoration, a freshly re-consecrated empire and therefore nothing much to disturb the powers that be. Hallelujah! And – once William IV’s furiously reluctant hand had been dragged onto the bill outlawing slavery itself – God Save the King! In the United States, abolition of the trade heralded just the opposite, not a unification of the realm but a sectional disintegration of the Republic. The case, as befitted legislation sponsored by President Jefferson, had to be argued tactically and pragmatically rather than in terms of high principle. What followed were the compromises, equivocations and repeated postponements of pain that alone – it was thought – could preserve the Union. But there were, of course, through the first half of the nineteenth century, plenty of folk, white as well as black, who believed temporising unworthy of the high ideals on which the United States had been established. Those militants argued from principles saturated in Christian indignation. In the first place it was telling that

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the driving force of their abolitionism (after the Quakers) was to be found among Baptists and Methodists rather than high Church Episcopalians as in England; churches, in other words in which the colour-blind criteria of salvation had to be a central tenet; churches, especially in the case of the Baptists, that stressed the indispensability of conversionary rebirth. The potentially dangerous implications of this ‘soul liberty’ (as the blacks called it) were, of course, not lost on Southern Baptist and Methodist slave-owners. Black deacons and preachers, especially the out-ofdistrict itinerants, were thought especially dangerous. Charles Pinckney in Charleston candidly explained that ‘we look upon the habit of Negro preachers as…an evil, not because the black man cannot be a good one but because of his acquiring an influence outside of our control’.42 Hence the need for regulated ‘plantation missions’ that emphasised obedience and a fatalist version of Christianity that taught resignation to the will of God, the eschewing of righteous anger, and which made sure that the hymnal was nothing more exciting than Isaac Watts.43 But this heavy dose of supervision triggered in turn the formative experience (unless one counts the great escape to the British that I narrate in Rough Crossings) of African-American self-determination: the creation throughout the slave world of the South, of secret, irregular black churches beyond the bounds of white supervision, the ‘hush harbours’ improvised from twigs and branches, congregations meeting only at night in swamps and gullies, ravines, woods and wilderness. Unlike the kind of church available say to Olaudah Equiano in London, these churches truly belonged to their worshippers.44 Their forms, more than anything in the first Great Awakening, were those of direct witness: testimony, ecstatic jubilation. These churches were full of chants and ring shouts (which sometimes had to be muffled to prevent discovery) and their music of course sounded nothing whatever like Isaac Watts. It did not take much for messages of the scripture – the deliverance of suffering Israel from bondage or the torment and deliverance of Christ the Saviour – to find direct physical embodiment in the experience of the slaves themselves. And from that visceral connection came the words and sounds of liberation: the spirituals, those great anthems of hope and of the eventual opening of the gates of heaven. In some cities, this Christianity of redemptive liberation was allowed institutional expression, not least because ingrained racism in the northern as well as Southern Methodist and Baptist churches made it necessary for black worshippers to found their own houses. Thus there came about the thirteen black Baptist churches of antebellum Savannah, the nursery of African-American self-determination. In Georgia, this included the African Zion Church – still there – and the Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Philadelphia founded after Richard Allen – who had been a slave in Delaware, sundered from his family when they were sold down river in the revolutionary war – was, with Absalom Jones, physically hounded in mid-prayer from the white Methodist chapel of St George’s.45 (Allen had been converted by an itinerant preacher appropriately called Freeborn

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Garretson.) Those churches became stops on the British tourist circuit – much as Sunday in Abyssinian Church in Harlem is still a must-see for Scandinavians. English writing of the usual ethnographically patronising variety is full of amusement at the antics and the enthusiasm of the darkies. There were others who were paying proper attention, though. David Walker, the militant black abolitionist from Boston who had heard Allen preaching, wrote in his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829 that ‘When the Lord shall raise up coloured historians in succeeding generations to present the crimes of this nation to the then gazing world, the Holy Ghost will make them do justice to the name of Bishop Allen.’46 And there were whites for whom the oral culture especially – the preaching and teaching and above all the singing and chanting of the black churches – was transformative. William Garrison47 was another admirer of Allen’s Christian oratory and there were others who looked beyond the pulpit to understand the character of what had already become a liberation theology. We owe our documentary knowledge of those free spirituals to one man more than any other, Emily Dickinson’s friend and correspondent, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The descendant of Puritans, a Harvard graduate, and Unitarian minister at Newburyport until he was expelled for radicalism, Higginson was one of those Massachusetts apostles of virtue who found the very existence of slavery so abhorrent a stain on the character of the United States that he was prepared to accept the division of the nation rather than tolerate its continuation – and still less its expansion into the new territories. During the Civil War, he volunteered to be an officer in what became the first all-black regiment, the South Carolina Volunteers, which was partly recruited from freedmen, partly from escaped slaves. In the introduction to his edition of what was the first anthology of Spirituals, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1867, just after the war, Higginson tells us that when he first walked round the campfires of his black soldiers he was following in the footsteps of his hero Walter Scott whom he credited as the archivist of ‘border minstrelsy’, envying his talking of ‘writing them [ballads] down piecemeal from the lips of ancient crones’.48 No crones on the Shenandoah. But Higginson became spellbound by the richness and the diversity of the Spirituals – the differences between regions, and dialects, the prevalence of fuguelike rounds in some places and of ring shouts in others, the clapping in some songs and foot-stomping in others. Gradually Higginson became aware he had uncovered an entire aural culture of saving grace. The last thing he wanted was to be seen to be an intruding presence, a Professor Higgins of the black camp: ‘Writing down in the darkness as best I could with my hand in the safe covert of my pocket the words of the song, I have afterwards carried it to my tent like some captured bird or insect and then after examination, put it by.’49 Higginson enlisted an NCO, Robert Sutton, who had, he said, a phenomenal memory, to help with the aural record. What we have of that time: I Hold Your Light (‘Hold your light Brudder Robert/Hold your light/Hold your light on Canaan’s shore’) sung half an hour at a

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time; My Army Cross Over (‘My army cross over/My army cross over/O Pharaoh’s army drownded/My army cross over’); One More River (‘O Jordan was a great old bank/Dere aint but one more river to cross/We have some valiant soldier here/Dere aint but one more river to cross’) and the one that had got its singers locked up in jail in Charleston at the start of the war, We’ll Soon be Free: ‘We’ll soon be free/We’ll soon be free/we’ll soon be free/When de Lord will call us home/My brudder how long/My brudder how long/My brudder how long/‘Fore we done sufferin here/It wont be long … We’ll walk de golden street/We’ll walk de golden street/We’ll walk de golden street/Where pleasure never dies.’ It is those Spirituals and the churches and camp revivals where they were sung – especially after the war and the brutal liquidation of Reconstruction in 1876, the centennial year of the Republic – which preserved the inter-connected character of African-American salvation, spiritual, social and political. Around those words and anthems were built new generations of churches, in the cities of the migrations North and in the black quarters of cities like Atlanta that rose from the ruins. It was to those churches that African-Americans looked when the riots and lynchings happened. It was to those churches that they looked for the form of elective government that Du Bois saw and celebrated as the crucible of some sort of alternative existence, not just for his own people – but for the whole American Republic. And it was out of that Christian worship that the Civil Rights movement arose in the 1950s and 1960s – which is why of course its houses of prayer were targets for arson and bombings by the re-born Ku Klux Klan. And if forms have been in the first instance a source of succour and solidarity for black America, Dr King and Du Bois insisted they were ultimately an alternative model of community for the whole of America; hence the embrace of the white students, the bus riders, the desegregation diners, the freedom marchers of the 1960s. Now Barack Obama was born – in Hawaii – in 1961, and technically I guess we would have to classify him as American-African rather than African-American: half Kenyan. He too is out of Harvard – but his other intellectual and political apprenticeship has been in Chicago, one of the places where the Northern migration and its forms of preaching and teaching took deepest root. But the notion that he has somehow opportunistically manufactured a synthetic identity amidst black and white, Christians and infidels, seems to me (I have seen him in action) wide of the mark. Another place I know pretty well is Hawaii and that, as anyone familiar with its painful ethnic complications will tell you, is exactly the kind of place to invite reflections on race and American identity. So whether he was born or raised to it, it seems clear that Obama has internalised the long history I have been outlining for you: a history of natural fit between a theology of the captive and the disadvantaged and the politics of redemption. Just how such professions of belief may be squared with the liberal pluralism enshrined in the American constitution is a discussion for another day – perhaps by one of your speakers. But I’m always slightly amused by the

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accusation that an understanding of moral rhetoric – not to mention its practice – is somehow an advertisement of inexperience, a handicap in dealing with the world in its present condition. Have I been missing something or is it not a fact that many of the difficulties that threaten us proceed directly from theologies proclaiming monopolies of wisdom and impatient of religious pluralism? And though I blush to say this in Professor Dawkins’s ’hood, who better to deal with them than an Afro-KansanHawaiian ex-editor of the Harvard Law Review who just happens to be a Christian? Notes 1 Captain Basil Hall, Travels in North America in the Years 1827 & 1828 (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1829; modern edition, New York: Arno Press, 1974). [The notes to this chapter are by Matthew Spooner – ed.] 2 Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Pamela Neville-Sington (London: Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1832; Harmonsdworth: Penguin Classics, 1997), p. 130. 3 Trollope, Domestic Manners, p. 131. 4 Members of a seventeenth-century dissenting movement, many of them soldiers in Oliver Cromwell’s army during the English Civil War, who advocated popular sovereignty and religious toleration. Michael Mendle, The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, Levellers, and the English State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 5 James Otis (1725–83), was among the most prominent and effective critics of British rule in the decade leading to the American Revolution. J. R. Ferguson, ‘“Reason in Madness”: The Political Thought of James Otis’, William and Mary Quarterly, 36 (1979), 194–214. 6 Frederick Douglass (b. Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, 1818–95) rose from a childhood of slavery to become one of the most famous abolitionists in antebellum America. He helped to organise the Seneca Falls Convention that marked the inception of the American women’s movement and became the first black candidate for Vice President. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (reprint; New York: Penguin Classics, 2003); Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (reprint; New York: St Martins, 2002). 7 William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) was catapulted to national attention with his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech at the 1896 Democratic Party Convention, which directly led to his nomination as candidate. Robert W. Cherny, Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985). 8 Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was a leading American revolutionary, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the USA (1801–09). 9 John Adams (1735–1826), leader of the Boston revolutionaries, drafted the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780, which provided the model for the US Constitution. He was the second President of the United States (1797–1801). 10 Perhaps Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech, delivered at the commemoration of the Gettysburg battlefield where the bloodiest clash in American history had taken place.

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Abraham Lincoln, ‘The Gettysburg Address, delivered on 19 November 1863’ (reprint; Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1995). See also: http://en.wikisource.org/ wiki/Gettysburg_Address (20.01.09). A series of thirty radio addresses given by President Franklin Roosevelt during his terms in office, the ‘fireside chats’ urged Americans to have confidence in the banking system during the Great Depression and to support Roosevelt’s New Deal programmes. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, first published 1903 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 67. In the final line of President Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, delivered in 1861, after seven states had formally seceded from the Union, Lincoln expressed his hope that through ‘the mystic chords of memory’ and ‘the better angels of our nature’ the nation might still avoid impending Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, The Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. John Herbert Clifford and Marion Mills, vol. 5 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1908), pp. 133–47. See also: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 158. Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, founded in 1798 by Bishop Richard Allen, was the original AME Church and remained one of the largest black churches throughout the nineteenth century (see note 45). Reconstruction, usually dated 1863–77, was the period in which the United States attempted to abolish slavery and ‘reconstruct’ the shattered Union following the Civil War. It was a period that saw the enfranchisement of millions of former slaves, and the election of many black men to local and national office. By 1877, however, political intimidation by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and waning Northern interest in black rights had led to the abandonment of many of Reconstruction’s initial goals. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). The reference here is to Benjamin Franklin (1706–90): printer, revolutionary and diplomat. Franklin’s pragmatism was vital in obtaining the compromises that garnered support for the Revolution and the Constitution throughout the Thirteen Colonies. Bourke Hickenlooper (1896–1971), Republican Governor and Senator from Iowa, was known as one of the most conservative men in the Senate and opposed many domestic reforms, initially opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Everett Dirksen (1896–1969) served as Congressman and Senator from Illinois. He entered the Senate a staunch ally of Sen. Joseph McCarthy but became one of the strongest advocates of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Everett M. Dirksen, The Education of a Senator (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–77), a plantation worker, was an important part of Mississippi’s struggle for equality in the 1960s. The speeches and organising work of this devoutly religious woman drew national attention. Kay Mills and Marian Wright Edelman, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007). James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were student activists murdered during the Mississippi ‘Freedom Summer’ of 1964 while investigating a churchburning. The public outrage over their disappearance – Goodman and Schwerner were white – led President Johnson to send the FBI to investigate the case and helped spur

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the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Bill Scheppler, The Mississippi Burning Trial: A Primary Source Account (New York: Rosen Publishing, 2003). David Walker (1785–1830) was one of the most important early abolitionists. In 1829 he published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, which called for black unity across national boundaries. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles … to the Coloured Citizens of the World (Boston: David Walker, 1829). By the end of her life, Phyllis Wheatley (1753–84) was perhaps the most widely known black woman in the Western world. Born in Africa, she was sold into slavery in Boston. She was taught to read by the Wheatley family and published her first volume of poetry in 1773; it was praised by prominent white intellectuals from George Washington to Voltaire. Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806) was a free African-American mathematician, astronomer and farmer, most famous for publishing an almanac widely promoted by British and American anti-slavery advocates. Silvio Bedini, The Life of Benjamin Banneker: The First African-American Man of Science (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1999). Anthony Benezet (1713–84) was an important early American Quaker educator and anti-slavery agitator who published over a dozen anti-slavery tracts. Robert Vaux, Memoirs of the Life of Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia: W. Alexander, 1816). Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), writer and physician, is best known as one of the original signatories of the Declaration of Independence. The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush: his ‘Travels Through Life’ Together with His Commonplace Book for 1789–1813 (Reprint; Oxford: Greenwood Press, 1970). John Wesley (1703–91), a prominent theologian and Anglican cleric, is credited with founding the Evangelical Methodist movement in England and the American colonies. Roy Hattersley, John Wesley: A Brand from the Burning (London: Little, Brown, 2002). George Whitefield (1714–70) was perhaps the most widely known itinerant preacher of his time. His open-air revival meetings of the late 1730s attracted as many as 30,000 listeners – easily the largest public gatherings in the American colonies to that time. Frank Lambert, Peddler in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Probably the first Afro-American church in the United States was founded around 1773 at Silver Bluff, a large plantation in South Carolina. Although only white men were allowed to preach, nearly all of the church’s officers were free black men. Orville Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Eric Williams (1911–81) published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944 (Reprint; Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). He was successively Chief Minister, Prime Minister and Premier of Trinidad & Tobago from 1956 till his death. The Clapham Sect was a group of Evangelical social reformers founded and motivated initially by opposition to the slave trade and active during the early part of the nineteenth century; its members included William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp and Zachary Macaulay.

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32 Henry Thornton (1760–1815), son of John Thornton, was a prominent abolitionist, a member of the House of Commons and a leading member of the Clapham Sect. Standish Meacham, Henry Thornton of Clapham, 1760–1815 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1964). 33 Seymour Drescher is one of the premier historians of British anti-slavery. He argues that emancipation emerged out of the rational scientific thought of the late eighteenth/ early nineteenth century. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor Versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 34 Granville Sharp (1735–1813) was among the first and most influential advocates of slavetrade abolition in Britain. E. C. P. Lascelles, Granville Sharp and the Freedom of the Slaves in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928). 35 William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, Thomas and John Clarkson and Zachary Macaulay were the leading lights of the British movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. Their deeply held Evangelical faith informed their work on social reforms from abolition to temperance. 36 The term derives from the Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus (1524–83) who argued that sinners ought to be punished by the state and not by their church; ‘Erastian’ thus refers to the notion that the church is subservient to the state. 37 Beilby Porteus (1731–1809) became active in anti-slavery activities while Bishop of Chester and achieved notoriety in England in 1783 for delivering a sermon criticising the Anglican Church for ignoring the pleas and petitions of slaves on a Barbadian plantation. In 1787, he became Bishop of London and was the most prominent clerical abolitionist. 38 Samuel Romilly, Address to the House of Commons, 10 June 1806. Quoted in Thomas Clarkson, Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (London: P. A. Brinsmade, 1830), vol. 2, pp. 184–5. 39 Granville Sharp to Benjamin Rush, 18 July 1775, in John A. Woods (ed.), ‘The Correspondence of Rush and Sharp’, Journal of American Studies, I (1969), 16. Cf. Joshua 7. 40 Peter Early (1773–1817) and John Randolph of Roanoke (1773–1833) were Southern politicians and two of the fiercest political defenders of slavery in the Early Republic. Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (New York: Norton, 1979). 41 Nat Turner (1800–31) and Denmark Vesey (1787?-1822) led the two most famous slave conspiracies of the antebellum period. Turner, a slave and minister, killed sixty white people and burned innumerable buildings during an 1831 uprising. Vesey, a former slave, was hanged for allegedly planning the largest slave rebellion in American history. Douglas Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison: Madison House, 1999); Stephen Oates, Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990); Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (5th edn; New York: International Publishers, 1983). 42 Charles Pinckney (1757–1824) served three times as Governor of South Carolina between 1789 and 1806. He was among the fiercest defenders of slavery at the Constitutional Convention of 1789. Charles Pinckney, Address in Charleston, 1829, quoted in Harold T. Lewis, Yet With a Steady Beat: The African American Struggle for Recognition in the Episcopal Church (New York: Continuum International, 1996), p. 37.

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43 The first internationally known popular hymnist, Isaac Watts (1674–1747) wrote over 750 hymns. They were frequently reprinted and remained popular in church and in homes throughout the British Empire. 44 Olaudah Equiano (1745?–97) was the author of the most widely read slave narrative in his time or today. Having lived as a slave in Virginia and aboard a British naval ship, Equiano purchased his freedom and moved to London where he was active in the early years of the British anti-slavery movement. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (reprint; New York: Penguin, 2003). 45 Richard Allen (1760–1831) was the most influential black leader in Early American Philadelphia, which had by far the largest free black population in the United States. Ordained a Methodist minister, he split with the church in 1816 to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black religious congregation in America, which still has over four million members. Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 46 Walker, Walker’s Appeal, p. 65. 47 William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) was the most prominent of the ‘radical abolitionists’ of the late antebellum period. He founded the Liberator, the first and most widely distributed abolitionist newspaper. Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 48 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ‘Negro Spirituals,’ Atlantic Monthly, June 1867. 49 Ibid.

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Response to Simon Schama Matthew Spooner

Four years into the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln reminded the country that those who fought to preserve slavery and those who fought to destroy it ‘read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and both invoke His will against the other’.1 Lincoln understood, as many of his countrymen did not, that American Christianity is a pliable thing, as rife with contradiction and open to interpretation as America itself. In the decades before the Civil War a long line of antislavery advocates, from the Philadelphia Quaker Anthony Benezet to the Boston ‘firebrands’ William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, found in their faith the strength and moral clarity to condemn injustice and to defy public silence over slavery.2 At the same time, however, an even longer line of slavery’s defenders, from Augustine and Aquinas to the Southern slaveholders who seceded from the Union, found in the Bible voluminous evidence that God had sanctioned slavery and would, they believed, reward those who sought its preservation.3 As these examples begin to make clear, nowhere is the importance and ambiguity of Christian experience in America more evident than in the relationship between race and salvation that Professor Schama has outlined. The promise of salvation – the hope of personal redemption and deliverance as a people – has indeed been at the core of the long struggle for black liberation that began in slavery and, as Schama reminds us, continued in the candidacy and now the Presidency of Barack Obama. Yet even as Christianity helped to bridge racial divisions and to create the religious tradition that Professor Schama locates at the heart of the long struggle for freedom, so too has Christianity been instrumental in authorising those same divisions and denying freedom to millions. America may be, as Professor Schama says, ‘scarcely more than the sum of its words’, but those words have had many different meanings and have been employed toward many different ends. To fully understand the importance to America’s future of the ‘theology of the captive’ and the ‘politics of redemption’ that Schama has brought to light, it is therefore necessary to engage with the ways in which Americans’ faith has helped them to bind the many chains that their faith has also helped them to break.

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As Professor Schama argues, we must begin by reaffirming the fact that the bedrock of African-American resistance and renewal has long been the Christian church. In the antebellum North, black churches provided spiritual guidance and material relief to communities of free black Americans, allowing the emergence of the first consciously political struggles against slavery and racial discrimination. It was at Richard Allen’s Mother Bethel Church, for instance, that formal black politics arguably began in 1817, when over three thousand black Philadelphians rejected with a unanimous cry of ‘No!’ a plan to remove black Americans to Africa.4 They held, as David Walker would write in his Appeal and as later generations of black Americans would affirm, that ‘This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and the gospel is free.’5 And, as Schama writes, the plain truth of this fact and the eloquence with which men like Allen and Walker expressed it proved crucial in converting white Americans like Garrison to the cause of immediate abolition.6 In the slave societies of the South, where the Vesey conspiracy and Nat Turner’s revolt made clear the danger that black Christianity posed to the standing social order, the religious life of black Americans necessarily took on a more clandestine nature. On Sundays, many slaves openly gathered in churches on nearby plantations to hear white preachers, paid by their masters, repeat Paul’s instruction: ‘slaves, obey your earthly masters’ (Ephesians 6.5). But it was in the woods and slave quarters at night, and in their own churches where possible, that slaves, infusing African traditions with the Gospel, created a religion recognizably Christian and distinctly their own. Focusing as much on Moses and the story of Exodus as on the stories of the New Testament, slaves eschewed the fire and brimstone Christianity of their masters; the faith that they embraced emphasised God’s presence in the world and His promise to deliver His people from bondage. A European visitor remarked in astonishment that slaves ‘seem to see God bending over them like the sky, to feel his presence on them and around them, like the storm and sunshine’.7 The black preacher, whose importance as leader and teacher Schama rightly traces from slavery to Martin Luther King, emerged from both the oral tradition of African religions and the fact that slaves were kept illiterate by the law and the lash.8 The preacher held together a fragile slave community by serving as its spiritual centre and by resolving disputes among its members. Most importantly, as Schama writes, their presence and their teachings provided a powerful alternative to the docility and obedience prescribed by their masters, and for that reason their existence was constantly lamented by slaveholders (even if their capacity to preach was often much admired).9 While it is therefore undeniable that slaves found strength and conviction in the Christian faith, it is important to realise that their masters did the same. It is no revelation to point out, for instance, that Christianity predates Christian misgivings about slavery by more than seventeen hundred years. As many historians

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have argued, ‘the emergence of an international antislavery opinion represented a momentous turning point in the evolution of man’s moral perception.’10 Christianity may have first taken root among the slaves of the Roman Empire, but the ruling classes soon discovered that the promise of emancipation in the next life and the instruction to ‘render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar’ (Matthew 22.21) in this life provided a powerful means of maintaining social order.11 After Europeans stumbled into a ‘New World’, lust for wealth and power combined with a desire to spread the light of the Gospel; this potent combination legitimated the destruction of native peoples and the exploitation of over ten million transplanted Africans and their offspring.12 Missionaries of all sects and Christian-minded slaveholders alike rationalised the inhuman cruelty of bondage by arguing that without slavery both Indians and slaves would remain in heathen darkness. It is not coincidental that by 1760 the society most active in spreading Christianity, the Jesuits, was also the world’s largest slaveholder, with over 17,000 slaves working on estates in Brazil and the Caribbean.13 Perhaps the clearest indicator of Christianity’s importance to the rise and maintenance of slavery in the New World was the fact that the first generations of Africans throughout the Americas tended to resist attempts at conversion.14 Although Catholics had the most success (in part because the constellation of saints merged well with polytheistic African beliefs), no Christian sect made much headway with newly arrived slaves. Especially in the Caribbean, where high mortality rates necessitated a steady infusion of new Africans, slaves continued to look to more recognisably African religions to organise their collective identity and their resistance. The cults of Obeah, Myalism and Santeria, for instance, were implicated in numerous eighteenth-century slave uprisings throughout the Caribbean. And it was Voodoo priests who militarised slaves on disparate San Domingo plantations and lit the early fires of the Haitian Revolution, the greatest slave revolt in human history (and, in a strict sense, the only true eighteenth century revolution in the Western hemisphere).15 The egalitarian ideas present in American Christianity, even the free-will theology of the Baptists, did not therefore lead inevitably to its adoption as a form of resistance any more than belief in the self-evident nature of human equality led Thomas Jefferson to emancipate his slaves. That Christianity did form the basis of black resistance in America needs to be understood as resulting primarily from two unique aspects of American slavery. First, although North American slavery was brutal and inhuman, it was also a milder institution than Caribbean slavery. American slaves typically worked on smaller farms growing less profitable crops, and as a result – and in contrast with places like Brazil and Jamaica, where slaveholders needed to import massive numbers of slaves simply to keep the population stable – the North American slave population (outside South Carolina) became self-sustaining by the mid-eighteenth century.16 The large existence of Creole, or

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American-born, slaves was a necessary condition to slave Christianity, for as slaveholders knew and as many failed conversion attempts in the Caribbean help to prove, African-born slaves did not convert in any large numbers.17 A world away from Africa and lacking a steady inflow of African-born slaves, however, American-born slave communities had far greater difficulty recreating the religious systems of their forebears. In Jesus and Moses they found the promises of deliverance and redemption they needed to explain and lend meaning to a life in bondage. Although African traditions remained (and remain) visible in the ring shouts and the Spirituals Professor Schama describes, it was through the Christianity of their masters that slaves fashioned themselves into a new people.18 Second, unlike their counterparts in the Caribbean (who often preferred to run their plantations from the British Isles),19 American slaveholders lived and often worked alongside both their slaves and a growing free black population. Particularly after the Revolution and religious awakenings had stirred genuine discomfort at the hypocrisy of fighting for freedom and holding slaves, good Christian slaveholders needed a way to explain their continuing dependence on an institution whose cruelty and violence they could daily see. As Professor Schama notes, Revolutionary-era slaveholders could in part rationalise their situation by decrying slavery as a ‘necessary evil’ and ‘displacing blame for the slave trade onto the hapless figure of George III’. As slavery grew in importance after the cotton revolution, however, and as Southerners proved more than capable of exploiting slave labour without the King’s help, other explanations were needed to relieve the contradiction between inhuman bondage and what Edmund Burke celebrated as the slaveholders’ ‘manly love of liberty’.20 The act of Christianising one’s slaves, promoted most heavily by the Baptists and Methodists, proved a powerful means of resolving that dilemma by transforming slaveholding from an unavoidable social evil into a form of Christian stewardship.21 South Carolinian Charles Pinckney may, as Professor Schama relates, have looked upon black preachers as an evil, but he also spearheaded the effort to send Methodist missionaries into the slave quarters. ‘The prosperity of the master and the best interests of the slaves’, he assured sceptical owners, ‘are not inconsistent’.22 Christian slaves, he and many others argued, would be better workers, eternally grateful to their owners for showing them ‘the light of the true Christian faith’. At the urging of Pinckney and other slaveholding members, by 1860 the Methodists alone were spending over $125,000 annually and employing more than 350 full-time missionaries to Christianise and preach to slaves. The nuisance of the black preacher, it seems, was a small price to pay for a slaveholder’s piece of mind.23 The reality of living alongside a slave population that by 1860 had attained more than four million encouraged masters to allow Christianity in the slave quarters (and in the Northern cities), but this same reality that channelled Christian idealism towards missionary work prevented the vast majority of white Americans North and South

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from envisioning a world without slavery. Professor Schama is correct that the founders were loath to interfere in slavery because they respected the property rights of slaveholders. Yet the far greater impediment for Jefferson and others – and one which did not trouble the British abolitionists – was the fear, still apparent in some quarters of this country, that ‘ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained… will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race’.24 As Jefferson said of slaveholders’ predicament in 1820, ‘we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and selfpreservation in the other’.25 For this same reason, the vast majority of genuine, Christian anti-slavery sentiment among whites was directed not towards immediate emancipation but towards colonisation, the same plan that Philadelphia’s black community had emphatically rejected in Bishop Allen’s church.26 Despite the impracticality of colonising over four million unwilling black Americans, the fact that colonisation seemed to resolve the painful contradiction between fear engendered by race and guilt engendered by slavery kept the idea at the centre of the nation’s debate over slavery for five decades. Colonisation received the endorsement of nearly every major Christian denomination, including Baptists and Methodists in the North (both of whom sent missionaries and financial support to the American colony of Liberia) and the plan found support in many of the nation’s most prominent politicians, such as Jefferson, President James Monroe, Henry Clay and the signer of the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln.27 This short summary of an enormously complex subject has meant to show only that an understanding of why, as DuBois believed,28 America still needs black idealism, requires us to see that the origin of what Schama terms ‘the Christianity of redemptive liberation’ lies not in the ideas or experience of Christianity but in a much plainer fact. Slaves, and all other oppressed people, negate their condition not in their faith but in their humanity, and it is from that most basic and deepest of wells that the world might draw a fuller understanding of freedom. Our greatest intellectual historian of slavery, David Brion Davis, expressed this truth when he wrote that ‘we can expect nothing from the mercy of God or from the mercy of those who exercise worldly lordship in His or other names; man’s true emancipation, whether physical or spiritual, must always depend on those who have endured or overcome some form of slavery’.29 We must therefore pay heed to Professor Schama and take seriously the liberation theology that black Americans have carried through slavery and civil rights to the present day because, although Christianity has not provided the source of black resistance, in America Christianity has incontrovertibly given that resistance its form. And it is there, in the deep historical memory still palpable in Spirituals and black churches, that we can best hope to find the deeper beauty and meaning of that most contested and American of words, ‘freedom’.

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Notes 1 Abraham Lincoln, ‘Second Inaugural Address’, 4 March 1865, Washington, DC. 2 See, for example, Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2000); James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986). 3 For the debate over slavery and the Bible, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholder’s Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 473–527. 4 Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008), pp. 201–4. For the argument that the 1817 Philadelphia meeting marked the origin of formal black politics: see, among other places, Floyd J. Miller, Search for a Black Nationality: Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Howard H. Bell, Survey of the Negro Convention Movement (New York: Arno Press, 1969). 5 Bishop Richard Allen, quoted in David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World (3rd edn; Boston: David Walker, 1829), p. 57. 6 It was well known, for example, that Garrison’s interactions with Baltimore’s free black population, as well as reading Walker’s Appeal, moved him from support of colonisation and gradual emancipation toward demands for immediate, ‘radical’ abolition. Mayer, All on Fire, esp. pp. 44–70. 7 Quoted in Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), p. 46. 8 For the best discussion of the very complex role of the preacher in both negating and reinforcing slavery, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1972), esp. pp. 255–79. 9 The literature on slave religion is voluminous, but some of the best work can be found in Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, esp. chapters 3–7, pp. 161–280; Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Albert J. Rabateau, Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South (reprint; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 10 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolutions: 1770–1823 (reprint; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 42. 11 See the still classic David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 12 While many works have examined this, the best introductory discussion of European attitudes towards Indians and especially Africans is still Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). 13 Christopher Leslie Brown, ‘Christianity and the Campaign Against Slavery and the Slave Trade,’ in Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (eds), The Cambridge History of

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Christianity, Volume VII: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 517–35. Anglican missionaries similarly found it difficult to ignore the profits promised by combining slaveholding with spreading God’s word. In 1710, for instance, the Anglican Society for Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) assumed control of two large Barbadian sugar plantations with the intent of demonstrating to wary slaveholders the compatibility of Christianity and enslavement. Over the next one hundred years, the SPG did admirable work in the business of exploiting black labor to grow sugar but by 1793 could report that only a very small handful of slaves had shown any interest in adopting the faith of their masters. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, pp. 219–22. Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: Black Protestantism in the American South and the British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). For a good comparative discussion of differences in both slave Christianity and slave systems in the United States and the Caribbean see Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988) and Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, pp. 168–82. Laurent DuBois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. pp. 99–102; see also C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Random House, 1968). Although Professor Schama is correct that slave trade abolition did not attract much serious notice – in part because of sectional divisions and the lack of state power necessary for enforcement – the self-sustaining slave population of the Upper South was the larger reason. By the time the trade was abolished in 1808, slaveholders in the expanding Deep South were able to obtain the slaves they needed from older slave states like Virginia, which had large, reproducing slave populations and land no longer very profitable after two centuries of tobacco cultivation. Although North America received only 6 per cent of slaves from the Atlantic slave trade, by 1825 the United States held more than 35 per cent of all slaves in the Americas. Philip D. Curtain, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1969). For the best recent work on slavery’s expansion and the interstate slave trade see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll, p. 183; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion. For work on generational differences between slaves and the importance of a Creole slave culture, see Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). See for instance Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies (reprint; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Edmund Burke, quoted in Fox-Genovese and Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, p. 76.

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21 While the Southern clergy’s views on the religious basis for slavery varied by denomination and over time, biblical justifications for slavery rested primarily on two arguments, both formulated in response to pressure from a growing anti-slavery chorus in the North and Upper South. First, contradicting the claim made by many Northern Americans (even many non-abolitionists) that slaveholding was a sin, slaveholders and their clergy responded that Moses held and armed slaves (Genesis 15.14), that Leviticus is littered with references to slavery, and that, as one Virginian noted in 1831, ‘Jesus came into the world to reprove sin. Yet he rebuked not slavery.’ Similarly, James H. Hammond, in a letter excoriating Thomas Clarkson, wrote that the Scriptures showed that the Apostles considered ‘slavery as an established as well as inevitable condition of human society’. As calls to end slavery increased over the course of the 19th century, slaveholding came to be justified by a second and more ideologically powerful claim: that passages from the Bible, combined with the seeming eagerness of slaves to be converted, proved that slavery created a bond of interest that best encouraged Christian behavior at all levels of society. Juxtaposing the ‘Peculiar Institution’ with the urban industrialism of the North, and advancing the relative stasis of slaveholding society as evidence that the institution was divinely sanctioned, slaveholders echoed editors of the Southern Episcopalian magazine in calling slavery ‘a necessary element towards the composition of a high and stable civilization – as a thing good in itself … the best mode in which labor and capital can be associated’. Fox-Genovese and Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, pp. 507, 368. Jonathan Brown and James Hammond, quoted in ibid., p. 492. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 44. For other discussions of the vital role Christianity played in forming a pro-slavery ideology, see among many other works, Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolutions, esp. pp. 164–212; David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Paul Finkelman, Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South (New York: Bedford St. Martins, 2003). 22 Charles C. Pinckney, quoted in Lawrence Neale Jones, African Americans and the Christian Churches, 1619–1800 (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2007), pp. 70–1. 23 Ibid., pp. 73–4. 24 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 138. 25 Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, 12 April 1820, in Adrienne Koch and William Peden (eds), The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, (New York: Random House, 1944), pp. 698–9. The phrase also serves as the title for a book on Jefferson’s views of slavery. John Chester Miller, The Wolf By the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991). 26 Colonisation remains a rarity among 19th century American movements, one well known but not well understood. None of the work on colonisation is particularly strong, but the two most comprehensive recent works are Eric Burin, Slavery and the

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Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005) and P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonziaiton Movement: 1817–1861 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). 27 The best discussion of Lincoln’s views on colonisation (and, in brief form, on the American colonisation movement generally) is in Eric Foner, ‘Lincoln and Colonization,’ in Eric Foner (ed.), Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), pp. 135–66. 28 King also understood this, writing that ‘The black man in America can and must provide a new soul force for all Americans’, Martin Luther King, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), p. 318. 29 Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolutions, p. 564.

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2 Pentecost: learning the languages of peace Stanley Hauerwas

Being particular about particularity In his justly celebrated book, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Britain and the Commonwealth, argues that the ‘greatest single antidote to violence is conversation, speaking our fears, listening to the fears of others and in that sharing of vulnerabilities discovering a genesis of hope’.1 Some assume, according to Sacks, that if such conversations are to avoid becoming interminable debates between incommensurable positions, the participants must abandon their particularistic perspectives in favor of a more universal point of view.2 A more universal perspective is required because it is assumed that if we are to speak truthfully to one another we must do so from a position available to anyone.3 Drawing on his own tradition, and in particular the story of Babel, Sacks argues that it is not true that truth is timeless or the same everywhere for anyone. It was at Babel that people, seduced by the technological breakthrough of learning to make bricks, concluded that they had become god-like because they were now free from the limitations of nature and their particular histories. For Sacks, therefore, Babel represents a turning point in history. For after Babel, God, who had first made a covenant with all creation, chooses to call out one people that they might be a witness to God’s will for all people. The builders of Babel had tried to impose a manmade unity on a divinely created diversity, but after Babel God ‘turns to one people and commands it to be different in order to teach humanity the dignity of difference’.4 Sacks acknowledges that his refusal to abandon the distinctive perspective of Judaism means some will brand him a ‘tribalist’.5 Yet he argues that the very universalism that many assume to be the antithesis to the resurgence of tribalism, or worse terrorism, is an inadequate account of the human situation. A global culture may bring about much good, but from Sacks’s perspective such cultures, particularly when they take the form of empires, do much harm because they

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fail to be capable of acknowledging difference. That Sacks should distrust the universal pretensions of empires is not surprising for, as he observes, Judaism was born as a protest against empire.6 I am extremely sympathetic with Sacks’ attempt to recover the significance of conversation as an alternative to violence. Enda McDonagh and I have even drafted a ‘Call for the Abolition of War’ in order to try to begin such a conversation.7 I confess, however, I doubt such conversations can lead to peace without some specification of what such conversations should be about. It is my presumption that if conversing with another for the sake of ‘diversity’ becomes an end in itself we are just as likely to want to kill each other as to make peace.8 But I will state again that I am sympathetic with Sacks’s attempt to recover ‘the dignity of difference’ by resisting the presumptive universalism associated with liberal regimes which allegedly stand for peace in contrast to terrorist attacks exemplified by 11 September 2001.9 Of course it may seem odd for a Christian to underwrite Sacks’s claim that God loves difference. It has, after all, been the Christian conceit that the Jews are particularistic while Christians represent a universalistic faith. For example, in 1923 Ernst Troeltsch gave a lecture at Oxford entitled ‘The Place of Christianity among the World-Religions.’ He argued that Christianity is the only ‘world religion’ that can claim absolute and unconditional universality because it alone has produced a philosophy of history which recognises that there is a historical development that promotes unconditional worthwhile goals. The name he gives that development is Europe. In Troeltsch’s words: It is impossible to deny facts or to resist the decrees of fate. And it is historical facts that have welded Christianity into closest connection with the civilisations of Greece, Rome and Northern Europe. All our thoughts and feelings are impregnated with Christian motives and Christian presuppositions; and, conversely, our whole Christianity is indissolubly bound up with elements of the ancient and modern civilisations of Europe. From being a Jewish sect Christianity has become the religion of all Europe. It stands or falls with European civilisation; whilst, on its own part, it has entirely lost its Oriental character and has become hellenised and Westernised. Our European conceptions of personality and its eternal, divine right, and of progress towards a kingdom of the spirit and of God, our enormous capacity for expansion and for the interconnection of spiritual and temporal, our whole social order, our science, our art – all these rest, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, upon the basis of this deorientalised Christianity. Its primary claim to validity is thus the fact that only through it have we become what we are, and that only in it can we preserve the religious forces that we need. Apart from it we lapse either into a self-destructive titanic attitude, or into effeminate trifling, or into crude brutality … We cannot live without a religion, yet the only religion we can endure is Christianity, for Christianity has grown up with us and has become a part of our very being.10

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As much as I should like to attribute Troeltsch’s views to his commitment to the prejudices of the Enlightenment, it cannot be denied that Troeltsch gives expression to the Christian presumption that Christianity in contrast to Judaism represents a universal faith.11 This presumption is based on a story Christians believe is the answer to Babel – Pentecost. Accordingly Christians have gone into the world with missionary zeal convinced that they possess the truth that all people desire but may not have yet realised they do so.12 The political form this presumption took is called Constantinianism. Constantinianism has taken many different forms but Troeltsch’s claim for the inseparability of Christianity and Europe is as good an example as one could want for one of its most recent incarnations.13 It is, of course, hard to know which came first, that is, the presumption that the Christian faith represents universal knowledge that only needs to be explained to those who are not yet Christian or the politics of empire. Either way it is now clear that Christian presumption of universality either as knowledge qua knowledge or as a politics is – or at least should be – over.14 This does not mean I believe the Christian faith is not true, but what it means for it to be true cannot be secured by a theory of truth more determinative than the faith itself. Interestingly enough Christians now confronted by philosophical and political alternatives that claim universality as a necessary position to address the challenges of living in a global environment find themselves in the awkward position Jews have long occupied. From a cosmopolitan perspective, Christianity represents a parochial tradition that cannot pass muster as knowledge or as an ethic or politics. Thus the presumption that the language of rights and a faith based on revelation are in fundamental tension. One strategy for Christians confronted by the challenge to pass muster as a faith compatible with more secular and universal alternatives is to criticise the arrogance of such presumption. As those long experienced in the exercise of such arrogance it should not be surprising Christians are able to spot it in others. Put more philosophically, I think there are deep questions that bedevil attempts to develop a cosmopolitan perspective that is free of particularistic convictions.15 Advocates of cosmopolitan perspectives too often fail to be as candid as Troeltsch’s identification of Christianity with Europe. After all, who wants to acknowledge that the universalism they represent is that of the new Europe; that is, America?16 I think it is equally unlikely that a coherent account of natural rights has been given.17 I have no difficulty with rights claims that express social and legal duties, but claims of human rights qua human rights involve philosophical difficulties that cannot be resolved. In particular questions of what kind of human being we need to be to have rights are very troubling in relation to the mentally handicapped. Moreover once rights language is legitimated in the abstract, rights seem to multiply faster than rabbits. My deepest worry about rights, however, is how the language of rights can eviscerate more determinative moral descriptions. For

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example during the civil rights campaign in the American South the killing of a civil rights worker was described as a violation of his rights. If you think ‘rights’ are more basic than the description ‘murder’ you have an indication that language has gone on a holiday. But rather than going over the well worn ground surrounding questions of rights I want to use this occasion to explore the agony I take to be at the heart of the humanism that informs the cosmopolitan defense of rights. For the humanism that motivates many to assume responsibility to try to create a better world in the name of global responsibility too often is caught between trying to do too much or too little.18 For example, Sacks notes that our increasing awareness of our global interrelation tends to undermine our sense of moral responsibility. No longer able to identify who does what to whom we are tempted to assume we bear no responsibility except for our immediate actions.19 With his customary insight Zygmunt Bauman observes that as we become ever more knowledgeable about our and other people’s plight we are overwhelmed and become less able to respond with ethically inspired action. Paradoxically, according to Bauman, ‘our shared capacity to do harm seems infinitely greater than our shared capacity to do good.’20 Joseph Amato, in his unfortunately little known book, Victims and Values: A History and a Theory of Suffering, suggests that this transformation in our consciousness, that is, that we know ourselves in relation to the suffering of the distant other, is inseparable from the ‘replacement of the traditional individual, who was attached by life and imagination to a single locality, by the modern individual, who by thought, opinion, and empathy is joined to a changing world’.21 The problem with such a consciousness, according to Amato, is not only are there more victims at our door than our front steps can hold, but the attempt to sympathise with those who suffer occurs at the same time when ‘people in ever greater numbers discard the notion that suffering is an inevitable part of human experience’.22 As a result those who refuse to be liberated from the particularity of their religious convictions, who suffer from traditions in which suffering is not assumed to be antithetical to being human, or who refuse to cease suffering, can only be ignored or eliminated.23 I hope to show that the Christian experience of Pentecost and what it means to learn to speak as well as understand another’s language, is a continuing resource God has given the church to sustain our ability to suffer as well as respond to those who suffer for the long haul. Our ability to communicate means we do not have to be isolated from one another by what we endure. There is, therefore, a crucial relationship between being human, suffering and the gift of speech. In order to develop that claim I want to direct our attention to the work of Herbert McCabe, OP, and in particular to his understanding of communication as the paradigm of ethics. I do so because McCabe’s stress on the bodily character of communication challenges the presumption that communication can take place without people actually being present to one another.

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Moreover by focusing on McCabe’s account of language I hope to show how, at least for Christians, the assumption we must choose between membership in a particularistic community or some version of a more inclusive humanism is a false alternative. For the very presumption we must so choose is to assume that such a choice makes sense in the abstract. But we are never people in the abstract; we are people who are embedded in the narratives of particular linguistic communities. Our humanity depends on our ability to speak to one another, but that very ability is also the source of our differences. We are united by what divides us. Any attempt to overcome the reality of our linguistic constitution, and in particular any attempt to suggest that we suffer from that which constitutes our very being, threatens to hide from us a cruelty we perpetrate on one another in the name of a common humanity. The ‘Humanism’ of Herbert McCabe, OP In 1957 in response to the question, ‘Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?’ Elizabeth Anscombe answered that of course Oxford moral philosophy does not corrupt the youth. From Anscombe’s perspective the problem is much deeper. Oxford moral philosophers do not corrupt the youth because their philosophy reflects as well as reproduces the corrupt moral presumptions of the spirit of the time. Such philosophy might be called, in Anscombe’s words, ‘the philosophy of the flattery of that spirit’.24 I have no stake in taking sides as to whether Anscombe’s evaluation of Oxford moral philosophy was fair or unfair. I only call attention to her judgment about Oxford moral philosophy to suggest that at the same time she was so judging Oxford philosophers there was someone developing an account of ethics in Oxford that was anything but a ‘flattery of the spirit of the time’. His name was Herbert McCabe, OP. McCabe was perhaps more theologian than philosopher, but as will become apparent he was well acquainted with the philosophical alternatives of the day. In 1968 McCabe published Law, Love, Language, a book I believe should have changed the way we think about ethics.25 Unfortunately that was not to be, but it is never too late to make use of a good thing. Indeed we may be in a better place to appreciate McCabe’s position because he argues, as Sacks’ emphasis on conversation implies, that our ability to communicate, to be in conversation, makes us human. To be human, to share a common nature, according to McCabe means we share a biological and linguistic nature. Humans are animals that talk.26 McCabe avoids, therefore, any account of the human that might tempt us to forget our bodily nature. To be sure to be a human being requires that at least in principle we are able to communicate with other human beings by using conventional signs. But if we came across any form of life that seemed to share our nature

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in only one of these ways we would not be sure whether it could be called human. A creature from Mars, for example, might be able to communicate with us, but if we could not breed with them we should not call our guest human. Our language, therefore, is the culmination of organic life. ‘It is because I have this sort of body, a human body with a human life, that my communication can be linguistic. The human body is a source of communication.’27 McCabe puts it most clearly this way: Instead of saying that I have a private mind and a public body, a mind for having concepts in and body for saying and hearing words, I say that I have a body that is able to be with other bodies not merely by physical contact but by linguistic communication. Having a soul is just being able to communicate; having a mind is being able to communicate linguistically.28

Our shared bodily nature is not sufficient to sustain a common humanity, because as linguistic animals we can to some extent create responses to our world that constitute quite distinct worlds. Our language not only distinguishes us from other animals, but it also distinguishes our animality from that of other animals as well as from each other. Therefore ‘there is no such thing on earth as a purely linguistic community’.29 Communication requires sharing a common life that is intensified through language. We only become language users through the training provided by a particular language community in which we learn the ever changing thus provisional character of the language that speaks us. The challenge facing linguistic animals, therefore, is to learn to live in a world in which the linguistic community is never co-extensive with the genetic community. We are not able to communicate with one another in virtue of our shared humanity but rather our ability to communicate depends on being a member of a particular community. Accordingly the more intense, the more work our language does, the more we become isolated from one another. As a result the story of human life is not and cannot be a single story. Indeed attempts to create a stable human community, to ensure we can communicate, have ended in failure.30 You may begin to wonder what all this has to do with ethics. Ethics, for McCabe, is the study of human behavior as communication because what we are able to accomplish or fail to accomplish is determined by what we can and cannot say (94). Just as literary criticism enables us to enjoy a poem or a novel more deeply, so the purpose of ethics is to enable us to enjoy life more fully ‘by entering into the significance of human action’ (95). So ethics, like literary criticism, is never finished seeking as it must the deeper meaning of an action within the terms of a specific system of communication (98). Determining what we want – that is, to discover what it means to be free – is the great challenge that confronts us because we so seldom know what it is we desire (61). To be sure the dual character of human existence, that is, that we are at once a natural and a linguistic community, means there is sufficient basis for what can be

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described as natural law. We do have a law in the depth of ourselves and to act contrary to this law is to violate our nature (45). Yet that law is known primarily through, what McCabe calls, the ‘county council’ understanding of natural law. For it is through the deliberation of county councils that decisions are made that create laws of expectation through which it is made possible for life to flourish. But natural law so understood cannot be identified with the ‘highest common factor of the moral codes of different societies’31 (59). This means McCabe’s account of ethics as communication cannot ensure anything like a common morality. Just as we have no basis to guarantee our ability in principle to communicate neither do we have the ability to view the history of humankind as a dramatic unity. Of course some have tried to write such a history by utilising the idea of progress or some analogue of that story, but such views inevitably come to grief when confronted by concentration camps and nuclear weapons. Instead McCabe argues that the biblical view is that though we cannot now write a history of humankind we must live in the hope that in the end such a history can be written (112–13). However fragmented the human race may be, a people have been called into the world to sustain the hope for a common destiny (113).32 The Bible, at least after the first eleven chapters of Genesis, does not try to be a history of humankind, but rather tells the story of a people whose history is a sacrament of the history of humankind.33 The law, particularly the Decalogue, was given to these chosen people so they might learn to avoid the idolatrous temptation to assume, because they have been chosen, that they are the end of history. Christians believe they have been grafted into the history of Israel by Jesus who we believe is the very word of Yahweh. Thus in the Gospel of John the coming of Jesus is compared with the coming of a new language. McCabe writes, ‘Jesus is the word, the language of God which comes to be a language for man’ (129). Accordingly McCabe makes the extraordinary claim that Jesus, not Adam, is ‘the first human being, the first member of the human race in whom humanity came to fulfilment, the first human being for whom to live was simply to love – for this is what human beings are for’.34 The witness of Jesus’ love does not provide a utopian plan for a new society. Rather Jesus offers himself as the source that makes possible the creation of a community of communication in which the miracle of our common humanity occurs. The crucifixion of Jesus displays our determination to be less than human. Yet, Jesus is risen. That his love conquered death, that he was able to achieve his mission through failure, means that whatever people may mean by ethics has been transformed into the problem of sin and holiness. Pentecost marks the birth of a people through the restoration of communication between people of different languages and stories (111). At Pentecost we experience God’s future which, according to McCabe, means ‘the business of the church is to ‘remember’ the future. Not merely to remember that there is to be a future, but mysteriously to make the

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future present’ (141). Such a remembering is possible because Christ can be present through the work of the Spirit offering the world an alternative mode of communication. It is in this sense that the church is the: the sacrament of the unity of mankind, a continuing creative interpretation of human life; revealing and realizing in her proclamation of the gospel the presence of the risen Christ to the world; revealing therefore and realizing the revolutionary future of the world. The sacramental life as a whole, centering on the eucharist, is an articulation both of human life now in its real but only dimly discernible revolutionary depth and of the world to come. It is only by the utter openness implied in faith that the revelation of this depth and this future can be received. (145)35

Such a people cannot help but be revolutionary, calling into question as they must all revolutionary movements.36 As a result the Christian moral position will always seem unreasonable based as it is on the virtue of hope. Christian hope reaches out beyond this world toward a future world of freedom in which real communication is possible. Such freedom should not be confused with the autonomy promised by capitalist societies, that is, the freedom associated with the bourgeois secular city in which we suffer nothing other than having to endure our own desires. Rather the Christian seeks to transform the media of domination into the media of communication in which people are free to love one another without fear (158). The Church as God’s new language37 The strong Christological claims at the center of McCabe’s work may seem to be exactly the kind of claims many assume should be avoided if Christians are to be responsible actors in a world of difference.38 Yet McCabe’s account of what makes us human is the exemplification of the Christian conviction, in the words of Karl Barth, of the humanity of God.39 It is in Christ we see our common humanity – a humanity that cannot avoid suffering if we are to be of service to one another.40 Christians will do ourselves or our neighbours little good by trying to convince those who do not share our story that we also can be liberal cosmopolitans. Rather we must be what we are – the church of Jesus Christ. For if that church is not the anticipation of the peace God wills for all people then we are without hope.41 To sustain that peace, to care for the stranger when all strangers cannot be cared for, to know how to go on in the face of our suffering, the suffering of those we love and the suffering of those we do not know, is possible because we believe God abandons no one. Our belief in God’s persistence takes the form of a story which receives us as strangers and destines us to be friends. The Christian word for universality is catholic. Indeed that way of putting the matter can be misleading because it gives the impression that catholic is but another way to say universal. But catholic is not the name of a logical category or

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a philosophical position. It is the name of a people sent into the world to discover places and people whose difference is a necessary condition for self-recognition.42 Indeed the very presumption that there is something called the world that can be identified depends on a people who have been separated from the world to be of service to the world. What the people called ‘catholic’ have to offer is the patience and humility learned through the story called ‘Gospel’ that teaches us how to live at peace when we are not able to write the history of humankind. If the church is rightly understood to be God’s new language it is crucial that it not displace our particular languages. At Pentecost we are told the followers of Jesus came together in one place and a violent wind filled the house in which they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, rested on each of them, and ‘all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them the ability’. We are then told devout Jews from every nation, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Egypt, visitors from Rome, Cretans and Arabs, who were living in Jerusalem, heard each one speaking in their native language. ‘Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?’ What they heard from these diverse speakers, moreover, was about God’s deeds of power. What I take to be remarkable about this account of Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts is that the Spirit does not replace the different language each person speaks.43 They began to speak in other languages, but by the gift of the Spirit they were able to understand one another. This means that the language the church must be is not that which forces uniformity, but rather is shaped by the practices, as McCabe suggests, of love and vulnerability which are necessary for the required patience that enables us to tell our different stories.44 Pentecost has restored Babel not by mitigating the diversity granted by Babel but by creating a people who have learned how to be patient, how to be at peace, how to listen in a world of impatient violence. But the gift of Pentecost entails slow, hard work. We must not only learn to suffer one another as Christians; we must learn how to suffer others whose stories might make us vulnerable. Indeed the gift of Pentecost is but the beginning of hard and painful lessons in failure. Yet even failure turns out to be a gift if through failure the church is reminded that others are included in God’s promise. At its best, the church learns to receive the stories of different linguistic communities and in the process discovers that our own speech requires constant revision. Toward the end of his book Sacks observes that retaliation is the instinctual response to perceived wrong. There seems, moreover, no end to the wrongs that we have perpetrated on one another. The only alternative, according to Sacks, is a willingness to be forgiven and to forgive if there is to be an end to our endless violence. In a painful yet beautiful passage Sacks writes:

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Forgiveness is the ability to let go, and without it we kill what we love. Every act of forgiveness mends something broken in this fractured world. It is a step, however small, in the long, hard journey of redemption. I am a Jew. As a Jew I carry with me the tears and sufferings of my grandparents and theirs through the generations. The story of my people is a narrative of centuries of exiles and expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, beginning with the First Crusade and culminating in the murder of two-thirds of Europe’s Jews, among them more than a million children. For centuries, Jews knew that they or their children risked being murdered simply because they were Jews. Those tears are written into the very fabric of Jewish memory, which is to say, Jewish identity. How can I let go of that pain when it is written into my very soul? And yet I must. For the sake of my children and theirs, not yet born.45

But learning the languages of peace cannot, in the name of universality, require that Sacks forfeit the particularity of his tradition’s memory. If forgiveness is the way to peace, then we cannot be asked to forget what has been forgiven; for it is impossible to remain forgiven if the memory of suffering no longer exists. Redemption requires memory. Where does this leave us then? How can we begin the conversations Sacks talks about if there is no universal language with which to speak? I’d like to make a modest proposal: let us begin by learning to speak the language of peace within our own traditions. Perhaps the violence we perpetrate on those whose language is different than ours is the result of our losing our own language of peace. The greatest gift, I believe, Christians can give the world is to refuse to kill other human beings because we are Christians. Until Christians understand that loving Christ means refusing to kill those whom he died for, until we recover our own language of peace, there is little hope that we will be able to engage others in conversation without it perpetuating a shallow discourse that leaves us all speechless.46 Notes 1 Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 2. As much as I admire Sacks’s book I think he mistakenly underwrites the description ‘clash of civilizations’. Talal Asad rightly argues that ‘there is no such thing as a clash of civilizations because there are no self-contained societies to which fixed civilizational values correspond’, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 12. 2 Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, p. 83. One of the great virtues of Sacks’s book is he not only commends conversation, but exemplifies what he commends. He writes unapologetically as a Jew yet in a manner that is accessible to those who do not share his faith. I am not as accomplished as Sacks, and I may even be more unapologetic as a Christian than he is as a Jew, but I hope nonetheless to follow his example in this lecture. Of course

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given the position I take I assume some Christians may find themselves in deeper disagreement with me than those who are not Christian. Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, p. 19. Ibid., p. 53. (my emphasis). Sacks’s account of Babel has striking similarities with that of John Howard Yoder. See Yoder’s essay ‘The Disavowal of Constantine: An Alternative Perspective on Interfaith Dialogue’, in Michael Cartwright (ed.), The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 242–61. One of the reasons I am sympathetic with Sacks may be because of the accusation that I am also a ‘sectarian, fideistic, tribalist’. For my response to that charge see the ‘Introduction’ to my book, Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World, and Living In Between (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), pp. 1–23. Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, p. 60. One of the challenges for positions like Sacks and my own is how the very descriptions used to critique us are part of the problem. For example words like ‘religion’ or ‘pluralism’ are from my perspective problematic. See, for example, the chapter ‘The End of Religious Pluralism: A Tribute to David Burrell, C.S.C.’ in my The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 58–75. See my essay, ‘Reflections on the “Appeal to Abolish War”’, in Linda Hogan and Barbara Fitzgerald (eds), Between Poetry and Politics: Essays in Honor of Enda McDonaugh (Dublin: Columba Press, 2003), pp. 135–47. See, for example, my chapter entitled, ‘The Non-Violent Terrorist: In Defense of Christian Fanaticism’, in my Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), pp. 177–90. Drawing on the work of Richard Tuck, Asad argues that there is a kind of violence inherent to liberal states not simply because such states require armies for their defence, but ‘rather that violence founds the law as it founds political community. Violence is therefore embedded in the very concept of liberty that lies at the heart of liberal doctrine. That concept presupposes that the morally independent individual’s right to violent self-defence is yielded to the state and that the state becomes the sole protector of individual liberties, abstracting the right to kill from domestic politics, denying to any agents other than states the right to kill at home and abroad. The right to kill is the right to behave in violent ways toward other people – especially toward citizens of foreign states at war and toward the uncivilised, whose very existence is a threat to civilised order. In certain circumstances, killing others is necessary, so it seems, for the security it provides’, On Suicide Bombing, pp. 59–60. Ernst Troeltsch, Christian Thought: Its History and Application, ed. and trans. Baron von Hugel (London: University of London Press, 1923), pp. 24–5. For an insightful analysis of Troeltsch’s understanding of Christianity amid the world religions, indeed of the very creation of the idea of ‘world religions’ see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 309–23. Troeltsch reflects Kant’s judgment that Judaism is not really a religion at all ‘but merely a union of a number of people who, since they belonged to a particular stock, formed themselves into a commonwealth under purely political laws and not into a church’, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore Greene and Hoyt Hudson (New York:

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Harper Brothers, 1960), p. 116. By ‘church’ Kant meant the invisible church of reason not the one ‘grounded on dogmas’ and organised by men (p. 140). Which, of course, raises the question to what extent the Enlightenment is the result of Christian presuppositions. It is my own view that the Enlightenment is a secularised form of Christianity and, in particular, of Constantinian Christianity; this, from my point of view, makes it all the more dangerous. Troeltsch observes that the ‘heathen races are being morally and spiritually disintegrated by the contact with European civilisation; hence they demand a substitute from the higher religion and culture. We have a missionary duty towards these races, and our enterprise is likely to meet with success amongst them, although Christianity, be it remembered, is by no means the only religion taking part in this missionary campaign. Islam and Buddhism are also missionary religions. But in relation to the great world religions we need to recognise that they are expressions of the religious consciousness corresponding to certain definite types of culture, and that it is their duty to increase in depth and purity by means of their own interior impulses, a task in which the contact with Christianity may prove helpful, to them as to us, in such processes of development from within. The great religions might indeed be described as crystallisations of thought of great races, as these races are themselves crystallisations of various biological and anthropological forms. There can be no conversion or transformation of one into the other, but only a measure of agreement and of mutual understanding’, ‘The Place of Christianity Among the World-Religions,’ in Christian Thought, pp. 29–30. One could not wish for a more determinative expression of the racist presumptions that formed the thought world of the Enlightenment. My colleague, Jay Carter, has written a book I believe will force us to recognise the racialised character of recent theology. See Jay Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Popes and theological liberals are seldom thought to share common assumptions, but Benedict XVI famous lecture, ‘Faith, Reason, and the University’ delivered at Regensburg on 12 September 2006 sounded themes quite similar to Troeltsch. For example Benedict described the rapprochement between biblical faith and Greek inquiry as one of ‘intrinsic necessity’. He elaborated this claim noting that ‘this inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only for the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history – it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe’. One cannot help but wonder what Benedict might mean by the phrase, ‘despite its origins’ as well as his suggestion that it was only with Europe that Christianity took on its historically decisive character. Given Benedict’s Augustinianism you might think he would find the presumption that Christianity has assumed a final decisive character problematic. Charles Taylor provides the most compelling account we have that Christendom, that is, the attempt to imbue a civilisation and society with the Christian faith, is over; he

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does not deny that the societies of the West will remain historically informed by Christianity, but he suggests ‘that it will be less and less common for people to be drawn into or kept within a faith by some strong political or group identity, or by the sense that they are sustaining a socially essential ethic’, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 314. I think Taylor is right for no other reason than the Christianity that is so often represented by those who seek to maintain a Christian social order is little more than a parody of the Gospel. From my perspective I regard this development as a positive good because I assume that Christians made a decisive mistake when they thought they could use the power of the state or its equivalent to make the church secure. 15 Kwame Anthony Appiah has provided, at least as far as I know, the best account of cosmopolitanism that negotiates this tension. According to Appiah cosmopolitans hold in tension two ideas: (1) that we have obligations to others that reach beyond those that give us the resources for identity; (2) that the other is valued not just as human life, but as a particular human life. Appiah does not deny that these ideas are often in tension which indicates that cosmopolitanism is not the name of a solution, or even a ‘position’, but a challenge, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. xv. Appiah provides a more developed philosophical defense of his understanding of what he calls ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ in The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 213–72. There he draws primarily on John Stuart Mill to sustain his defence of autonomy that allegedly does not undermine the ‘local’. I remain unconvinced. [See also Appiah’s ‘Citizens of the World’, in Matthew Gibney (ed.), Globalizing Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 189–232 – ed.] 16 Oliver O’Donovan observes that publicity mediates universalism just to the extent its aspiration is to overcome differences in order to unify communications within a single world communication sphere. According to O’Donovan modernity, which began its career with three centuries of conquest, produced colonialism which on being exhausted found its new home in communications. The potential of globally transmitted images became the spearhead of an expansive movement which seemed to bypass obstacles posed by differences of language and national politics. O’Donovan notes it is hardly surprising, therefore, that these anarchistic aspirations, easily underestimated by Western observers, were identified in other parts of the globe with colonial intent. Accordingly it is not difficult to see the revival of radical Islamism as a protest against the universal ambitions of Western communications. He concludes, ‘In this universalizing thrust we may observe how Western society has forgotten how to be secular. Secularity is a stance of patience in the face of plurality, made sense of by eschatological hope; forgetfulness of it is part and parcel with the forgetfulness of Christian suppositions about history’, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 68–9. I am indebted to Adam Hollowell for drawing my attention to O’Donovan’s argument. 17 For an attempt to provide a theological defence of ‘natural rights’, see Ester Reed, The Ethics of Human Rights: Contested Doctrinal and Moral Issues (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007).

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18 Charles Taylor characterises this form of humanism as ‘exclusive’ in order to indicate that such a humanism, which may have come from a religious tradition, is now offered as the only alternative to religion. In short Taylor suggests that what it means to call our age ‘secular’ is that now we live in a time in which ‘the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing’ is conceivable, A Secular Age, pp. 18–9. Taylor’s story of the development of this kind of humanism is to say the least complex, but crucial I believe is his insight that as a correlative of the development of deism came a sense of invulnerability necessary to sustain a sense of self-possession (pp. 300–1). He then, in a manner like Foucault, suggests that the measures to ensure safety can make us insensitive to whatever lies beyond this human world. In particular, suffering becomes a threat to such a world reminding us, as it does, we are not invulnerable. Ironically the altruism that such a humanism produces can result in some humans being more ‘civilised’ than others. 19 Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, p. 14. 20 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘The Liquid Modern Adventures of the “Sovereign Expressions of Life”’, in Concern for the Other: Perspectives on the Ethics of K.E. Logstrup (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2007), p. 133. 21 Joseph Amato, Victims and Values: A History and a Theory of Suffering (New York: Praeger, 1990), p. xxi. Amato thinks the development of sympathy for the distant other originates in Christianity and humanism but more recently in Enlightenment and Romantic sensitivities. 22 Ibid., p. xxii. Talal Asad notes that the modern sufferer’s sense of pain no longer has any moral significance which may make it easier to bear. In contrast modern poverty is experienced as more unjust, making it less tolerable. By calling attention to these developments he denies he is suggesting that the distribution of pain engendered by modern power is worse than that of pre-modern societies. Rather, he is only trying to suggest they are different. Nor is he claiming that it is an undeniable social fact that there has been an amelioration of illness and improvements in public health. He calls attention to these differences to stress ‘that more is at stake in secularism than compassion for other human beings in plural democratic societies. And nothing is less plausible than the claim that secularism is an essential means of avoiding destructive conflict and establishing peace in the modern world. Secular societies – France among them – have always been capable of seeking solidarity at home while engaging in national wars and imperial conquests’, ‘Trying to Understand French Secularism’, in Henri de Vries (ed.), Political Theologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 24. 23 I think this stance toward suffering that is so defining of modern humanism helps explain the violence often characteristic as well as justified by appeals to our common humanity. Thus Asad argues ‘that the cult of sacrifice, blood, and death that secular liberals find so repellent in pre-liberal Christianity is a part of the genealogy of modern liberalism itself, in which violence and tenderness go together … There is the imperative to use any means necessary (including homicide and suicide) to defend the nation-state that constitutes one’s worldly identity and defends one’s health and security and, on the other hand, the obligation to revere all human life, to offer life in place of death to universal humanity; the first presupposes a capacity for ruthlessness, the second for kindness’,

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On Suicide Bombing, p. 88. For the significance of the phrase, ‘the refusal to cease suffering’, see Daniel Bell, Liberation Theology After the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering (London: Routledge, 2001). Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘Does Oxford Moral Philosophy corrupt Youth?’, in Mary Geach and Luke Gormelly (eds), Human Life, Action, and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), p. 167. Herbert McCabe, Law, Love, Language (London: Continuum, 2003). I wrote a ‘Foreword’ for the new edition of Law, Love, and Language which the publisher forgot to include. For anyone interested it has been published as ‘An Unpublished Foreword’, in New Blackfriars, 86, 1003 (May, 2005), 291–5. McCabe, Law, Love, Language, p. 37. Ibid., pp. 38, 68, 90. McCabe was a great Aquinas scholar and his emphasis on the body reflects not only what he learned from Wittgenstein but Aquinas’s emphasis on our bodily nature. For example Aquinas asks if the body of man was given an apt disposition, that is, was it appropriate that humans have an upright stature. He answers it was appropriate for us to have an upright stature for four reasons: (1) our senses were given not only for procuring the necessities of life, but for knowledge, which means in contrast to animals humans alone take pleasure in the beauty of sensible objects; (2) for greater freedom of the acts of the interior powers; (3) if humans were prone to the ground they would need to use their hands as fore-feet and thus lose their utility for other purposes; and (4) ‘because if man’s stature were prone to the ground, and he used his hands as fore-feet, he would be obliged to take hold of his food with his mouth. Thus he would have a protruding mouth, with thick and hard lips, and also a hard tongue, so as to keep it from being hurt by exterior things; as we see in other animals. Moreover, such an attitude would quite hinder speech, which is reason’s proper operation’, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1947), I, 91, 3, 3. McCabe, Law, Love, Language, p. 86. McCabe’s emphasis on the body obviously reflects the profound influence of Wittgenstein. Too often I fear that Wittgenstein is interpreted as assuming all language is purely conventional if not arbitrary. John Bowlin, however, rightly argues that Wittgenstein thought that some of the moral and ontological commitments that constitute the foundation of our linguistic practices are set in place by custom or convention shared by those that inhabit a linguistic community that is not shared by all, but not all of our commitments are so constituted. Some are constituted by ‘nature,’ by what Wittgenstein calls in On Certainty (505), ‘nature’s grace’ by which we know anything at all. John Bowlin, ‘Nature’s Grace: Aquinas and Wittgenstein on Natural Law and Moral Knowledge’, in Jeffrey Stout and Robert MacSwain (eds), Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein (London: SCM Press, 2004), pp. 154–74. McCabe, Law, Love, Language, pp. 68, 46. Appiah seems quite close to McCabe in this respect arguing as McCabe does that we share a biology, ‘but that does not give us, in the relevant sense, a shared ethical nature’, The Ethics of Identity, p. 252. Indeed elsewhere he remarks, ‘Humanity isn’t, in the relevant sense, an identity at all’, Cosmopolitanism, p. 98.

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30 McCabe, Law, Love, Language, p. 111. Sacks says something quite similar by observing ‘There is no universal language. There is no way we can speak, communicate or even think without placing ourselves within the constraints of a particular language whose contours were shaped by hundreds of generations of speakers, storytellers, artists and visionaries who came before us, whose legacy we inherit and of whose story we become apart. Within each language we can say something new. No language is fixed, unalterable, complete. What we cannot do is place ourselves outside the particularities of language to arrive at a truth, a way of understanding and responding to the world that applies to everyone at all times. That is not the essence of humanity but an attempt to escape from humanity’, The Dignity of Difference, pp. 54–5. 31 McCabe observes that Aquinas’s account of natural law presumes such an understanding of the ‘county council’ because he thought God, as ‘the inventor of mankind, the one who made the decisions about what sort of institutions mankind should be, had as a matter of fact issued the basic laws of mankind’, Law, Love, and Language, p. 57. (Subsequent paginations will appear in the text.) Aquinas thought the Decalogue was God telling us the natural law, but McCabe suggests the matter is better put that God does not reveal to us the Ten Commandments, but the Ten Commandments reveal God to us. They do so because the Decalogue, particularly the prohibition against work on the Sabbath, is given to stop us from presuming we are our own creation. 32 Sacks makes a similar point suggesting that ‘the central insight of monotheism – that if God is the parent of humanity, then we are all members of a single extended family – has become more real in its implications than ever before. The Enlightenment gave us the concept of universal rights, but this remains a “thin” morality, stronger in abstract ideas than in its grip on the moral imagination. Far more powerful is the biblical idea that those in need are more brothers and sisters and that poverty is something we feel in our bones’, The Dignity of Difference, p. 112. 33 Oliver O’Donovan suggests that Israel’s being so called means we ‘must allow that divine providence is ready to protect other national traditions besides the sacred one’. Which implies, according to O’Donovan, ‘something about the limits of collective identities. To be a human being at all is to participate in one or more collective identities. But there is no collective identity so overarching and all-encompassing that no human beings are left outside it. In that sense it is true that to speak of “humanity” is to speak of an abstraction. Only in that sense, for in fact “humanity” has a perfectly conceivable referent, and we should not hesitate to say that “humanity” is real. But it is not a reality that we can command politically. We do not meet it in any community, however great, of which we could assume leadership. We meet it only in the face of Christ, who presents himself as our leader and commander. The titanic temptation which besets collectives needs the check of a perpetual plurality at the universal level. There are always “others,” those not of our fold whom we must respect and encounter’, Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 73. I am obviously sympathetic with O’Donovan’s suggestion, but I worry that his use of the language of ‘national traditions’ may reproduce romantic understandings of politics. 34 Herbert McCabe, OP, God Matters (Springfield: Tempelgate, 1987), p. 93.

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35 By ‘sacrament’ McCabe understands those actions that mark ‘the intersection of the world to come with this present world; or, as we say, the presence of the risen Christ’, God Matters, p. 150. 36 In a recent interview Rowan Williams made the point this way: Jesus was ‘so revolutionary that he puts all revolutions into question. The change is so different that it is not so much a change from one system to another, but a change from one world to another. A new creation where our relations to each other are no longer mutually suspicious or exclusive or competitive, but entirely shaped by giving and receiving – building one another up by a community of transformed persons, not just by a new legal system. That’s revolutionary’, Sarah Joseph, ‘Table Talk with the Archbishop of Canterbury’, emel Magazine, 39 (November 2007), 32–6. 37 For those interested, this is the title of a chapter in my book, Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World, and Living In Between (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001), pp. 47– 66. The book was originally published in 1988. I call attention to that chapter, which was originally written to honor Hans Frei, because when I reread it for this essay I was surprised I made no reference to McCabe. Yet I am sure I could not have written the essay without having learned from McCabe what it means for the church to be a ‘language’. 38 At the beginning of his The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007), Mark Lilla gives voice to what I take to be the sentiment of many: ‘We are disturbed and confused. We find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that leave societies in ruin. We assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong’ (p. 3). I am more than happy to be identified with the ‘fanatics’ because by being so identified I may at least be able to avoid the arrogance of Lilla’s ‘we’. 39 Karl Barth, The Humanity of God (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1963). Though many might doubt that McCabe and Barth could be made theologically compatible I find in their work a common spirit. Theology in their hands is done with joy which means all things human can be celebrated. 40 In a quite moving passage, Charles Taylor observes that the self-giving of Christ can be seen as how God repairs the breach between God and humans. Such a view begins with the fact of human resistance to God, which we call sin, but it is God’s initiative to enter, in full vulnerability, the heart of the resistance by offering humans participation in the divine life. ‘But the nature of the resistance is that this offer arouses even more violent opposition, not a divine violence, more a counter-diving one. Now Christ’s reaction to the resistance was to offer no counter-resistance, but to continue loving and offering. This love can go to the very heart of things, and open a road for the resisters. This is the second mystery. Through this loving submission, violence is turned around, and instead of breeding counter-violence in an endless spiral, can be transformed. A path is opened of non-power, limitless self-giving, full action, and infinite openness. On the basis of this initiative, the incomprehensible healing power of this suffering, it becomes possible for human suffering, even of the most meaningless type, to become associated with Christ’s act, and to become a locus of renewed contact with God, an act which heals the world’, A Secular Age, p. 654.

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41 Miroslav Volf puts the matter just right in an article in the Christian Century (17 May 2003). Volf says, ‘If we strip Christian convictions of their original and historic cognitive and moral content, and reduce faith to a cultural resource endowed with a diffuse aura of the sacred, we are likely to get religiously legitimized and inspired violence in situations of conflict. If, on the other hand, we nurture people in historic Christian convictions that are rooted in sacred texts, we will likely get militants for peace.’ 42 Oliver O’Donovan puts it this way: ‘No community should ever be allowed to think of itself as universal. It is essential to our humanity that there should always be foreigners, human beings from another community who have an alternative way of organising the task and privilege of being human, so that our imaginations are refreshed and our sense of cultural possibilities renewed. The imperialist argument, that until foreigners are brought into relations of affinity within one cultural home they are enemies, is simply a creation of xenophobia. The act of recognition and welcome, which leaps across the divide between communities and finds on the other side another community which offers the distinctive friendship of hospitality, is a fundamental form of human relating. Xenophilia is commanded us: the neighbor whom we are to love is the foreigner whom we encounter on the road’, The Desire of the Nations, p. 268. 43 Surely one of the most startling effects of Pentecost is the presumption that Christian scriptures could be translated. The very language that Jesus spoke is not the language in which the New Testament was written. Accordingly Christians have assumed that the scriptures can be translated into other languages. 44 I am deeply sympathetic with Appiah’s suggestion that what makes Cosmopolitanism possible is not necessarily a shared ‘culture’, not even universal principles or values or a shared human understanding. Rather, it is ‘stories – epic poems as well as modern forms like novels and films, for example – it is the capacity to follow a narrative and conjure a world: and, it turns out, there are people everywhere more than willing to do this. This is the moral epistemology that makes cosmopolitanism possible … If there is a critique of the Enlightenment to be made, it is not that the philosophes believe in human nature, or the universality of reason: it is rather that they were so dismally unimaginative about the range of what we have in common’, The Ethics of Identity, p. 258. One might then ask how is the position I have taken in this paper different than Appiah’s cosmopolitanism? I have no reason to emphasise the differences, but there is a difference: Pentecost. Put differently it is not clear who is the agent of Appiah’s cosmopolitanism. I hope it is clear I believe an agent exists that makes it imperative at least for Christians to listen to the stranger. We call that agent the Holy Spirit. 45 Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, p. 190. 46 I am thankful to Sam Wells, Greg Jones, Adam Hollowell and Carole Baker for reading and revising portions of this chapter.

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Response to Stanley Hauerwas Pamela Sue Anderson

Stanley Hauerwas focuses explicitly on the remit for the 2008 Oxford Amnesty Lectures (OAL): ‘Rights are sometimes thought to derive from the God-given nature of man. Yet today human rights and religion may find themselves at odds.’ Hauerwas finds rights and religions at odds, opting for the Christian religion over rights and any other religions. The OAL remit acknowledges that ‘the universal claims made for rights can run counter to the revealed truths from which religions derive their authority’. Hauerwas maintains that ‘the revealed truth’ of Christianity is the sole authority concerning the nature of our shared humanity and our particularity, which is, in his view, our being embedded ‘in the narratives of distinctive linguistic communities’. My response will tease out certain problems and contradictions in Hauerwas’s lecture. First of all, his critique of the ‘presumptive universalism’ in ‘liberal regimes’ insinuates that the corrupt nature of these regimes goes back to ‘racist presumptions’ like those ‘that formed the thought world of the Enlightenment’.1 Second, this critique undermines Christianity’s relation to a ‘politics of rights’ that, according to Hauerwas, distorted twentieth-century theology with its focus on universal claims for individuals. Third, Hauerwas’s Christianity assumes that faith-community is destroyed by the autonomy of individuals that he finds in the secularising of liberal theology. But, in his terms, the ‘events’ of ‘Babel’ and ‘Pentecost’ reveal a theological remedy for the sin of autonomous individualism: the ‘bodily’ nature of ‘a community of communication’ is characterised by the ‘shared’ suffering that makes it possible to learn ‘the languages of peace’. Fourth, Hauerwas challenges twentieth-century ‘rights-talk’ by pitting Barthian theology against Ernst Troeltsch whom he takes to exemplify Christian imperialism or ‘Constantinianism’. Hauerwas connects Enlightenment thought with the ‘secularized form’ of ‘Constantinian Christianity’. It will be concluded that acceptance of human suffering (Babel) does not result in the languages of peace (Pentecost). Instead an inherent failure to address unjust suffering within and between communities of

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difference exacerbates the presumptive universalism that Hauerwas identifies in Troeltsch but which, I shall argue, is also present in Hauerwas’s own theology. ‘Presumptive Universalism’ Hauerwas calls Enlightenment-inspired attempts to protect human rights ‘presumptive universalism’ and associates this ‘with liberal regimes which allegedly stand for peace’. He insists that ‘the presumption that Christian faith represents universal knowledge … [or] universality … as a politics … is over’. His critique targets liberal Christianity, its epistemology and politics. However, at the same time as he criticises the role of universality in a secularised form of Christianity, he claims that humans have bodies; they suffer; they have the potential to communicate, even if this is developed in particular ways within linguistic communities. Implicit contradictions undermine his critique; he makes basic claims true for all humans. These are apparently distinct from the claims of faith, for Hauerwas states categorically that ‘what it means for [faith] to be true cannot be secured by a theory of truth more determinate than the faith itself’. He rejects imperialism in any form of Christianity, but especially the secularised form that presumes universality and ignores the local identities of religions. In contrast, he embraces a faith community determined by an exclusively Christian form of revelation. However in dismissing the universality of faith, reason and rights, Hauerwas is left without a coherent or defensible position. His rejection of rights does not eliminate conflict within and between religious communities (although there may be a psychological denial of such conflict); the difference that characterises these communities fuels disagreement about human dignity and worth. Does human worth, as Hauerwas proposes, consist in shared suffering? Or does it rather lie in thinking and acting autonomously? Either way, a presumption of what is universally human threatens Hauerwas’s goal of ‘the dignity of difference’. Hauerwas sees Troeltsch as personifying a presumptive universalism of liberal regimes: Christianity as a universal faith builds explicitly Eurocentric empires. Hauerwas contends that what is true for Christian Constantianism is also true of universal claims for human rights: they both represent Eurocentric imperialism. Yet in Hauerwas’s lecture Troeltsch is merely a stalking horse: claims to rights for all must be dismissed, in order to avoid imposing ‘Christianised’ values onto those people who have not recognised them as their own. Against: the politics of rights Hauerwas suggests that contemporary cosmopolitanism unwittingly equates Christianity with the ‘new Europe’, i.e., America, in a manner similar to Troeltsch’s equation of Christianity and Europe as a ‘pan-European empire’. But he maintains

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that, compared with Troeltsch’s universalism, deep questions ‘bedevil’ cosmopolitan attempts today to be ‘free of particularistic convictions’.2 Troeltsch’s theological imperialism and contemporary cosmopolitanism must, then, have different foundations for their respective politics of rights; one is universalist, the other is universal-particularist. In contrast, Hauerwas aims to avoid any talk of rights. According to Hauerwas’s Christianity, the ‘divine in each of us’ has nothing to do with individual rights. Hauerwas implicitly rejects ‘positive’ freedom (the autonomous self-development of human agency) as running against the norms of Christian community.3 But by upholding particularistic convictions, he implies that Christians are to live in a faith-community without interference from outside. In this way, Hauerwas assumes a version of ‘negative’ freedom – the absence of outside determination – within a faith-determined community. But again a contradiction manifests itself: a community’s freedom from external determination presupposes a claim for all individuals to be able to form groupings, in the Christian case at least determined by faith in revealed truths. The above leads to the question OAL posed to all the 2008 lecturers: ‘where rights and revelation diverge, how can the difference be negotiated?’ Implicitly in his lecture and more explicitly elsewhere, Hauerwas opts to privilege revelation over rights. Yet difference must still be negotiated. Take an individual right that is not compatible with the negative universality of suffering. In the discussion after the Lecture, a question was posed concerning this negative universality, what about the suffering of bodily pain, say, in starvation? Hauerwas’s immediate reply was: ‘Do you have a right to eat meat?’ With this, he forces us to ask ourselves: Is there a common humanity at this level? Would religious vegetarians be willing to avoid death by starvation if it involved eating meat? For: the bodily nature of ‘a community of communication’ Although Hauerwas does not give a direct account of rights in his text, in answering questions after his lecture, he identified rights with the universal Christianity professed in Troeltsch’s 1923 lecture. Troeltsch identifies Europe with a Hellenised Christianity and ‘our enormous capacity for expansion’; once a ‘Jewish sect’, Christianity is now the religion of ‘all Europe’. The nature of Christianity as a pan-European or universal faith derives from Christianity’s claim that Pentecost (the speaking in tongues) answered Babel (the confusion of languages). But as Hauerwas correctly notes, in the modern world Christianity is just one among many religions with ‘universal’ claims. To overcome this conflict of ‘universals’, Hauerwas turns to the story of Pentecost with its ‘gift of tongues’, which is said to ‘undo’ Babel. To this end, Hauerwas considers an account of language developed by Herbert McCabe, OP. McCabe holds that humans share ‘a biological and linguistic nature’.

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This might seem uncontroversial, though Hauerwas himself rightly jibs at definitions of the human that might exclude the severely mentally handicapped. McCabe says that ‘there is no such thing on earth as a purely linguistic community’; and ‘our shared bodily nature is not sufficient to sustain a common humanity’.4 Instead the more integrated our language with our community, the more isolated we are from speakers of other communities. Puzzlingly, we are also a natural and linguistic community and therefore natural law – though not common morality – exists within humanity. McCabe believes that a particular ‘people’ has been called into the world to sustain the hope for a common destiny. (Yet the biblical story is that God scattered humanity and gave them divergent languages to prevent their achieving their common purpose.) In a further contradictory move, the coming of Jesus is likened to a ‘new language’, thus creating the possibility of ‘a community of communication’. The problem is that, in addressing the dignity of difference, Hauerwas has no solution but that of hope in a redemptive understanding of history to which we may have access through a particular faith only. This returns us to Hauerwas’s (universal) presumption of particularity. Ironically, Hauerwas next brings in McCabe’s conception of ethics which insists on natural law. But can this be a universal without being presumptive? An answer to this question should force Hauerwas to see self-contradiction inherent in his relativist claims about communities which have a universal basis in nature. Instead he simply insists that he is a particularist, not a universalist, and rejects the popular ‘universal particularism’ amongst religious groups as incoherent. So it remains unclear how Hauerwas’s conception of languages of peace finally avoids the incoherence that he perceives in any form of presumptive universalism. Barthians against Troeltsch Why would anyone today be interested in the theology and imperialism of Troeltsch’s 1923 lecture? Hauerwas’s critique of Troeltsch may serve to occlude contemporary cosmopolitan perspectives on human rights. But one reason why Hauerwas cites Troeltsch may be that it accords with his own declared affinity to Karl Barth. Barth, as a contemporary of Troeltsch, not only wrote a systematic Christian theology on the exclusive ground of truth revealed by ‘the Word of God’, but is thought to have decisively refuted Troeltsch’s liberal empire-building. Hauerwas’s critique of Troeltsch aligns his own position with Barth and twentyfirst century Barthian theologians. The latter – like Hauerwas himself – find sin and corruption in all forms of political and philosophical defenses of individual agency, autonomy and rights. Following Barthian theologians, instead of Troeltsch, it makes perfect sense for Hauerwas to take Christian revealed truth as the source of his conception of a community of faith. All too crudely this means humans who suffer and speak have

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an inherent worth that cannot be grasped by the non-Christian. By arguing that Christianity is no ground for empire-building, Hauerwas secures the true worth of particular Christian faith-communities against both imperialism and individualism, both of which he (here and elsewhere) condemns. That the dogmatism implicit in his exclusive claims to a ‘faith more determinate than any other theory of truth’ is supposed to secure his position against any rational critique or reasoned argument seems obvious. Yet it is also patently clear that this is seriously at odds with the project of learning the languages of peace. Instead it follows that only violence – e.g. war – is left to resolve the conflicts and disagreements that are bound to be created by differences that are not rationally negotiable between and within communities. Hauerwas assumes some sort of justification of difference in accepting the myth of Babel as part of Christian biblical revelation. This same myth is corroborated by Sacks’ particularist Hebrew frame of reference. In fact Hauerwas begins his lecture with Sacks’ classical statement of a self-contradictory relativism, offering what seems at the outset a strange sort of argument for it, involving the technology of bricks and a mythological event. The role of the Chosen People, however disputable in itself, does not confirm Hauerwas’s views about particularism in the least: after all, the Jews were to bear witness to everyone. A form of self-contradictory relativism like Sacks’s, then, appears to be present in Hauerwas’s rejection of a theory of truth more determinative than the faith itself, whereas the Christian faith specifies certain articles of faith to be true universally. Conclusion The revival of Anglo-American liberal political theory in the early 1970s brought about by John Rawls and his groundbreaking theory of justice has made possible a lively, contemporary debate about the problems of our cultural and religious existence in terms of individual freedom, the particulars of community life and the universal claims concerning human rights and religions. Hauerwas, by contrast, dismisses the possibility of thinking autonomously about religion, society and the ethical and political organisation of individuals in cultural traditions and groupings. As a result, Hauerwas has no way out of (self-)contradiction. The object of Hauerwas’s critique haunts his own position. Yet there is no reason why universalism has to be negatively or positively ‘presumptive’. Instead let us admit that there will be different universal attributes ascribed to humanity and that particular convictions will also exist. An alternative to Hauerwas’s view might be that individual persons will suffer, often unjustly; but that a positive freedom offers the possibility for any individual to think and act autonomously, in order to develop themselves morally and politically for the good of their own lives and for that of a world where the difference between rights and revelation can be both

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contested and negotiated. If universal human obligations to those persons who suffer innocently can be addressed with rights-talk, however contestable the claims for human rights, then there is at least a chance for a peace worth having. Notes 1 2

3

4

This implicit criticism of the Enlightenment can be traced in the footnotes of Hauerwas’s lecture; see especially notes 10, 11, 12, 15 and 21. Hauerwas seems to think that the cosmopolitanism of Kwame Anthony Appiah (Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) comes close to avoiding the equation of a new universalism with America. Hauerwas himself does not use the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ freedom but makes passing jibes at notions of freedom that he calls ‘secular’, ‘capitalist’ and bourgeois’ and incompatible with ‘the Christian moral position’. These attacks fit closely with his reading of ‘the Enlightenment’ as ‘a secularised form of Christianity’ and of ‘autonomy’ and ‘universal faith’. Herbert McCabe, Law, Love, Language (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 46.

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3 Human rights in the Roman Catholic tradition Charles E. Curran

This essay will discuss the understanding of human rights in the Roman Catholic tradition. One essay or even one book cannot pretend to cover the entire topic in any depth. This article will focus especially on the official teaching of the hierarchical magisterium. The hierarchical teaching in the general area of the social order has been called Catholic Social Teaching which traces its origins to the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII in the latter part of the nineteenth century.1 This essay will develop three major points: the dramatic change that occurred with the Catholic acceptance of human rights in the latter part of the twentieth century, the basis and grounding of human rights in contemporary Catholic thought, and a somewhat troubling development in the teaching of Pope John Paul II. A dramatic change The most significant change was the dramatic move from adamant opposition to human rights to strong support for human rights in the second half of the twentieth century. The Catholic Church staunchly opposed human rights in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and well into the twentieth century. Pope Leo XIII in many official documents including the 1888 encyclical letter, Libertas praestantissimum, opposed modern liberties and the human rights associated with them. The right to religious liberty and the freedom of worship go against ‘the chiefest and holiest human duty’ demanding the worship of the one true God in the one true religion that can easily be recognised by its external signs. The rights of free speech and of free press mean that nothing will remain sacred: truth will be obscured by darkness and error will prevail. There is only a right and a duty to speak what is true and honorable and no right to speak what is false. Also, there is no right to the freedom of conscience. The only true meaning of the freedom of conscience is the freedom to follow the will of God and to fulfil one’s duties to obey God’s commands. Leo XIII, however, in accord with the accepted teaching of the time,

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acknowledged that public authority can tolerate what is at variance with truth for the sake of avoiding greater evils or of preserving some greater good.2 Seventy-five years later, in 1963, in the encyclical, Pacem in terris, Pope John XXIII vigorously supported the concept of human rights and made human rights a central part of the Catholic Church’s understanding of a just and good society. The human person has rights and obligations flowing directly from human nature. Divinely revealed truth provides an even higher appreciation of the dignity of the human person as the source of human rights and duties. Pacem in terris devotes eight paragraphs to the discussion of various human rights including both political and civil rights and social and economic rights before talking about human duties.3 It was only at the Second Vatican Council in 1965 that the Roman Catholic Church finally accepted the right to religious freedom for all human beings. Pope John Paul II in Redemptor hominis, his first encyclical in 1979, saw human rights as a fundamental principle of human welfare, the criterion for testing the existence of social justice within a country, and the basis for social and international peace.4 Pope John Paul II constantly insisted on the role and importance of human rights in his many trips to various countries around the world. Interested observers have also recognised this dramatic change that occurred in Catholic teaching. The American political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University, pointed out that no one at the beginning of the twentieth century would ever have thought that at the end of the twentieth century the Roman Catholic Church would be the strongest force in the world defending human rights.5 George Weigel, the self-described Catholic neoconservative author and commentator, claims that the second great revolution in the twentieth century after the Marxist revolution was the Roman Catholic acceptance of democracy and human rights.6 What explains this dramatic change especially in an institution like the Roman Catholic Church which is so hesitant to recognise change let alone dramatic change? Why did the Catholic Church oppose human rights before the latter part of the twentieth century? Catholic opposition to human rights came from its struggle against the Enlightenment and political liberalism with their insistence on the rights and freedom of the individual human person who is morally sovereign. Catholic teaching firmly opposed individualistic liberalism in all its forms. Religious liberalism started with Luther who made conscience supreme and cut off the individual from God’s law and God’s church. Philosophical liberalism substituted the autonomy and conscience of the individual person for God’s law and God’s truth. Political liberalism made the will of the majority and not God’s law the determining factor in human society. Economic liberalism insisted on the freedom of the owner and the entrepreneur to make as much profit as they could. Catholic teaching insisted on God’s law and truth that could be found in the natural law. Catholic teaching on objective truth insisted on the fundamental importance of duties and

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obligations and of the common good not on rights with their basis in subjective individualism. Pope Leo XIII, the staunch opponent of human rights in the last part of the nineteenth century, also insisted on the need for Catholic philosophy and theology to be based on the teaching, method and approach of Thomas Aquinas.7 As a result, Catholic philosophy and theology at that time became neoscholastic. Thomas Aquinas had no understanding of human rights in the subjective sense. He recognised the existence of ius but this was the objective reality of what is just. According to Michel Villey, a French twentieth century French jurist, historian, and neoscholastic philosopher, the culprit for bringing subjective rights into the Catholic tradition was William of Ockham (1288–1349) with his voluntarism and nominalism. As a voluntarist, Ockham gave great importance to God’s power and our power as individuals, not to the natural ordering that God put into the world. As a nominalist he insisted there were no universals and only individuals have real existence so that law rests on the claims of individuals. According to Villey, Ockham with his nominalism gave birth to the monstrous infant of understanding ius as a subjective power of the individual and thus opened the door to the excesses of the Enlightenment.8 How could this position then change? Catholic approaches to human rights were based on opposition to individual liberalism which was seen as the primary problem in the modern world. But as the twentieth century evolved a new enemy appeared on the scene – totalitarianism. In the 1930s, Pope Pius XI strongly condemned Fascism, Nazism and Communism. In theory Catholic teaching opposed all forms of totalitarianism but there can be no doubt that the Church was more willing in practice to tolerate totalitarianism from the right. In 1944, Pope Pius XII for the first time in Catholic teaching gingerly proposed that democracy might be the best form of government. After World War II, Catholic teaching constantly and consistently attacked Communism. (It should be noted that in the 1960s, Pope John XXIII called for a more nuanced dialogical approach to Communism.) In light of the dangers of totalitarianism the Catholic Church stressed the freedom and dignity of the individual person. The last hurdle in the acceptance of human rights was the acceptance of the right to religious freedom which only occurred at the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The Council Fathers faced not only the issue of religious liberty but even more significant was the problem created by the fact that Pope Leo XIII in the nineteenth century had strongly condemned religious liberty. How could the Catholic Church in the twentieth century now affirm the right to religious freedom? John Courtney Murray, the US Jesuit theologian, had a defining influence on the Declaration on Religious Freedom at Vatican II. Already in the 1950s, Murray had argued in great detail that the acceptance of religious liberty in the 1950s was not a reversal of Leo XIII’s position but a change due to different historical

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realities.9 Murray and Vatican II based religious freedom on the role of a limited constitutional government which allowed for a public role for religion in society but not in the legislative, judicial and executive functions of the state. Leo XIII denied religious liberty because he rightly opposed the theory of continental liberalism that reduced the role of the church only to the private and personal sphere. Leo also understood the state as having an ethical and paternalistic role in light of the need to instruct the ignorant multitudes. The changing role of the state and the realisation that the church did have a public role in society outside the limited parameters of state government now justified the acceptance of religious freedom. But in my judgment there was much more discontinuity between the teaching of Leo XIII and what was proposed by Murray and Vatican II. At the very minimum, at one time in history, the teaching of the Catholic Church was in error and needed to be corrected. Recent historical scholarship has also challenged the theory of Villey that the concept of subjective human rights came into the Catholic tradition with the nominalism of William of Ockham. The distinguished medieval historian, Brian Tierney, and his then graduate student, Charles Reid, have convincingly shown that the thirteenth-century canon lawyers, known as the Decretalists, possessed a well developed and explicit understanding of subjective human rights before Ockham.10 The basis and grounding of human rights Does this change and acceptance of human rights mean that the Catholic tradition has now accepted the approach of individualistic liberalism? The answer is no. The Catholic tradition still opposes philosophical liberalism with its tendency to absolutise human freedom and autonomy. It is true that in the past the Roman Catholic tradition did not give enough importance to human freedom and has learned to put more emphasis on human freedom and the active participation of all people in the life of human society. But Catholic anthropology sees the human person not as an isolated monad but as a relational being in relationship with God, neighbour, world and self. Catholic anthropology recognises the dignity of the human person but also the social nature of the person who is called to live in solidarity with others. Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World of Vatican II, recognises that ‘the protection of human rights is a necessary condition for the active participation of citizens, whether as individuals or collectively, in the life and government of the state’.11 David Hollenbach correctly maintains that Catholic Social Teaching has developed a more communitarian grounding of human rights as opposed to the individualistic grounding in liberalism.12

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Many commentators have rightly pointed out the danger of a one-sided individualism in the United States ethos. A good example of this individualism is the failure of the United States to guarantee health care to all its citizens. Catholic Social Teaching puts more emphasis on social and economic rights than does individualistic liberalism. The 1986 Pastoral Letter of US Bishops on the Economy criticised the structures of the US economy precisely on the basis of a one-sided individualism. Catholic Social Teaching also differs from liberalism by its insistence on both rights and duties. Pacem in terris in 1963 insisted: ‘The natural rights with which we have been dealing here are, however, inseparably connected in the very person who is their subject with just as many respective duties.’13 In addition, Catholic Social Teaching recognises a specifically religious and Christian basis for human rights. But we live in pluralistic national societies and in a very pluralistic global community. If human rights are based on specific religious principles or teachings, how can they be accepted by all human beings? The Catholic response to this problem is typical of the Catholic ‘both-and’ approach. Before Vatican II official Catholic Social Teaching, as illustrated even in Pacem in terris in 1963, was based almost exclusively on natural law which is common to all human beings. Human beings reflecting on the human nature created by God can determine how human beings should act. Vatican II, however, called for Catholic moral theology to be more theological, scriptural and Christological. As a result, is Catholic Social Teaching no longer able to be in dialogue with all others in its approach to human rights? The answer from the Catholic perspective is no. The ultimate basis for human rights is the dignity of the human person. In the Catholic understanding today this dignity has anthropological, theological, and Christological bases. The anthropological basis of the dignity and social nature of the human person can and should be accepted by all human beings. The Catholic Christian tradition recognises two other bases for this fundamental dignity. From a theological perspective God created human beings in God’s own image and likeness. Jesus Christ revealed the fullness of humanity to itself so that the Christian tradition has a specifically Christian basis for accepting the dignity of the human person in addition to the anthropological basis which they share with all humankind. Yes, Catholic Social Teaching understands human rights to be God-given. God is the ultimate author and giver of these rights. Catholic theology has characteristically insisted on the principle of mediation – the divine is mediated in and through the human. The traditional Catholic acceptance of natural law well illustrates this mediation. How do we know what God wants us to do? Do we go immediately to God and ask? No! On the basis of what God has created our human reason can determine how God wants us to act. Nonbelievers who do not accept

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the God-given nature of human rights can still recognise and support these rights based on their understanding of the human. In practice, the Catholic Church has joined with all others in working for human rights for all people in our world. Ever since John XXIII, the encyclicals and documents of Catholic Social Teaching issued by popes have been addressed not only to Catholics but to all people of good will. Pope Paul VI and John Paul II have frequently cited, agreed with and commented on the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. (However, Pius XII, who was pope at the time never publicly referred to this document.) A somewhat troubling development From my perspective there has been a somewhat troubling development in the approach taken by the late John Paul II to human rights. In his moral and political writing, John Paul II insisted on the primacy of truth in his understanding of democracy and human rights. Without transcendent truth, there is no sure principle for grounding just relations between people. The inseparable connection between truth and freedom is extremely significant for the life of persons in the socioeconomic and socio-political sphere.14 John Paul II was well aware that many people see an emphasis on truth as an unacceptable basis for democracy. Democracy for many is based on agnosticism and sceptical relativism with regard to truth. Precisely because of this agnosticism, democracy must safeguard the rights of the individual person that might be taken away on the basis of another’s understanding of truth. Since there is no truth we can agree on, democracy must protect the human rights of the individual. But John Paul II insists that a democracy without truth and values, as history demonstrates, easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.15 I agree with John Paul II that democracy and the recognition of human rights rests on certain truths that are held by all. The Declaration of Independence in my own country asserts: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ My problem comes from John Paul II’s failure to explicitly recognise the difference between the role of truth in the moral order and the role of truth in the socio-political order. Truth has a lesser role to play in the socio-political order than in the moral order. Not everything that is morally wrong should be declared illegal by the state. Without explicitly recognising this difference and its consequences, John Paul II fails to incorporate the understanding of the state and the sociopolitical order found in the Declaration on Religious Freedom of Vatican II. John Courtney Murray pointed out that Pope Leo XIII in his opposition to a right to religious liberty had a paternalistic and even authoritarian understanding

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of the state which had an obligation to teach the truth to the ignorant multitude. This approach maintained that error has no rights. The acceptance of religious freedom at Vatican II recognised the right to religious freedom as based on the dignity of the human person. This dignity is a truth that all can and should agree on. The Declaration on Religious Freedom of Vatican II acknowledged the basic understanding of a limited constitutional government – ‘the usages of society are to be the usages of freedom in their full range. These require that the freedom of man be respected as far as possible and curtailed only when and in so far as necessary’ (n. 7). This understanding of a limited constitutional government thus limits the role of truth in the political order and gives a greater role to freedom. At times, however, the state must use its coercive power to restrict the freedom of citizens. The older Catholic approach and the one still used by Pope John Paul II saw the end or purpose of the state as working for the common good. Murray and Vatican II make a distinction between public society and the lesser role of the state within public society. Society works for the common good, but the state is concerned with the more limited reality of the public order which involves an order of justice (including social justice), public peace, and public morality. There are definite limits on freedom in the limited constitutional government as understood in the Declaration on Religious Freedom of Vatican II. By failing to recognise explicitly the distinction between the roles of truth and freedom in the moral order and in the political order, and by insisting on the primacy of truth even in the political order, John Paul II tends to reassert the older Catholic position and fails to acknowledge with Vatican II that in the political order the freedom of human persons be respected as far as possible, and curtailed only when and in so far as necessary. The state must also intervene to protect and promote public order which definitely includes some truth claims. But the relationship between freedom and truth in the political order differs from that relationship in the moral order. Such a theoretical teaching has practical ramifications. In 2003, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued ‘Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons.’16 As is well known, the Catholic Church has argued against public recognition of samesex unions throughout the world. Some Catholic theologians, including myself, have maintained that the Catholic Church should change its teaching on homosexual unions striving for permanency. But the discussion here will presuppose the existing hierarchical teaching. I will develop an argument that one can accept the hierarchical teaching on homosexuality and still make a somewhat convincing case for accepting same-sex unions in the legal sphere. The document begins with the understanding of the nature of marriage with its inalienable characteristics. By the Creator’s plan sexual complementarity and fruitfulness belong to the very nature of marriage. Homosexual acts can never be

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morally approved under any circumstances. To its credit the document explicitly recognises that the scope of civil law is more limited than moral law, but civil law can never contradict right reason and the natural law. The state must protect, defend and promote marriage as an institution because this is for the good of society and the common good of all. Legal recognition of homosexual unions would obscure certain basic moral values and cause a devaluation of the institution of marriage. As a matter of fact, would the legal recognition of same-sex unions be harmful to the institution of marriage? I do not think so. The vast majority of human beings are heterosexual. Heterosexual persons are not going to enter into homosexual unions. The fact that homosexual unions are legally recognised does not threaten the institution of marriage. Yes, the state can and should support the institution of marriage but the legal recognition of same-sex unions would not detract from the institution of marriage. A cartoon in a national US magazine made the point very well. Two upper-class women of a certain age were drinking in a bar. The one said to the other: ‘Same-sex unions don’t threaten my marriage. Rather bimbos like the one over there are a threat to my marriage.’ If the primary consideration in human rights is the truth of human dignity, then one could argue that by legalising same-sex unions one enhances the dignity of homosexual persons without in any way taking away the rights and dignity of others and of important societal institutions such as marriage. To enhance human dignity in the political order is a good thing. Even from the viewpoint of the existing Catholic hierarchical teaching and understanding, one can and should argue that it is a lesser evil to promote long-term committed relationships between homosexual persons than it is to promote fleeting one-night stands. Thus the recognition of same-sex unions would prevent a worse moral evil from occurring. If the logic found in the 2003 document of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith calling for opposing same-sex unions were applied to the issue of civil divorce, one logically would have to conclude that the Catholic Church today should oppose civil divorce. One of the essential characteristics of Catholic marriage is indissolubility and permanency. But nothing is more threatening to the indissolubility of marriage than the existence of civil divorce and the possibility of remarriage. Here the civil law directly goes against what the hierarchical church teaches is a matter of natural law – the indissolubility of marriage. One might justify the failure to call for a change in civil divorce laws as a case of tolerating a situation that cannot be changed. Even that position, however, recognises the important difference between the moral order and the political order. There exists a significant difference between the moral order and the political order. In discussing what is proper in the political order, one should not begin with moral truth but with the complex understanding of the dignity of human persons and the role of a limited constitutional government. This chapter has discussed three important aspects in the Catholic tradition’s approach to human rights – the

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significant change from opposition to human rights to their acceptance; the basis for the contemporary Catholic acceptance of political and economic rights with its recognition to cooperate with all others in working to defend and promote human rights; and finally a somewhat troublesome development in the writings of Pope John Paul II which did not explicitly recognise the difference between the role of truth in the moral order and in the political order. Notes 1 [See Charles E. Curran, Catholic Social Teaching, 1891–Present: A Historical, Theological and Ethical Analysis (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002) – ed.] 2 Pope Leo XIII, Libertas praestantissimum, nn. 19–37, in The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teaching of Leo XIII, ed. Etiénne Gilson (Garden City: Doubleday Image, 1954), pp. 70–9. The abbreviation n. or nn. in church documents refers to the paragraph numbers of these documents. 3 Pope John XXIII, Pacem in terris, nn. 8–27, in David J. O’Brien and Thomas A. Shannon (eds), Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1992), pp. 132–5. 4 Pope John Paul II, Redemptor hominis, n. 17, in The Encyclicals of John Paul II, ed. J. Michael Miller (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 2001), pp. 71–4. 5 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘Religion and the Third Wave,’ National Interest, 24 (summer 1991), 29–42. 6 George Weigel, ‘Catholicism and Democracy: The “Other Twentieth Century Revolution”’, in Gordon L. Anderson and Morton A. Kaplan (eds), Morality and Religion in Liberal Democratic Societies (New York: Paragon, 1992), pp. 223–50. 7 Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, in The Church Speaks to the Modern World, ed. Gilson, pp. 31–54. 8 Michel Villey, ‘La genèse du droit subjectif chez Guillaume d’Occam’, Archives de philosophie du droit, 9 (1964), 97–127. 9 For my analysis of Murray’s approach to religious freedom and the change from the understanding of Leo XIII, see Charles E. Curran, American Catholic Social Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 192–211. 10 Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law (Atlanta: Scholars, 1997), pp. 1–203; Charles J. Reid, Jr, ‘The Canonistic Contribution to the Western Rights Tradition: An Historical Inquiry’, Boston College Law Review, 33 (1991), 37–92. 11 Vatican Council II, Gaudium et spes, n. 73, in O’Brien and Shannon (eds), Catholic Social Thought, p. 215. 12 David Hollenbach, ‘A Communitarian Reconstruction of Human Rights: Contributions from Catholic Tradition’, in R. Bruce Douglass and David Hollenbach (eds), Catholicism and Liberalism: Contributions to American Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 127–50. 13 Pacem in terris, n. 28, in O’Brien and Shannon (eds), Catholic Social Thought, p. 136.

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14 Pope John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, n. 99, in Encyclicals of John Paul II, ed. Miller, p. 647. 15 Pope John Paul II, Centesimus annus, n. 46, in Encyclicals of John Paul II, ed. Miller, p. 550. 16 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexuals Persons’, Origins, 33 (2003), 177–82.

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Response to Charles E. Curran Nicholas Bamforth

A Catholic priest, moral theologian and university professor by vocation, Charles Curran’s life has marked him out as a truly prominent defender of freedom of conscience and of debate in the contemporary world. His struggles with the Catholic Church hierarchy, and with the trustees, President and Chancellor of the Catholic University of America – from which he was removed as a professor between 1986 and 1988 after daring, during the preceding twenty years, to call for more open debate within the Catholic Church – has been the stuff of New York Times headlines. His related court battle with the Catholic University became a rallying point for defenders of academic freedom across North America, and stands as an inspiration to defenders of freedom of conscience everywhere. Charles Curran’s investigation and, many would say, persecution at the hands of the Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – headed at the time by one Joseph Ratzinger – appears remarkable when one reads his published work. Curran has called for a re-evaluation of the Church’s absolutist doctrines concerning permissible and impermissible sexual acts, but has done so from the perspective of a generally friendly internal critic.1 To quote from his aptly titled memoir, Loyal Dissent, Curran believes himself to have ‘generally agreed strongly with the broad fundamental aspects of the Catholic theological tradition’ and to have worked ‘primarily out of that tradition’.2 He would ‘not feel comfortable in any other tradition’; his ‘problems are with particular church teachings, not with its core dogma or broad theological approach’.3 Furthermore, Curran’s methodology is distinctly gradualist. He has written that ‘Anyone working in a tradition first tries to justify something new in light of what has come before. But, on the other hand, Catholic tradition is by its very nature a living tradition that does not simply repeat the past. I had come … to appreciate the mutual relationship between theory and practice. Sometimes recognizing a new practice requires us to rethink our theory. Just the same, a theologian working in a living tradition definitely wants to strive for continuity, and to some extent is tempted

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to overlook the reality of change and discontinuity.’4 This being so, the Church’s response to Charles Curran’s position as loyal dissenter is, alas, a telling example of the intolerance some religious hierarchies exhibit when faced even with reasonable internal questioning. Charles Curran’s support, in his OAL lecture, for the granting of legal recognition to committed same-sex relationships falls firmly within the methodology of a friendly internal critic. He presupposes, despite personal misgivings, the truth of the Church’s condemnation of loving same-sex sexual acts. Nonetheless, he notes that the granting of legal recognition would not threaten the institution of heterosexual marriage, and that the dignity of lesbians and gay men can be enhanced by legal recognition – as seems to be the case with Britain’s civil partnership legislation – without undermining the dignity of others. It is thus a lesser evil for the law to recognise committed same-sex relationships than for it to refuse to do so. For lesbians and gay men who are not practising Catholics, such arguments may well appear rather negative. Generally, lesbians and gay men argue that a real positive moral good can be associated with lesbian and gay sexuality in general, and with committed sexual and/or emotional relationships of any type: and, from this perspective, that the law should support rather merely tolerate their relationships.5 To this extent, Charles Curran’s defence of same-sex relationships neatly highlights the clash between religious and secular reasoning about human rights: he is defending such relationships with a weather eye to Church doctrine and the distinction between the political and the moral order; secular theorists, by contrast, do so by invoking the moral and/or constitutional ideals of autonomy or equality as goods which are vindicated when we grant proper respect to same-sex partnerships. More generally, the difference between the moderate, internal nature of Charles Curran’s reasoning, and the bolder, more assertive position which secular defenders of same-sex partnership rights would adopt, might be seen as further evidence of the disproportionate nature of the Catholic hierarchy’s response to Curran and his arguments (this is despite the Church’s ostensible commitment, since the Second Vatican Council, to existing within a democratic world). As such, Charles Curran’s life and work bear witness to the continuing inability of one of the world’s most powerful religions to deal reasonably with the moderate, thoughtful exercise of the human rights of free speech and free conscience. The positive side to Charles’s story, however, is that it provides a compelling account of one very sincere human being’s tenacity, courage and intellectual integrity – qualities rightly associated with a true defender of human rights. Notes 1 See, generally, Charles E. Curran, Transition and Tradition in Moral Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979); History and Contemporary Issues: Studies in Moral

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Theology (New York: Continuum, 1996) and ‘Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in American Perspective’, in Saul M. Olyan and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds), Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in American Religious Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 85–100. Charles E. Curran, Loyal Dissent: Memoir of a Catholic Theologian (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006), p. 73. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 73. For discussion, see Nicholas C. Bamforth and David A. J. Richards, Patriarchal Religion, Sexuality and Gender: A Critique of New Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 6. [See also N. Bamforth (ed.), Sex Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2002 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) – ed.]

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4 Worldviews and universalisms: the doctrine of ‘religion’ in Islam and the idea of ‘rights’ in the West Hisham A. Hellyer

Humans are responsible for the evil they do, regardless of why they do it. They are accountable before humanity and God … Pointing to the banality of goodness does not diminish it in any way. An act is good when it is caring, when it protects the life and rights of others, no matter who does it, or where, or why. (David R. Blumenthal) Even the will of an omnipotent being cannot change or abrogate (natural law) … (This) would maintain its objective validity even if we should assume the impossible, that there is no God or that he does not care for human affairs. (Hugo Grotius) All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Religion versus rights: the dichotomy as seen in Muslim intellectual thought The theme of this volume is ‘religion and rights’ and the relationship between them. It is a theme that has frequently been discussed in the twentieth and the twentyfirst centuries but the parameters of that discussion have not always been clear. Among the questions that remain are the following: What do we mean by ‘religion’? What religion is under discussion? What kind of authority can our analysis pretend to? We might also ask what is meant in this context by ‘rights’? In other words, whose perception of ‘rights’ is under discussion? Here we discuss a contribution to that debate that is informed by Islamic thought, as expressed by the normative authorities of that tradition, in so far as the author understands them. The aim of this chapter is two-fold: to show where the philosophical worldviews that inform the religion of Islam and the rights discourse may be distant from each other, and where they may be closer than we ordinarily realise. We begin with a few thoughts on what ‘rights’ and ‘religion’ mean in this context.

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Religion Where we discuss religion in this essay, we draw from religious themes as expounded upon by Islam, through the normative tradition of that religion. This is useful for our purposes, since Islam is currently often portrayed as the one major world religion most inimical to ‘rights’. However, it is also important to stress at the outset that that the Islamic notions of religion that we shall discuss in what follows, where they apply outside Islam, are applicable to other religions, particularly those that admit of revelation, notably Christianity and Judaism. We begin by noting that when Islam is compared to other religions, it is sometimes thought that, in the absence of a Muslim ‘church’, no Islamic voice speaks authoritatively on topics such as those concerning ‘rights’ and the wider community. This is not the place to address the widespread confusion on this point, which is manifested in innumerable references to ‘Muslim clerics’ in both popular and academic reflections on Muslim religious authority. Suffice it to say that the absence of an ecclesiastical hierarchy does not imply the absence of religious authority in Islam. The point can be explained by analogy: authority is attained in precisely the way that academic authority is attained, through constant peer review – and also by the wider Muslim public’s assent, silent or otherwise, to the authority of those peers. However it must be stressed, too, that for the Muslim community the original ‘peer’ (or rather, authority, as his role transcends that of later Muslims) is the Prophet. It is understood by all scholars in Islam that the Prophet sets the limits of knowledge and that the Prophet is the source of credibility, in so far as he is the most authoritative interpreter of the Divine Will. Only if this point is respected can such scholars be considered the inheritors of the Prophet, partaking of the Islamic intellectual tradition. This cannot be sufficiently emphasised in an age when the very notion of religious authority for Muslims is frequently subject to question, particularly in the absence of any institution comparable to the Roman Catholic Papacy. In keeping with that Islamic understanding of religious authority, it is to be noted that the author of this chapter does not write as a member of the community of Muslim religious scholars (‘ulama) but as a Western academic whose training is primarily in the Western tradition, particularly in politics, law and the social sciences. He has, however, studied the normative tradition of the ‘ulama in an effort to enter into fruitful inter-civilisational dialogue. In that normative tradition, religion is described as ‘din’. This Arabic word comes closest to the meaning ascribed to ‘religion’ in the West in the twenty-first century. But it also has specific resonances in the particular worldview from which it derives, which it expresses, and to which it belongs; though it has commonalities with faiths that are, like Christianity and Judaism, close kin to Islam, there are also specificities in terms of what is meant by religion.

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Religion in the Islamic sense ‘does not concede the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane’;1 it includes both the temporal and material world (al-dunya), and the world beyond (al-akhirah). Moreover, in stark contrast to modern secular ethics, religion insists that the world that we can see, touch and feel must be ‘related in a profound and inseparable way to the akhirah-aspect’ and that ‘the akhirah-aspect has ultimate and final significance’. From this basic point concerning definitions, we can identify where tensions may begin to arise, and thus why a discussion about the relation of Islam to human rights must start at this basic level: that of the definition of terms. One cannot begin to enter into that discussion without first recognising that as far as believers are concerned, rights (as a part of this worldly realm) are related, and subjected to, deeply theological, metaphysical and spiritual concerns. For believers, religion is revealed. It is not a construct, but truth, and is the religion of the Absolute Truth (al-Haqq): God Himself. Certainty is available on the essentials of the religion, without any confusion or debate over critical fundamentals. For believers, any theory, including that of ‘rights’, is therefore subject to those certainties and must engage with them. And yet, since there is no institutionalised ecclesiastical authority, what might appear to be an uncompromisingly holistic religious system nonetheless has surprisingly little objection to the modern insistence on dividing the ‘state’ from the ‘church’.2 Where clear lines of distinction are required between the institutions of temporal and religious authority, Muslims can soundly appeal to many Islamic philosophical and historical traditions, without losing any claim to authenticity. At this point, we should note that the only example of a theocratic state in the Muslim world is Iran. The other examples often cited, such as the Saudi kingdom, are not theocratic states: their religious authorities are distinct from the institutions of government – though there are lines of communication. By contrast, Iran subordinates state institutions to an individual conceived to be the supreme religious authority. Even within the Shi’i tradition, this position is the subject of intense debate and controversy. In Sunni Islam, it is unsustainable and has been so at least since the Ummayyad dynasty, which succeeded the rule of the khulafa’ al-rashidun (the ‘four rightly guided successors/caliphs [to the Prophet]’).3 More could be written on this point, but it would take us beyond our particular subject. We should have, by now, outlined the parameters of any discussion of rights within a moral universe – or, more accurately, from within the believer’s worldview. A rights discourse sustainable within Islam flows from metaphysical and spiritual considerations that at the very least do not contradict religion, and ideally derive from it. Rights We see, then, that there is a vast gulf between Islam and any religious tradition within which authentic arguments can be made for separating ‘worldly’ (dunyawi) and ‘sacred’

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activity. For Muslims, philosophically speaking, there is no such room for manoeuvre. Religion derives its authority and authenticity from the ultimately Authentic and supremely Authorising (the Divine). If religion is not relevant for all spheres of activity, it is simply not religion, as far as believers are concerned. The notion of ‘rights’, on the other hand, is a modern idea; it evolved in a particular cultural context in response to social and political pressures. Though it claims universal legitimacy in time and space, it is, by its very nature, a modern construct. The ‘rights discourse’ of the twentieth to twenty-first centuries does not generally root its authority in divine or ancient texts. Its legitimacy and credibility are rooted in much more recent times, indeed in a theory that relied on the culmination of human experience. Through trial and error, human beings came to the notion that certain rights were ‘inalienable’. Almost as a post-script, some tried to present those rights as ‘God-given’. Many of those involved in these discussions were undoubtedly believers in God but it was historical circumstance rather than their belief systems that led them to postulate ‘human rights’. It is sometimes argued that the theory of rights derives from early natural law theorists such as Thomas Aquinas. Natural law is indeed invoked today by certain rights activists who are also believers. But natural law theories are neither responsible for nor indispensable to rights discourse. The point being made here is that by its very nature, the discourse of rights is fundamentally uncertain and subject to change as human history proceeds. Herein lies the first difference between it and religion – for the believer, religion has fixed points of reference that have ancient and primordial origins, emanating from the Creator. The secular concept of rights may be determinative as well but both the discourse and its points of reference are relatively new. These two approaches each bring their own points of ease and their own points of complexity. The scope of ‘rights discourse’ offers a second point of distinction. Religion concerns both life in this world – what is (and what is not) ascertainable by the five senses in this world – and the afterlife. Unsurprisingly, rights discourse has no stake in supernatural or metaphysical realities, let alone the world to come. It is fundamentally concerned with the here and now. Though believers may hold that there is a connection between their commitment to rights and what happens to them in the afterlife, rights discourse is wholly unconcerned with the hereafter. It is essentially agnostic on such matters, with some adherents basically hostile. Having emerged as part of the secularisation of Western society, it derives its authority from something other than a supernatural or metaphysical source. If it is thus difficult to engage fully with rights discourse from within the Islamic worldview, this is not so much because Islam values the individual less than does the secular discourse of human rights, but because the value which Islam assigns to the individual derives from quite distinct considerations. To put it simply: the worldview of the believer, construed through its ‘permanently established constituent

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elements’, is different from the worldview that produced the discourse of rights. Where these points of difference are not taken into account, the discussion risks becoming a dialogue of the deaf. Both participants in the dialogue must take the postulates of the other seriously if any progress is to be made. In the believer’s worldview, the individual human being is a representative of God Himself on earth (khalifat-l-Allah fi-l-‘ard), and deserves respect as such. The human being’s heart in Islam is said to contain the Divine – there are many similes and metaphors that call attention to the importance of regarding the individual human being as special, due to Divine involvement. Rights discourse has different points of departure and remains a secular discourse at least in its origins. Rights accorded to the individual in Islam do not find their authenticity or authority by claiming interpretations of rationality or reason, even though reason and the rational may indeed be brought to bear on the issue in deeply influential ways.4 One of the primary indicators of ‘religion’ in the Islamic worldview is the idea of ‘indebtedness’. The verb that signifies being ‘indebted’ (dana) derives from the noun ‘religion’ (din). Other derivations include ‘obligation’ (dayn), ‘judgement’ (daynunah), ‘city’ (madinah) and ‘governor’ (dayyan). When the Prophet became the dayyan of the city of Yathrib, the name of the city changed to ‘the Madinah’ – signifying yet again that in the Islamic worldview, religion results in a social order where obligations are judiciously kept and judgments respected, due to the clear sense of each individual being indebted to the Creator.5 This suggests one way in which the rights discourse of the West and the Islamic worldview may find areas of agreement. For rights discourse also assumes that human beings become civilised in an environment where a sense of obligation to the rule of law prevails. However, what is conceived as ‘just’ in rights discourse does not necessarily coincide with the Islamic conception of ‘justice’, or vice versa. Synergy may indeed be possible – but it can require a great deal of discussion to deconstruct certain biases and to re-evaluate what is actually being discussed. For example: it has been argued that Islam – in contradistinction to the secular discourse on rights – emphasises responsibilities rather than rights. Others argue that the rights discourse ignores responsibilities, in favour of rights. Both assertions are simplistic, and ignore the philosophical systems of both discourses. Another confusion arises around the notion of secularism. In the West, secularism is a subject of great controversy, in terms of what it requires by way of specific policies and legislative tools. The very notion of secularism is alien to the Islamic worldview and has not yet found a sustainable elaboration within it. This is not to say one cannot be found but it would have to begin from the assumption that religious authority and the government are naturally separate in the first place – not from the assumption that ecclesiastical institutions should be separated from the state, as in the Western model.

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This is certainly not meant to imply that the process of engagement should not, or cannot take place. At least from the Islamic worldview, this is rejected a priori. There is a stubbornness among Muslim philosophers, such as Al-Attas, that resists accepting the philosophical worldview and epistemological assumptions of secular modernity, from which the rights discourse emanates: but this is inseparably accompanied by an insistence that deep engagement must take place.6 Engagement with the rights discourse: a philosophical justification When justifying engagement from within the Islamic worldview, Muslim scholars mention many different precedents. The most often cited of these dates back to the disagreement between two theologians of the early generations of Muslims, al-Harith al-Muhasibi (d. 243/857), and Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (d. 241/855).7 These two Muslim forefathers, both learned and pious Sunni scholars, shared many views but disagreed fundamentally on how to engage with heterodox ideas and sects. This disagreement was later analysed by al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), author of the groundbreaking and far-sighted work of sceptical inquiry, The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Al-Ghazali distinguished (1) the basic objection to engaging in theological exercise and the rational examination of dogma (known traditionally as ‘dhamm `ilm al-kalam’) and (2) the more specific objection to engaging in academic polemics, e.g., by making assertions on controversial issues and giving accounts of the opponent’s arguments (known as the ‘dhamm taqrir al-shubah’). In so doing he managed to bring about an entente between these two tendencies, thus permitting later Sunni scholars to develop arguments on either side without acrimony. His work engages with issues of theology, particularly Ancient Greek metaphysics, the influence that they were exercising on the scholars of his own time, and the resulting danger of confusion among the mass of believers. But his essential message clearly relates to contemporary discussions concerning intellectual engagement with ideas that do not emanate from the Islamic worldview. Fundamentally, the disagreement between al-Muhasibi and Ibn Hanbal was this: one favoured the use of systematic exposition to defend the faith while the other felt that such an exercise was futile and a danger to the faith. On the one side are those like al-Muhasibi‚ who argue for intellectual engagement – their concern is to alleviate any doubts afflicting the educated faithful. The best way to eliminate such doubts, they argued, was a thorough understanding of the sources of the arguments that were causing such doubts. The arguments could then be proved false using sources from within the Islamic worldview. By contrast, the concern among scholars such as Ibn Hanbal was to protect the faithful from falling into confusion in the first place; they feared that engagement of any type, particularly public controversy, might endanger the faith, by disseminating and exacerbating confusion among the majority of believers.

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Al-Ghazali does not simply accept al-Muhasibi’s arguments. He sees himself as following in al-Muhasibi’s footsteps when arguing for constructive intellectual engagement to tackle ‘bad theology’ but shows his sympathy for Ibn Hanbal’s objections in his insistence that such engagement should only be carried out by qualified experts. More importantly, al-Ghazali follows al-Muhasibi in his insistence that Muslim scholars must engage with ideas widespread enough to sow confusion in the minds of the non-specialist, whether or not those ideas emanate from the Islamic worldview. Paradigms must be provided that put those doubts to rest. Clearly, the over-protective doctrines of this early ‘hero’ of non-engagement, Ibn Hanbal, sustained a coup de grâce from al-Ghazali and have become still less plausible in a modern and well-read society. What Ibn Hanbal feared – that if the floodgates were opened, they could not be closed – had already happened a thousand years ago, whether one likes it or not. Although, as al-Ghazali was sensitive enough to recognise, both scholars had authoritative arguments supporting their views, his pragmatism won the day, and history has recorded that the position of Ibn Hanbal became unsustainable. These realities dictate that the preferable position for the Muslims of today is that of al-Muhasibi. The truth is that community of believers has been cursed (or blessed) by the need for engagement with other worldviews from the moment the Muslims left the Hijaz. Undiluted ‘purity’ was perhaps conceivable in the isolation of the desert but the Muslim world, which from its inception has been primarily urban, has always been inter-connected – never more so than in the twenty-first century. The basic premise of the Ghazalian approach is clear: scholars of the normative tradition are advised to hold to, and constantly renew, that tradition, while remaining aware of the need for specialist expertise outside their fields of expertise. If such scholars focus on expanding and rejuvenating their own disciplines, in proficient ways that only they can do, using the experience only they possess, those who can do it competently will constantly update those disciplines. In the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, one of the main discussions with and tensions emanating from nonIslamic premises has been that associated with rights discourse. It should be clear from the above that contemporary Muslim scholars, academics and intellectuals have a collective duty ( fard kifayah) to engage with that discourse. The question is how. In the traditional Muslim world, the scholarly class had many individuals who had mastered several disciplines, although they were never all that common. With the advent of the colonial period in the Muslim world, they became far rarer; but there is also a contemporary opportunity that did not exist before. The improvements in mass communication have allowed for the deterioration of scholarship, such that so many self-proclaimed ‘experts’ are in fact simply media-savvy; but it has provided, too, for new means of collaboration and of exchange of ideas. That in itself represents how rights discourse may be able to interface with the classical tradition of Islamic discourse.

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Contemporary reflections The above makes clear the basic philosophical framework: believers consider rights discourse through the paradigm and the prism of religious thought. In what follows we shall look briefly at how things have actually evolved within the Muslim world. In doing so, we will find less the perfect manifestation of any worldview, and more a range of perspectives, in a collection of states that happen to contain Muslim majorities. And here there are many interesting points to note. Modernity has arrived in all parts of the Muslim world. Secularist notions of how people should be governed have become entrenched in all Muslim countries and communities. One might assume that this would cause conflict – even civil war. Yet this is not how things have turned out. Muslims in the state with the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia, for instance, have created evolving institutions for producing religious authorities and a massive Muslim association or party: the Nahdatul Ulama. This development took place within a secularist state. A similar case is the AK party in Turkey. Muslims in non-Muslim-majority countries have also formed their own parties. These developments are possible because Islamic law is very pragmatic. True, one could argue that things might, ideally, be different: one might wish to be living in the time of the Prophet himself or of the khulafa al-rashidun or at least in a state that facilitated Islamic law. But Sunni political philosophy has a pragmatic streak of respecting order above all else, as long as key demands are met. If the ruler allows the people to pray to God and upholds their right to establish ritual worship, there is little permission for rebellion. However, a question now arises, specifically in relation to the discourse of rights: is this kind of co-existent engagement sufficient? Rights discourse does not declare itself specific to certain countries or cultural paradigms – its attraction for its adherents is its claim to universalism. The key expression of rights discourse is the ‘Universal Declaration’ – no other legislative document of the last fifty years has exercised anything like the same influence. It might be described as the founding document of the human rights movement. Given what we have already said, it would be of no surprise if Muslim states had refused to sign up to the Declaration when it was promulgated. The universality of the declaration could not, after all, be assumed, even if it were (in due course) to be universally accepted. While many Muslim countries have signed many international agreements promoting human rights, some have at times expressed reservations, accepting their provisions only insofar as they are consistent with Islam. These countries include Egypt, Kuwait, Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Of course, reservations about the universality of human rights are not confined to Muslims: ‘political philosophers in the West also recognised that the metaphysical foundations of human rights continue to be controversial’.8 But unfortunately, none of these early Muslim reservations, expressed when the UN Declaration was originally

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drawn up, were articulated in a manner that could be described as engagement. The opportunity for a fruitful and authoritative discussion was lost. Presumably the Muslim states considered that the worldview implied in rights discourse was so alien to Islam that engagement would be fruitless – or they were simply unable to properly articulate themselves. We may never know. One of the main stated objections by the Saudi Arabian government at the time of the promulgation in 1948 was that the declaration did not acknowledge that rights were a gift of God. But the Saudis simply abstained in the UN General Assembly vote; they did not vote against, or deeply engage in a discussion.9 Such non-engagement on the part of states will have to change if Muslim countries, or Muslims at large, are to engage fruitfully with rights discourse today. It may be that engagement between worldviews has to take place on the basis of the understanding that the various rights instruments are only expressions of a worldview: they are not worldviews in and of themselves. Human rights would consequently be engaged with most productively on the level of law and policy, rather than theology or metaphysics. Fadel provides a useful methodology in this regard, which is easily summed up: if a certain legislative tool emanating from the rights discourse demanded that Muslims morally and ethically reject something that is not rejected explicitly by the Islamic worldview, then that would create a moral and ethical quandary for Muslims.10 Morals and ethics are not inseparable from history in the Islamic worldview, while they may be in the rights discourse – if something is morally and ethically obscene in the twenty-first century, then it must have been so in the seventh century. For example: there is often the demand posed by human rights activists for Muslim states to ban polygamy. Now, Muslim states could very well do so, theoretically speaking – there would be ways to do this, under certain legal tools, even within Islamic law – for example, if it was shown that polygamy was (just for the sake of argument) life-threatening due to new circumstances. But even if legally, and even if such a state law involved was Islamically acceptable, there would never be a way to decry polygamy as unethical or immoral in and of itself – for the undeniable conclusion would be an accusation that the Prophet himself was unethical or immoral. If, on the other hand, Muslims deemed it politically and rationally expedient, or even simply in the public interest that certain things were proscribed in the twentyfirst century that were not before, this would represent no quandary, as long as such a proscription did not violate a fundamental duty according to the Islamic worldview. In so doing, this would not necessarily be a philosophical or ethical quandary – for Islamic law does permit that things previously permitted under Islam may be suspended, indefinitely, if the public interest of the Muslim community justifies it. To stay with our aforementioned example: polygamy is not a duty or an obligation under Islamic law – and is, in any case, only permitted (as opposed to being ordered) as a somewhat less normative lifestyle with very strict conditions anyway.

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This is of course a very slippery slope. Unless the methodology of such proscriptions is carefully specified, it might legitimate any number of proscriptions. The material power of the West is and has been frequently used to pressure nations to accept legislative tools. But even this does not satisfy all objections from the proponents of rights discourse vis-à-vis Muslims. Staying with our theoretical example of polygamy: it is doubtful that those who promote the universality of secular human rights would be satisfied with a limited, which is to say legal, ban on polygamy: one that did not also denounce polygamy as always and everywhere morally unacceptable. Muslims could never accede to such a demand. The only thing that is absolutely universal in the Islamic worldview, in time and space and beyond, is the Divine. On a more practical, mundane and worldly level, a set of rights not primarily mandated from within the Islamic worldview cannot be universal. In Islamic law, universal values do exist but they are extremely few and certainly do not constitute the bulk of Islamic legal rulings. Insofar as they exist, they are necessarily religious and spiritual in origin. Conclusion Differing worldviews lead to different conclusions. Many within the Muslim world argue that rights are not ends in themselves but means to an end, and that end is the knowing of God, which is the purpose of all recommended and obligatory actions in Islam. No such proviso is made in rights discourse. The issue is not whether there can be metaphysical agreement, but whether these two worldviews can co-exist, instead of falling into war or civil conflict. There is, in other words, room for discussion. The ‘Seminar on Human Rights in Islam’ in 1980, for example, organised by the International Commission of Jurists, the University of Kuwait and the Union of Lawyers, reported that ‘the time has come to refute the idea that the initiation and continued development of the concept of human rights must be attributed exclusively to Western culture’. Many contributions indicated a willingness to accommodate and incorporate certain aspects of rights discourse into Islamic law, and to do so not so much because of external pressures, as through an Islamic worldview and justification. In discussion, it became clear that as far as these participants were concerned, the notion of human rights, though first elaborated in the West, existed in essence within Islam. This represents a very common thread within the Muslim world, and signifies, at the very least, a desire to engage. In 1968, a Sufi shaykh wrote a commentary on the Declaration, which, while describing the document as the UN’s ‘masterpiece’, suggested that ‘most of its provisions were already inherent in Islam’.11 The considerations advanced in this essay are congruent with discussions in other religious communities, many of which show a similar concern with the supposed

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universality of human rights. As we discussed earlier, the Islamic worldview might well be shared or at least sympathetically judged by all believers in an Absolute Divine Creator: devout and committed believers in a Divinity that does not share authority are logically in a quandary otherwise. The proponents of rights discourse cannot ignore that such a philosophical engagement must take place, and indeed they must be ready to entertain it; for without such engagement, any attempt at universalising the righteous concerns of those who argue for human rights will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Notes 1 See S. M. N. Al-Attas, Prolegomena: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Islam (Kuala Lumpur: International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, 1995). 2 Even though (it must be said) the modern concept of the nation-state does not find its roots in Islamic discourse, and is frequently in tension with how, philosophically, classical Islamic discourse has argued for people to be governed. 3 Some historians consider the third of the khulafa’ al-rashidun the progenitor of the Ummayyad dynasty. This is technically true as he was of the same family as the later rulers called ‘Ummayyads’. But ‘Uthman bin Affan’s reign is usually counted by Muslim historians as part of the khulafa al-rashidun. 4 For a contemporary reflection on the relationship between belief and reason, see Shayk Muhammad Afifi-al-Akiti and Hisham A. Hellyer, ‘The Negotiation of Modernity through Tradition in Contemporary Muslim Intellectual Discourse: The NeoGhazalian, Attasian Perspective’, in Wan Daud (ed.), Knowledge, Language, Thought and the Civilization of Islam; Essays in Honor of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (Kuala Lumpur: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 2010), pp. 119–34. 5 Al-Attas, Prolegomena, pp. 43–4, citing the classical Arabic dictionary of Jamal al-Din Muhammad ibn Mandhur, Lisan al-‘Arab (Beirut: Dar Sadir and Dar Beyrut, 1968, 15 vols). 6 See Al-Attas, Prolegomena, and S. M. N. Al-Attas, Islam and Secularism ([1974] reprint Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1993). 7 Much of this section relies on Al-Akiti and Hellyer ‘The Negotiation of Modernity’. 8 Mohammad H. Fadel, ‘The Challenge of Human Rights’, Seasons Journal, 5, 1 (spring 2008), 59–80. 9 See Robert Traer, Faith in Human Rights: Support in Religious Traditions for a Global Struggle (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991). 10 Fadel, ‘The Challenge of Human Rights’. 11 See Traer, Faith in Human Rights, p. 120.

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Response to Hisham A. Hellyer Chris Miller

If I heard a voice from the sky announce that lying was good, I would not lie. (attributed to Ali, the fourth caliph)

Hisham Hellyer’s analysis goes to the heart of the matter. Indeed, one of the titles suggested for this volume (rejected as excessively tendentious) was ‘Revelation and Rights’. In ‘human rights discourse’, sections of the Islam community have seen nothing more than another form of cultural invasion. Prepared for such incursions by invasions quite unmetaphorical, they are anxious to assert an independence that should never have been questioned in the first place. Dr Hellyer therefore sets out the conditions under which ‘rights’ might be acceptable in Islam. This is a necessary proceeding. But it is, by its nature, somewhat defensive and I believe a little more can be said. Indeed, I believe that little stands between Islam and human rights other than the envenomed history of the two imperialisms, Christian and Islamic. That may, of course, prove no minor obstacle, especially when Western imperialism remains on a flood tide. The objection that neither religious adjective should be used to describe imperialism is one that I am very willing to accommodate, for as I shall go on to say, the political has been known to cloak itself in religious colours. The unbeliever scrutinising the precepts of religion sometimes finds the prejudices of a ruling (or victimised) class mounted on a metaphysical pedestal. That this was so of the apartheid doctrines of the Dutch Reformed Church of Africa is by now uncontroversial; if I suggest that the rulings of certain religions (Christianity offers a clear example) concerning the need for women to obey men come into the same category, I enter more controversial territory. Dr Hellyer tells us that within Islam polygamy could never be decried as unethical or immoral in itself. As he also points out, since polygamy is only permitted under Islamic law, it could also be proscribed under Islamic law if public interest required this. The concern that Islam takes with the dignity of women might, in modern urban conditions, afford strong arguments for this. The example of

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slavery, taken up by Dr Hellyer and Afifi-al-Akiti in OAL 2006, offers an example of how such a change might occur.1 Shari’a provided for the existence of slavery but tended toward emancipation; the outlawing of slavery in Shari’a occurred in some degree as a reaction to Western pressure but could, I think, never have occurred if the moral arguments concerning slavery were not so clear. No one would wish to be a slave. Human rights have a similar moral urgency. Amnesty of course opposes the death penalty, which is prescribed for certain crimes under the hudud laws. But what is said about slavery applies to those laws too in some measure. The tendency within the Koran is to counsel mercy in such cases and make very high evidentiary demands before they can be enforced. As Abou El Fadl tells us, for ‘most of Islamic history, the hudud penalties have had a very limited impact on the socio-cultural practices of Muslims’.2 There would therefore seem to be scope for arguing for a very widespread application of mercy by the rulers of Islamic states in which they are applied (which is by no means all such states). Dr Hellyer also says, ‘secular notions of how people should be governed have become entrenched in all Muslim countries and communities’. I believe that this could be put in a different way. Many of the laws governing Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Iran have nothing secular about them (one could turn to the laws of certain states of the United States for Christian examples of similar kind).3 But the important point might be that the countries listed are all nation states and that the secular administrative functions that they perform (or fail to perform) are needed in modern life. The conditions of modern life are necessarily somewhat at odds with the position of an ascendant faith in a group of tribes governed by one man supposed to have direct access to the word of God. Most of the decisions that have to be taken by a modern government concern secular matters. Dr Hellyer goes on to identify Iran as a theocracy, a point that he himself describes as controversial within Islamic tradition and that I would categorically deny. A ‘supreme religious authority’ is not the same as the Prophet and cannot be presumed infallible in the way that a Prophet (if revelation is to mean anything) must. Indeed, the history of Islam and the caliphates might be designed to illustrate the point that religious authority is invested in words rather than men and therefore primarily in texts. I have argued elsewhere that there is no such thing as a theocracy in the absence of direct rule by God.4 Anything less is rule by humans and on such rule there must be constraints. The history of these constraints is, of course, the history of politics. But that history is not and almost never has been a secular one. Politics is, as it were, the department of the ethics of government and a majority of the world’s population construes its ethics in terms of religion and revelation. The subjects on which that ethics is brought to bear are, however, for the most part secular. It is on the basis of that consideration that I would argue for the almost complete compatibility of human rights with Islam. I put the argument in that way because,

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as Dr Hellyer points out, the human rights era has been a short one and, I would add, as much honoured in the breach as in the observance. Human rights have enjoyed a brief flowering and been most consistently honoured in prosperous countries in which material needs (economic ‘rights’) have also been widely met. The implications of the economic rights specified in the Universal Declaration are radical; they imply world economic justice and are widely ignored. But in most places in the world, economic rights are a dead letter, a letter of credit with no signature appended. Man does not live by bread alone; but if bread is not forthcoming, people think about little else. The starving are likely to subordinate their freedom of speech to survival and a struggle for resources is not a convivial breeding-ground for human rights. By contrast with civic and economic rights, religion is as old as the human race and likely to prove coeval with it. If human rights are widely rejected on religious grounds, they are not long for this world. Even the most secular human rights activists would be wise to attempt to persuade believers to take the side of human rights. I can claim no originality in my argument for the compatibility of rights and Islam. Two strains in the Koran, that of humans as vice-regents of this world (khulafa’ fi al-ard) and the injunction against fasad fil al-ard (sometimes translated as ‘destroying the beauty of creation’) underpin my argument. These seem to me sufficient to bear the burden of human rights. In arguing this, I must emphasise how basic are the claims of human rights, a point perhaps made more easily by reversing the question and asking if anything in Islam enjoins torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment,5 arbitrary arrest, slavery, discrimination in law, restriction of free movement within the borders of each state, or the banning of peaceful assembly and association. It goes without saying that many of these things are nevertheless practised by states nominally and indeed ostentatiously Islamic – as they are by secular ones. When such Islamic states reject human rights, their motives have nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with identity politics. Because Islamic peoples have suffered from rather than practised imperialism since before the downfall of the Ottoman caliphate, because technological hegemony has shifted to the West and technology is secular by definition, because capitalism has become hegemonic and affected or overthrown traditional societies throughout the Islamic world, the rejection of human rights as a further Western import and a Trojan Horse of capitalist imperialism is sometimes welcomed by Muslims. They have always been confronted with Western actions incompatible with either human rights or Christian principles (we may compare the attitudes of the Crusaders and Saladin in their respective captures of Jerusalem) and now the West comes calling with moral advice: throw it back in their faces! Many of these Islamic states in any case owe their existence to Western imperialism and have adopted its habits. It was not Saddam Hussein who first thought of using poison gas on villagers in Iraq; Winston Churchill was particularly enthusiastic about the idea of gassing rebels from the air.6

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In our own time, when a state wishes to advertise itself as ostentatiously Islamic, the focus of its laws tends to be twofold: those relating to observation of the faith and those relating to sexual morals. Yet we know from the history of Islam that it has often been extremely tolerant of other faiths, as it was in Andalusia; that Christian heretics such as the Nestorians in the Middle East preferred Islamic rule to that of Byzantium, which was inclined to exact religious conformity vi et armis where Muslim rulers were happy to let the Christian heretics govern themselves as long as they kept the peace. Moreover, Muslims living in a non-Islamic state, so long as they are free to practise their faith, are expected to obey all the laws of that state that are compatible with Islamic beliefs. It is in the context of the military opposition between Christianity and Islam that apostasy became a sentence of death and in the context of the new wave of Western imperialism that the sentence has been revived. The laws on sexual morals in modern Islamic states are primarily political, I think: here is a chance to castigate the lax morals of the West and provide scapegoats that will distract the people from the inadequacies of the more secular departments of government. This is not to say that there will not be disagreements between human rights campaigners and Muslims over the status of women and gays. But in the absence of identity politics, such issues are largely cultural; Christianity and Judaism have similar quarrels with the ‘private’ requirements in the human rights culture and have made their own compromises. These compromises were arrived at after free and open discussion and it should be remembered that such debate has only very recently become possible in the West. It is not yet possible in many parts of Islam. The attitude of al-Musahibi has, says, Dr Hellyer, been transcended. But the truth is that for many puritan Muslims it has not. Today, textual discussion of the Koran (the tradition known as qirat) is widely reproved by the puritans of Islam, who nevertheless have a tendency to abrogate verses with which they disagree, a very drastic form of textual criticism in which interpretation alters the text.7 The puritans tend to believe that the Islamic scriptures alone prescribe all that a person needs to know and do in this world. This is a standard puritan reaction in any religion and tends to arise at moments when the religion is in need of reform and revival. We can compare the outbreak of Puritanism in Christianity, which was accompanied by such virulent sectarianism (many sects believing the others were damned) that it also gave rise to theories of tolerance. In Islam, the waves of Wahhabite and Salafi Puritanism have had the unfortunate effect of denying the wealth of Islamic law and theology, drawing only on certain strands and not infrequently damning other traditions as infidel. The West has contributed to this with its support for the nominally Wahhabite regime in Saudi Arabia, which has exported and subsidised a version of Islam that is simplified to the form of ignorance (and extremism).8 Moreover, Islamic study in the West has been invaded by Wahhabism because departments of Islamic law or theology are often financed by the Saudis, who have then sometimes called the

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tune. Thus Western negligence promotes the Islamic extremism of which it so often complains. Whenever the West also instigates or connives at the torture of Islamic dissidents in purportedly Islamic states, it exacerbates the situation and creates hardened enemies (or martyrs, depending on the country).9 When Dr Hellyer announces that ‘Certainty is available on the essentials of religion, without any confusion or debate over critical fundamentals’, I believe that he is, however indirectly, influenced by puritan interpretations of the Koran. The puritan tendency is generally toward literalism; moderate attitudes to revelation tend to take the form of symbolic interpretation. Symbolic interpretation of revealed texts is, in my view, inevitable because circumstances change. The Koran does not prescribe whether, for example, more money in the budget of a nation-state should be spent on motorways than on welfare. It prescribes the moral considerations that must be brought to bear on this practical problem. The fact that it is possible to bring moral considerations to bear on such a problem that do not (at least in the mind of one bringing the argument) derive from Islam is one reason why puritans tend to resort to literalism; for them, il n’y a pas de hors-texte (or shouldn’t be).10 The influence of moral reasoning is felt to be deleterious to the authority of revelation. They therefore tend to wish to repress such reasoning and the result is a sort of gangsterish theological repression racket. This is not the way in which useful debate proceeds. Nor is it generally helpful to consider politics in the light of access to the next world. We know that many hasty decisions of a morally dubious kind have been made in that way, in which zealots compete for extremes of purity and believe that God will sort out the mess retrospectively: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.11 That rights discourse has no stake in ‘supernatural or metaphysical realities’ is entirely in its favour. This is also its connection with democracy. The will of the people should not require interpretation. The puritans’ view of religion is that it is and should remain simple and monolithic. This is the version of Islam that makes headlines in the West. But it is not the whole of Islam nor can modern puritans endlessly declare their opponents, their predecessors and indeed anyone with whom they disagree kafirun.12 When Islamic communities have thrived in the past, their religion has been a broad church. If the onslaught of Western imperialism, under the more recent influence of that god of capitalism, oil, has understandably provoked a very fierce counter-wave of religiouslylabelled violence and moral condemnation, the West is (also) much to blame for the fact. The famously tolerant and serene Islam of the past may yet return with all the cultural beauties with which it was freighted. One way in which the West might promote this is by observing the human rights that it so likes to promote, not least by encouraging the spread of democracy throughout the Islamic world.13 Nothing could do more to promote religious tolerance than placing people’s political fate in their own hands. The stage is set in Iran for the people to reject an increasingly corrupt priestocracy – the equivalent of the Soviet apparatchiks. At that

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point, the moral validity of almost all the rights specified in the Universal Declaration will become more transparent and the question whether such moral considerations are alien transplants will be less urgent. At least to the extent that this is true in the West, Iranians may come to find it wrong that the state should torture or detain arbitrarily. They have found out that when a regime customarily engages in these activities, anyone may become its victim; this makes for unsatisfactory government, whether religious or secular. Notes 1 See Shayk Muhammad Afifi-al-Akiti and Dr H. A. Hellyer, ‘Response to Khaled Abou El Fadl’, in Chris Miller (ed.), ‘War on Terror’: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2006 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 224. 2 See Khaled Abou El Fadl, ‘Islam Law, Human Rights and Neo-Colonialism’, in Miller (ed.), ‘War on Terror’, p. 196. 3 One might specify Article 1 of the Saudi Arabian constitution www.servat.unibe.ch/ icl/sa00000_.html, the General Principles of the Iranian constitution www.iranonline. com/iran/iran-info/Government/constitution-1.html, Article 4 of the Sudanese constitution www.sudan.net/government/constitution/english.html. In the context of Christian fundamentalism, we might cite the 1999 decision by the Kansas Board of Education to delete all mention of evolution from the state’s science curriculum. 4 See Chris Miller, ‘Introduction’, in Chris Miller (ed.), The Dissident Word: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1995 (New York: Basic Books, 1996), V, pp. 17–19. 5 It may be worth mentioning that the punishment of stoning is nowhere mentioned in the Koran. 6 Though mustard gas was undoubtedly considered for anti-insurrectionary purposes in Iraq, the memo in which Churchill expresses his enthusiasm – ‘I am strongly in favour of using gas against uncivilised tribes’ – refers to tear gas, which is, he says, preferable to high explosives on the ground that its ‘good’ moral effect (on those who did not understand what was happening) would minimise casualties. It is not clear that either lethal or irritant gases were used in Iraq at this period; the technology was not available and Churchill was almost alone in attempting to sanction their use. See R. M. Douglas, ‘Did Britain Use Chemical Weapons in Mandatory Iraq?’, Journal of Modern History, 81 (December 2009), 857–87. 7 See, for example, Abid Ullah Jan, ‘The Limits of Tolerance’, in Joshua Cohen and Ian Lague (eds), Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Place of Tolerance in Islamic Law (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), p. 47: ‘The provision of verse 5:69 … is abrogated by verse 3:85.’ 8 See especially the chapter ‘The Rise of the Early Puritans’, in Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wresting Islam from the Extremists (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), pp. 45–94. 9 ‘If you send a prisoner to Jordan you get a better interrogation. If you send a prisoner, for instance, to Egypt, you will probably never see him again, the same way with Syria.’ Thus Robert Baer, a CIA case-officer in the Middle East, in interview for BBC File on Four, 17 January 2005. Cited in Stephen Grey: Ghost Plane. The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Rendition Programme (London: C. Hurst & Co, 2006), p. 36.

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10 The phrase is that of Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp. 227–9. 11 ‘Kill them: The Lord Knows His Own.’ These words are attributed by the Cistercian writer Caesarius of Heisterbach to Arnaud Amaury (Arnaud Amalric), seventh abbot of Citeaux and Papal Legate at the siege of the Cathar citadel of Béziers in 1209. On Amaury’s account, 20,000 people died in the capture of the city by the AntiAlbigensian Crusaders. 12. Takfir, the ‘excommunication’ of other Muslims, in particular declaring them kafirun or unbelievers, has sometimes been the equivalent of a death sentence. The Wahhabis exploited this practice to justify a number of atrocities in the nineteenth century. 13 It is easy for Muslims to denounce ‘rights discourse’ as hypocritical while the West continues to support despotic governments in Islamic countries and reacts to terrorism with a blithe disregard for its own human-rights commitments. ‘When the Islamic party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and won the election, you unleashed your collaborators in the Algerian army on them … a new lesson from the “American book of democracy” … your Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues annual reports containing statistics of those countries that violate Human Rights. However, all those values vanished when the mujahidin hit you [on 9/11] and you then implemented the methods of the same documented governments that you used to curse’, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, ed. Bruce Lawrence (New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 169, 170.

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5 Terror and religion1 Ronald Dworkin

Introduction The Oxford Amnesty Lectures have by now a longish and distinguished history. The topic that dominates discussion shifts year by year, as it should, reflecting contemporary urgency. Sometimes the focus falls on implementation: we know when human rights are being violated en masse, and we struggle to find ways to end the horror. Sometimes the focus is more theoretical: when new national constitutions or human rights covenants are proposed and debated, for example, we debate whether economic rights are properly counted among human rights. Just now the focus is on a large and fundamental issue that is both intensely practical and deeply, abstractly, theoretical. Where do human rights come from? The theoretical character of that very large question is obvious. Its practical importance rises from the deeply cross-cultural character of contemporary violence. We in the Western democracies appeal to human rights to justify our military policies: to justify the war we make on states we accuse of fomenting terrorism, for instance, or of groups or governments that we accuse of genocide or racial cleansing. I do not intend to discuss, here, whether or when our appeal to human rights is justified, or whether we, the democracies, are ourselves guilty of violations of the very rights we claim to defend: through torture in interrogation and through our detention policies in Guantanamo and elsewhere. I have discussed these issues at some length elsewhere. I shall focus instead on the problem raised just by our appeal to such rights. It is this: the existence and character of human rights are very far from common ground between us, the democracies, and those we accuse of violating those rights and offer to punish or kill in consequence. We accuse them of violating standards they do not accept. It is therefore of cardinal importance to consider the basis of our confidence in those rights. If we suppose, as a great many people who embrace human rights do suppose, that these rights have finally a religious source and base,

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then we must recognise that our appeal will only inflame those whose religious traditions and convictions are very different from our own, particularly those who believe that their religion commands the acts that we decry and punish. We must also confront a paradox in our values. We believe in religious tolerance as among the fundamental rights we are committed to protect, and we therefore think it violates people’s rights to force upon them religious doctrines and practices that they do not accept. But is not that exactly what we do when our invading armies march under a banner of human rights that we treat as a text from our religious heritage? The idea that causes these difficulties – that human rights have a religious foundation – is a very old one. Human rights are widely thought to descend from natural rights that in turn were supposed to be deliverances of natural law which in the central tradition was understood to be divine law. Thomas Jefferson may well have been an atheist – there is a dispute among historians about that – but he was only reporting received ideas and common rhetoric when he declared, in his Declaration of Independence for the United States, that it is self-evident that a human being is ‘endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. The religious origin of human rights is even more manifest in Islamic countries. Article 24 of the l990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights, for example, states that ‘All rights and freedoms mentioned in this statement are subject to the Islamic Shari’a,’ and Article 25 adds, ‘The Islamic Shari’a is the only source for the interpretation or explanation of each individual article of this statement.’ Certainly the idea that religion is the basis of moral truth is very much alive in the United States, and I suspect alive though less visibly elsewhere in dominantly Christian countries. George Romney, one of the two remaining serious candidates for the Republican nomination for the presidency at the time of writing, has said that he does not see how anyone could be genuinely moral who does not believe in God, and President Bush described the US invasion of Iraq as a Crusade. We are revisiting the twelfth century. It is therefore of practical as well as theoretical importance to consider whether this traditional idea, that human rights have a divine authority, is correct. We believe, most of us, that human beings enjoy certain rights just as human beings, rights that are independent of any political source, rights that exist prior to politics, and that act as moral trumps over politics. We must consider whether we have an adequate secular theoretical base for our belief so that we can avoid depending on religious authority for our conviction. Someone might attempt this while still holding to his conviction that religion remains the most important ground for human rights. That position would be in the spirit of John Rawls’s recommendation that liberalism be based on bracketing or suspending religious convictions to see what common ground could be found among those of different religions.2 I do not believe this to be an adequate strategy in the face of the difficulties I described, however,

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since those who reject human rights because they think their god has commanded them to act in a contrary way will not find a secular argument an eligible excuse for abandoning that religious duty. I shall argue a different and more radical position that I can now summarise, too crisply, in advance. The old tradition I described is in error. No divine authority can provide any basic support for human rights. On the contrary: the logic of argument runs the other way. We must assume the independent and logically prior existence of human rights in order to accept the idea of divine moral authority. Nor, therefore, can any divine authority cancel or abrogate human rights. I do not assume any particular position about the existence or character of a god or gods in making those apparently radical claims. I do not base my rejection of divine authority on atheism or any other form of skepticism. On the contrary I shall assume (though entirely for the purpose of the argument of this lecture) that a single anthropomorphic god, as conceived in traditional monotheistic religions, exists, has existed and will exist forever; that that god has created the universe and all forms of life in it; that he has in particular created human beings in his own image; that he is, moreover, an all-powerful creator and destroyer; and that he is, further, all-knowing and all foreseeing. Of course I know that many people who regard themselves as religious do not accept this traditional picture. They express their faith differently, if mysteriously and even unintelligibly, in declarations that the universe contains a higher force, or that it houses something bigger than we are, or that we can glimpse the divine nature only through a glass darkly and hence must not suppose an anthropomorphic god made in our image. But it will be easier for me to put the argument I intend if I use a much more traditional, indeed crude, cosmology as my vehicle. I hope it goes without saying that I do not mean to endorse this traditional view of the matter as my own. The autonomy of morality I included no moral or other evaluative features in my crude account of a god. I am supposing that a god is an all-powerful creator, but that is not to say that he is good or that he has moral authority, by which I mean that his commands impose genuine moral obligations. Of course the Abrahamic religions attribute both moral quality and authority, as well as omnipotence and omniscience to their god. But I want to separate these two components of an overall religious worldview. Religions, I suggest, have two distinguishable parts: a cosmological and an evaluative part. They provide answers to two kinds of questions. They answer the question of what is there, and why. How did the world and its parts, including life and human life, come to exist? What or who determines how the world will go? Is there a soul? If so, what happens to the soul after death? They also answer the question of what there should be, and why. What is right and what wrong? What is important

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and not important? What must I do with my life? When must I sacrifice it, for example? How must I treat other people? When, if ever, may or should I kill? Many theologians and some philosophers would find this distinction illegitimate. They think that goodness is an inherent quality of God, so that imagining his extraordinary power without also imagining his goodness is impossible. Indeed, some versions of the still robust ontological argument for a god’s existence include goodness as a necessary property. But the ancient Greek conception of the gods was very different; it shows at least the conceptual possibility of separating omnipotence from goodness, and that is all I am assuming. I do not question the widespread assumption, moreover, that the Abrahamic God, the all-powerful and omniscient supernatural creature who has created everything, really is good, and that his commands do have moral authority. I only ask what the source of his goodness and moral authority is. In spite of the widespread opinion I mentioned, these moral properties cannot follow directly from his omnipotence and omniscience. As David Hume pointed out, simply but irrefutably, we cannot derive an ought from an is.3 We can only defend a conclusion about what should be – about whether God’s commands should be obeyed, for instance – if we presuppose some further value premise on which we can rely. No catalog of a god’s massive creative achievement, which is only a catalog of what is, can on its own yield any judgment about his moral character or capacities. You may suppose that a god created the universe and you too, and that he is all-powerful and all-knowing. You may suppose that he issues commands like those of the ten commandments. But of course you can’t infer just from these facts that you have a moral obligation to obey his commands, or that his commands will conduce to a morally good state of affairs, or, indeed, a state of affairs desirable in any other way. You need an additional moral premise, we might say, to draw God’s moral authority from his power and knowledge. That is not to deny his moral authority. The prior principle we need might give us ample reason to think that a god has the power to create fresh moral reasons. Consider, if this is not too offensive, the analogy to government. Rulers are only legitimate if they satisfy certain independent procedural and substantive principles of legitimacy. If they do satisfy these principles, however, then they have the power to impose new moral obligations through legislation and in other ways. You see that I am taking sides in an ancient theological controversy. Is God good because he obeys moral laws, or are certain laws moral laws only because God commands them? This is sometimes presented as a dilemma. If God is bound by moral laws, he is not all-powerful; he cannot change what is finally right or wrong, good or bad. If on the other hand the commands he issues become commands of morality only because he has issued them, then it makes no more sense to say that he is good than to say (using H. L. A. Hart’s telling example) that the standard meter bar is exactly one meter long.4 The dilemma is a false one. A god’s power

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and knowledge alone, as I said, do not give him moral authority. No matter how powerful he is, just the fact that he has spoken, on its own, cannot make anything good or right. If what he commands does make something right or wrong, good or bad, then this must be in virtue of some moral principle that declares that what he has commanded meets the right procedural and substantive tests for moral authority. But that moral fact does not make a god in any way less powerful. We are assuming that your God, if you have one, does have full and complete normative power: he can create obligations by, for example, declaring his will on stone tablets. A creature’s normative power is not diminished when and just because that power depends on principles he has no will to violate. Quite the contrary: someone who purported to create his own moral authority, independently of any principle making that authority legitimate, would wholly fail. So the familiar idea, that God is the ultimate source of morality, is confused. The old churchmen who said that his goodness reflects some independent moral law or truth were right. But now we come to the crucial question for our overall argument. What could that independent moral law or truth be? Of course, we can’t just say that we know God has moral authority because some bible or other sacred book says so. Even if we accept that this book faithfully records a god’s word, we cannot accept that he has moral authority because he says he has. Let us therefore consider some more substantive answers to that question. A god of unlimited creative and destructive power enjoys stick-and-carrot power over all human beings. He can, as some think their God has, send fanatical murderers to New York and AIDS epidemics to Greenwich Village. He can also, in the view of many Oxford college chaplains, send a boat to the head of the river, or, in the views of other divines, provide a battalion of virgins in Heaven for suicide bombers. We might be tempted to base his moral authority on these powers of punishment and reward. But that would debase not confirm His authority. Threats and bribes do not supply legitimacy. True, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter out of a supposed moral duty, but this was a duty to his troops and subjects not to any god. Here is another unsatisfactory though much more popular answer. God has moral authority over us because he created us along with everything else. There is of course a longstanding argument, offered in different forms by John Locke and Karl Marx, that someone who creates something – a sculptor who mixes his labour with a marble block – owns what he has created, subject to certain conditions, and it is part of the concept of ownership that he who owns property has authority, though limited, over what happens to that property. But it would seem grotesque to draw some analogy that suggests that creators own the people they create. We may hope to improve the argument by supposing that people who have been created owe some kind of duty of gratitude to their creators. Children owe duties to their parents, and these include, at least for a time, some limited obligation to do what their parents

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direct. We outgrow that obligation: duties of obedience shift to duties of care. But in any case the power of parents does not include the power of moral legislation: they cannot create valid new principles of right and wrong by fiat. If God has that kind of moral authority, it must be in virtue of some different principle from Locke’s. One last suggestion. Perhaps we do not need, after all, any principle in virtue of which a god has moral authority over us. Perhaps it is enough to say that his authority is just a moral fact we perceive or intuit as an act of faith. That would not be to lapse back into the tautology that whatever God does is by definition good. We concede that God’s goodness is substantive not by definition, but insist that we can perceive or intuit his moral authority directly, as a brute moral fact, just as many people insist that they perceive or intuit his existence and power as brute facts of cosmology. This claim neglects, however, a crucial difference between the two domains I distinguished: of fact and value. A god’s existence and achievements, if any god does exist, are matters of fact, albeit rather special and exotic fact. Any god’s moral authority, if this exists, is a matter of value. Claims of fact can be barely true. There can be two worlds now different in absolutely nothing except that some natural fact holds in one but not in the other. We can imagine two universes identical in every respect except one: that in one universe there is water on a particular planet but no water on the parallel planet in the other. The claim that there is water on that planet in the first world is not true in virtue of any other contemporary fact about that world: it is just true. The world of value is different: nothing is barely true there. If something is right or wrong, it is so in virtue of a principle that ramifies across a whole terrain of morality. It can’t be just a bare moral fact we can perceive or intuit that genocide is wrong except on Tuesdays. That can’t be true unless some background moral principle makes days of the week relevant to moral valence, and then the consequences of that principle would be vast. We may be ignorant of the principle in virtue of which an omnipotent and omniscient being has moral authority over us. But if we believe that he does have moral authority, we can’t deny that some principled account of that authority can, in principle, be constructed. So we have work to do, and a fresh start is necessary. So far I have been considering arguments for a god’s moral authority that begin in some fact that makes a god unique: his power to impose punishments or grant favors, his role as creator of the universe, or the special epistemic power of faith. We need a very different argument: an argument that focuses not on the uniqueness of some supernatural creature but on the general conditions of moral authority, conditions that hold even in more mundane contexts of power. One crucial and nearly self-evident condition is this: no one has moral authority over a group of other persons unless he exercises that authority with an equal concern for all its members, unless, that is, he treats the fate of each as equally important. We see that principle at work in the idea of political legitimacy. Political rulers claim moral authority: they claim the

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power to impose fresh moral obligations on those subject to their dominion through legislation and decree. But we do not recognise that moral authority – we treat rulers as tyrants with only naked power – unless the government of these rulers is legitimate, and we do not treat government as legitimate unless it treats those over whom it claims that moral authority with equal concern. If we claim for our God a moral authority over all peoples, then we must suppose an equal divine concern for all peoples. The idea popular in some religions, that their God cares only or mainly for subscribers to that religion, or for the particular ethnic stock of its faithful, subverts the assumption of his catholic moral authority. A partisan god can be a moral authority only for his partisans. It is controversial, of course, what acts or decrees demonstrate an equal concern for all, or what equal concern requires by way of moral edict. But these questions cannot be answered by an appeal to a god’s authority. We cannot say, without absurd circularity, that equal concern for infidels permits torturing them into the true faith because that is what a god has commanded, for example. That begs the question whether a god who issues such a command has moral authority. We must first decide what equal concern requires, as a moral issue, before we can decide whether the putative commands of a putative god have moral authority. Once again the analogy to government is useful. Government that is legitimate has the moral authority to create fresh obligations: it can be true that we have a moral obligation to pay our taxes only because a legitimate government has decreed those taxes. But a government can’t make itself legitimate by decree. From equal concern to human rights The traditional view – that a theory of human rights can be drawn from religious commitment – is wrong. That claim mistakes the direction of argument: in fact a theory of divine authority must be drawn from a theory of human rights. We take the first step in defending that claim once we realise that no one has moral authority unless he meets the condition of equal concern I just described. But that is only the first step, because we must try to expand that condition into a more general theory of human rights. A general theory of rights must explain what a human right is, and must explain this in such a way as to provide guidance in identifying particular human rights. Many arguments about human rights begin in what we might call a legal fact: they call attention to the text of important national and international documents like the United States Constitution, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the European Convention on Human Rights, or the Human Rights Act of this country. These documents stipulate that particular rights are to be treated as human rights, and those stipulations have varying types and degrees of legal force. But they must all be seen as attempts, often spoiled by political compromise, to

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capture something more basic than the law of human rights, which is the underlying moral facts of human rights: the moral facts that the various charters and conventions should aim to capture. A general theory of human rights must be a moral theory not a legal analysis. I described such a theory in my recent book: Is Democracy Possible Here?, and I offer a much fuller account, with the necessary philosophical background, in my forthcoming book, tentatively titled Truth for Hedgehogs. My argument begins with a conception of human dignity. This consists in two principles. First, every human life matters in the following way. It matters, and matters objectively, whether that life succeeds or fails. Second, each person has an inalienable responsibility to realise the objective potential value of his or her life, and it is part of that responsibility to identify what kind of life would realise that value. These are the conditions of human dignity. Someone who does not embrace them in the way he lives lacks self-respect. I will not attempt to repeat or defend that theory of human rights in this lecture. But it is important to my thesis that this account can be defended without relying on divine authority. I said, earlier, that a god’s moral authority depends on an assumption: that his commands respect the requirements of equal concern for all those over whom he exercises dominion. If I am right, that means that his authority depends on his respect for those two principles. He is in the same position, in that respect, as terrestrial political authorities. He will have his own view about the best interpretation of the two principles, and he will legislate accordingly. His commandments will embody his interpretation of those principles, and those who believe in his omniscience will take his commandments as true interpretation. This view of a god’s authority therefore has important interpretive implications. In many religions divine commands are obscure or set out in parable. The two principles offer a guide to their interpretation: since the faithful assume the moral authority of their god, they must interpret his commands so as to satisfy the two principles. We may think that systematic discrimination against women in employment, for example, is a violation of their human rights. The faithful of a religion that seems to call for such discrimination have a reason, in their faith in their god’s moral authority, for interpreting their religion so as to minimise that discrimination, or at least to administer in a way that shows respect rather than contempt for women. Rights to religion I have completed my defence of the claim you may have found radical: that we can defend a god’s moral authority over human beings only by assuming that human beings have human rights. I have been responding to the danger I identified at the outset: the danger that the idea of human rights will seem a parochial product of certain religions only, unfit for enforcement against those who reject religion or

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the particular religion that produced the particular rights enforced. If human rights can be defended without an appeal to divine authority – indeed, if they can only be defended that way – then we can separate rights from religion and press our demand that these rights be respected without fear of sectarian intolerance. Now I turn to a different but plainly connected subject that also falls within this series of Oxford Amnesty Lectures: not the place of religion as a putative ground of human rights but its place within the content of human rights. The familiar human rights documents I mentioned give an important place, as I have already suggested, to what we have come to call the free exercise of religion. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution forbids government to abridge that freedom. The Universal Declaration and the European Convention declare the right in almost identical terms: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.’ But the right to free choice in religion is very firmly denied in many political cultures: freedom of worship is effectively denied in certain Muslim countries, for example. It would therefore be appropriate for us to consider, now, whether freedom of religion can be defended as a fundamental human right given the account of human rights that I have just offered you, and, if so, what that defence suggests about the dimensions of that right. We in the West are broadly satisfied to recognise an expansive right of private worship. We do argue, particularly in the United States, about how far religion should figure in public life: we continue to debate about whether state schools should provide time for prayer, for example, and whether government may or should require that alternatives to Darwin’s account of evolution should be taught or mentioned in schools. But we do not doubt the fundamental idea that people should be free to worship as they choose, alone or in dedicated churches with others or not to worship at all without official penalty. In several Islamic nations, however, though Jews and Christians are allowed to worship, they are subject to disabilities that rank them as second-class citizens, and it is a crime in many of those nations for Muslims to convert to any other faith. What might we say on behalf of that kind of intolerance? We can, in fact, construct an apparently powerful argument in its favor. This begins in the majoritarian principle: when people disagree about important matters of conviction, preference or taste, it is only fair that the views of the majority of citizens should prevail. The majority may decide, for example, to impose zoning restrictions that enforce its aesthetic taste. Most citizens believe that the state’s role in religion is a matter of very great importance, and they also believe that the question which religions should be permitted is a crucial one. True, as I said, in Western countries a majority seems to prefer policies that do not discriminate for or against any particular religion or sect: those who want the state to play a role in promoting religion want it to endorse religion in some ecumenical monotheistic form. In other parts of the world a very great majority apparently prefers not only

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the establishment of a particular religion but also to deny free exercise of any minority faith. So the question arises: why isn’t the majority entitled to have its way in this matter as in so many others? It might seem tempting to answer: because religion is a private matter. My choice of where and how to pray, or what religious symbols to wear or what practices to observe does not affect your life, and you should have no say in my choice. Religion is a matter for individual decision; it is not a matter for the exercise of majority will. But this response is plainly too glib. One person’s religious practices do affect the lives of others, in a variety of ways. Some religions make everyone in the community responsible for the religious convictions and behaviour of everyone else. They command concern for the immortal souls of heretics and infidels and demand forced conversion. Or they threaten a community that harbors apostasy with destruction. Even setting these direct commands aside, people have selfish concern with the religion others are practising. They have as great an interest in religious zoning as in aesthetic zoning. It confirms their religious faith to have that faith embroidered into the public and legal life of the community. It makes it much easier for them to raise their children in their faith; they want a sense of sharing a faith on public occasions; they do not want the distraction of rival voices. So we need a better argument why religion is special if we wish to treat religion as a matter of individual rather than collective choice. Once, in Europe and the early United States, there was a critically important practical reason for making religion special. Religion tore nations apart, and tolerance seemed the only sensible policy. But this is no longer true. Religious freedom benefits mainly powerless minorities in the largely Christian West, who could not cause much trouble even if they were suppressed. In the Muslim world other religions are suppressed with no apparent civic risk at all. And, of course, even if we had good reasons of state for religious tolerance, this would not make freedom of religion a basic human right. It would make it only a wise policy choice. Can we justify making religion special through a kind of cost-benefit analysis? We might say: though it is true that the majority would be better off if it were allowed to dictate a uniform religious environment, the harm this would cause people forbidden to worship according to their convictions would be so great that it would swamp that advantage to the majority. Utilitarian arguments of that kind are always hostage to contingency. This argument makes tolerance depend on the fanaticism or the majority, the character of the minority’s beliefs, and the relative number of the two groups. Once again it offers a fragile policy argument for tolerance in some circumstances, but not a case for a fundamental human right. Can we find an argument for religious freedom rooted in the two principles of human dignity that I described? I said earlier that denying freedom of religious choice plainly outrages the second principle, which requires people to take a personal responsibility for their lives. Choosing a religion, or none, seems a crucial

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part of identifying value for and in one’s own life. But there is a difficulty here I ignored earlier: no political community can allow its members freedom to choose and act on all their convictions about value. It cannot allow individuals to choose for themselves whether and when the person or property of others should be respected, or what sum the right account of distributive justice requires them to pay in taxes. If we are to sustain our claim about religious freedom, then we must find some adequate way of distinguishing religious convictions, and the role these play in people’s lives, from these other convictions about what is right and wrong. Once again, we need to give up the idea that religion is special among human ideals. If we want to defend religious freedom as a human right, we must locate religion within a broader category of human values and ideals. Return to the second principle: the principle of special responsibility for creating value in one’s own life. The appeal – indeed the sense – of that principle depends on our success in defending a distinction between morality and ethics. To put the distinction briefly: ethics is about how it is good to live and morality is about what it is fair to do or have. The second principle relies on the distinction. It supposes that people have a personal responsibility for their own ethical decisions: their decisions about which ways to live, how best to redeem the importance of their lives, and hence a right not to have the ethical choices of others forced on their own lives. We can suppose that right to be objective: it can consistently be claimed by everyone. But the second principle cannot be understood as claiming a right in each person to decide what his community should enforce as fair. That right could not be made objective because morality divides resources among people. I could not consistently claim a right to decide my fair share for myself while recognising your right to define a fair share for yourself. But now notice an important consequence of the turn our argument has taken. In justifying a human right to free choice in religion, we have appealed to and embraced a much larger human right: a much more general right to independence in matters of ethical choice. We cannot justify free choice in religion if we suppose this to be a distinct, separate right holding for choice in supernatural deities but no other personal choice. We can only justify a right to free choice in religion, as traditionally understood, only by showing that specific freedom to be an application of that larger freedom of ethical independence. It follows from that larger right that we recognise a human right to choice in sexual behavior that respects the choices of others, to choose one’s own death in preference to unremitting suffering or sedation, and to choose whether to continue a pregnancy until a fetus has rights and interests of its own. Each of these rights must of course be explicated with some care. The right to take one’s own life must be defined with space for an acceptable form of paternalism, for example, and the right to choice in abortion must notice the point in embryonic development when a fetus does develop the consciousness needed to become a moral subject. That is just the beginning, but it is enough to

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show that many Western nations that claim an unimpeachable record in recognising religious freedom actually fall well short of recognising the freedom on which that depends. Conclusion I doubt there will be time for much of a summary. But these are the points I have tried to secure, now set out in reverse order. First, the right to freedom of choice in religion is indeed, as the basic Western documents claim, a fundamental human right. But this right is basic not because religion is special among human values, but precisely because it is not. The choice of religion – or the choice of no religion – is a right for a much more general reason that begins in the dignity of a human life and extends to all those choices, of which religion is only one, through which each of us acquits his responsibility to live well. Second, though free exercise of religion is a basic human right, religion cannot be the source or ground of human rights. Any religion that claims moral authority for a god must presuppose a conception of legitimate authority and the only sensible conception includes a requirement of equal concern for all that is the foundation of human rights. The argument for human rights does not travel through a religious understanding of the universe; on the contrary a religious understanding is defensible, if at all, only through the intellectually prior doctrine of human rights. My argument places religion in a larger context of value. But it does not denigrate religion, which has been a remarkable force for good as well as bad over human history. Though the bad may be more prominent in our minds right now, fixed by terror, history is too complex to allow that as the final word. My aim has rather been to place the case for human rights on a different plane. We needn’t rely on our own religion, leaving those of other faiths behind, when we argue for the innate rights of all human beings. We can argue not from what divides us but from what unites us. We all – Muslim, Jew or Christian, atheist or zealot – face the same inescapable challenge: the challenge of a life to lead, death to face, and dignity to lose or redeem. Notes 1 Parts of this lecture appear, in modified form, in the book, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). [Notes have been kept to a bare explanatory minimum – ed.] 2 See John Rawls, ‘Fairness to Goodness’, Philosophical Review, 84 (October 1975), 536–54 – ed. 3 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature [1739], Book III, part I, section I – ed. 4 H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 106 – ed.

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Response to Ronald Dworkin John Tasioulas

I find myself in agreement with a great deal in Professor Dworkin’s elegant lecture. In particular, I agree with his main negative contention: that divine authority is not a credible foundation for human rights, largely for the reasons he gives – reasons which, as he rightly implies, find a responsive echo in the thought of philosophers such as St Thomas Aquinas. But I shall focus, instead, on Dworkin’s positive views regarding the nature and justification of human rights. Since these receive only a very compressed presentation towards the end of his lecture, I will also refer to the fuller treatment in his recently published book Is Democracy Possible Here?1 And I shall concentrate on points of disagreement, partly because that’s more entertaining, and partly because, as a philosopher, I know that’s what I’m expected to do. My comments will address two components of Dworkin’s account of human rights. First, the sketch he presented of a general moral theory of human rights. And, second, the case he outlined for a right to freedom of religion within that general framework. According to Dworkin, human rights demand that governments treat people with proper respect for their human dignity. Human dignity, in turn, is to be understood as consisting of two principles: (1) that people’s lives are of equal intrinsic worth: for any such life, it matters objectively whether it succeeds or fails; and (2) that each person has a special responsibility to realise the objective potential value of his or her life, which includes a responsibility to identify what kind of life would realise that value.2 How do we get from the two very general principles of human dignity to a list of concrete human rights of the kind to be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other such instruments? In his recent book, Dworkin argues that we can identify a core list of human rights – rights that must be respected by all governments, despite differences in circumstances and traditions – by asking the following question: Which acts of government are so obviously inconsistent with the two principles of dignity that they could not be justified by any intelligible conception of those principles? Acts that are inconsistent in this way are prohibited by human rights. As he puts it:

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These [human] rights forbid acts that could not be justified by any intelligible interpretation of the ideas that people’s lives are of equal intrinsic value and that they have a personal responsibility for their own lives. They are the concrete rights that human rights covenants and treaties try to identify.3

Notice that the test does not ask: which acts of government are obviously inconsistent with the two principles of dignity? Rather, the acts must be inconsistent with any ‘intelligible’ conception of those principles. But this ‘intelligibility test’, as I will call it, seems too weak. This is because ‘intelligible’ interpretations of human dignity presumably include deeply misguided ones. If so, Dworkin’s theory runs the risk of yielding an unduly meagre crop of human rights, especially when set against the more generous aspirations that have animated the human rights movement since 1945. An example may help bring this concern into sharper focus. Consider a highly traditional society that excludes women but not men from access to tertiary education or from holding important public offices. Does it violate a human right against non-discrimination on the grounds of sex? On Dworkin’s theory, the answer is hardly obvious. After all, the leaders of this society might protest that they are acting with due concern for the dignity of all its members, male and female. But their respect for the equal worth and personal responsibility of women is mediated by a sexist ideology that falsely, albeit intelligibly, ascribes to them different inherent capacities and aspirations from those it ascribes to men. Examples can be multiplied. Practices like capital punishment, forced marriage and female circumcision might well be justified by reference to a sincerely held, but merely ‘intelligible’, conception of human dignity. Indeed, it would be very hard to give a plausible explanation of how these objectionable practices emerged in the first place if such a justification did not exist. So, my question is: why should we identify human rights by the intelligibility test given that this threatens to short-change the aspirations of the contemporary human rights culture? One answer to this question is suggested by certain passages in Is Democracy Possible Here? in which Dworkin seems to endorse an idea that was, to my knowledge, first given prominence by John Rawls. This is the idea that human rights are essentially concerned with regulating intervention by one state against another. Specifically, they are those rights which, when severely and extensively violated, are capable of justifying forcible intervention by foreign powers in order to bring those violations to an end.4 Of course, the justification is only pro tanto and so may be defeated by competing considerations. Nevertheless, it is their role as triggers for intervention that differentiates human rights from the ampler list of constitutional or political rights that should be recognised by a liberal state. I call this the Coercive Intervention Account of human rights, or CIA for short – the acronym nicely brings out the resonance with a certain strand of US foreign policy. Now, if human rights are the triggers for forcible intervention, then the intelligibility test seems, at least initially, a plausible way of identifying them. But the

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CIA, as an account of the nature of human rights, is a radical innovation. It departs drastically from the orthodox understanding of human rights, according to which they are moral rights possessed by all human beings simply in virtue of their humanity. And the CIA has drastic practical implications. In Rawls’s hands, it leads to a considerably shorter list of human rights than can be gleaned from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other key human rights instruments. Rights to free speech, to non-discrimination on the grounds of sex and religion, to democratic political participation, to an adequate standard of living would not count as human rights because their extensive violation would probably not, in principle, justify coercive intervention against states violating them. But Dworkin, in his lecture, gives the impression that he would admit as human rights many of the rights that Rawls excludes. For example, it seems that he endorses a general right to nondiscrimination on grounds of religion, whereas Rawls only includes a narrower human right against religious persecution. It is not clear to me how he can be more generous in this respect than Rawls, if he also adopts the CIA. Someone might respond by saying that the problem I’ve identified is really no problem at all. After all, claims about the existence of human rights proliferate endlessly, threatening to debase the language of human rights. Doesn’t the CIA give us a measure of much-needed quality control? Certainly, the criterionless proliferation of human rights claims is a problem. But the cure prescribed by Rawls and Dworkin is grossly disproportionate. The CIA simply does not have a good fit with the tradition of human rights, the tradition that a compelling theory of human rights must seek to illuminate. And it conceptually ties the discourse of human rights – which finds favour among so many throughout the world today – to the principle of forcible intervention which, to put it mildly, neither enjoys widespread support nor has a track-record of great success. Of course, there’s nothing to stop philosophers like Rawls or Dworkin commandeering the notion of ‘human right’, turning it into a term of art with a technical role in their theories of intervention. But if that’s what they’re doing, then they are effectively changing the subject, as opposed to offering a theory of human rights in the ordinary understanding of the term. Let me go on to the question of justifying a human right to freedom of religion. Let’s assume that we’ve abandoned both the intelligibility test for human rights and the CIA. Instead, let’s say that human rights are those rights which do in fact flow from the principles of human dignity outlined by Dworkin. Can a human right to religious freedom be derived on this basis? Dworkin says in this lecture that ‘[i]f we want to defend religious freedom as a human right, we must locate religion within a broader category of human values and ideals’. That strikes me as entirely correct. But now the question arises: in relation to which human values and ideals should we locate religion? Dworkin’s

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proposal is that the right should be defended on the basis of the principles of human dignity. It emanates from a more general right to ‘independence in matters of ethical choice’, in deciding how it is good for us to live (as opposed to what we morally owe others). It follows from this proposal that we should not justify the human right to freedom of religion by appealing to religion as a distinctively important human good or value. My worry is that the succession of steps contemplated here – from the principles of human dignity – to a general right to free choice – to the more specific right of religious freedom – is rather too quick and precarious. This worry is shared with critics of human rights morality. On the basis of it, some of them even charge liberals with plucking so-called human rights out of thin air, uttering words like ‘dignity’, ‘autonomy’ or ‘responsibility’ as incantations to distract us from the fact that they are simply engaging in dogmatic assertion. Just to be clear: I don’t dispute that what Dworkin calls responsibility, or what I would call autonomy, has a central role in justifying the human right to freedom of religion. But I’m not confident that the naked appeal to responsibility is up to the task of justifying anything like a general human right to free ethical choice which in turn generates a right to religious freedom of the strong kind he has in mind. Responsibility only stands a chance of doing so if it operates in concert with some conception of the human good, of what makes life worth living, of all those things that Dworkin says belong to the category he terms ‘ethics’. Indeed, it seems to me that responsibility (or autonomy) itself is an important component of the good life.5 And in justifying a human right to religious freedom, one of the goods we should appeal to is the good of religion itself. I mean ‘religion’ in a very broad sense, the sense invoked by John Finnis when he lists religion among the basic human goods.6 According to this, an atheist can participate in the good of religion, insofar as his engagement with the ‘big’ questions of the nature of the universe and humanity’s place within it form part of what makes his life worth living. Another way of putting my point is as follows. It’s no accident that so many of the rights we find in key human rights documents – rights to work, to education, to family life, to rest and leisure, to democratic political participation – are rights to engage in activities that are potentially life-enhancing for those who engage in them. Conversely, for all the problems of proliferation, it is equally no accident that human rights documents are not bristling with rights to drink alcohol in public, use pornography, walk on one’s hands or wear silly clothes. That the former activities are potential sources of great value is part of the reason they merit the stringent protection afforded by human rights. By contrast, I’m doubtful that such rights can take root and flourish in the stony ground of human dignity mapped out by Dworkin. Just as Dworkin claims that God’s authority must presuppose human rights, I claim that the generative powers of human dignity with respect to human rights presuppose an account of the human good.

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Given the scepticism that human rights are apt to arouse, not only in non-Western societies but also among adherents of certain influential Western traditions of ethical and political thought, we need all the help we can get in defending them. We need to rely, in particular, on a fairly detailed picture of the human good. When we try to sketch this picture, we may well discover that one of those goods is religion, taken in the broad sense I have indicated. It too must play an important role in justifying a human right to freedom of religion. Dworkin concludes his lecture by suggesting that grounding human rights in a conception of the good life is needlessly divisive given the extent of cross-cultural disagreement on that very topic. But it is highly debatable whether what makes life go well attracts greater controversy than many of the moral judgments about human dignity (e.g. that it justifies a right to abortion) Dworkin is prepared to make. In any case, I doubt that the avoidance of controversial views is a consideration that plays a role at the fundamental level of the very justification of human rights. It seems more likely that it bears on the formidably complex practical issue of their implementation in particular times and places. Of course, that is a distinction Dworkin’s theory will not easily admit, because the CIA takes a certain mode of enforcement as definitive of the nature of human rights. But we have already found good reason not to succumb to the interpretation of human rights provided by the CIA. So, I began by promising you disagreement and perhaps I have tried too hard to find it. In any case, I can now summarise my disagreements with Professor Dworkin in the form of three slogans: INTELLIGIBILITY IS NOT ENOUGH. DOWN WITH THE CIA. NO HUMAN RIGHTS WITHOUT HUMAN GOODS.

Notes 1 R. M. Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 2 Ibid., p. 7. 3 Ibid., p. 36. 4 Dworkin writes: ‘When other governments violate what we take to be not only political but human rights … we at least contemplate the possibility of grave sanctions to try to stop those crimes’ (ibid., p. 34). 5 For such a ‘teleological’ conception of autonomy, and its deployment to underwrite human rights principles, see James Griffin, On Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 6 J. M. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 89–90.

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6 Can human rights accommodate pluralism? Chantal Mouffe

There are many ways to approach the topic selected for this year’s Oxford Amnesty Lectures. I have chosen to examine it from the following angle: Can human rights accommodate pluralism? I am especially interested in two questions: (1) Do human rights transcend cultural and religious differences? (2) What does the answer to this question imply for our understanding of democracy in a global context? I will begin by examining the supposedly universal relevance of the notion of human rights, a notion that lies at the heart of the Western conception of democracy. I will go on to consider how it is possible to reformulate that notion in a way that will make it compatible with a pluralist perspective. The point of departure for my reflections is this: as several theorists have pointed out, there is something very problematic about the idea of ‘human rights’ as it is usually understood, that is, as a cultural invariant that should be accepted by all cultures. This problem arises because human rights are presented as being both universally valid and uniquely European in origin. An important consequence of this formulation is that the spread of human rights is generally seen as requiring the adoption by other societies of the Western model of liberal democracy. It is further asserted that this can only occur when accompanied by a process of secularisation. Most contemporary political theory – leaving aside the reality of Western politics – asserts that Western liberal democracy is the necessary framework for the implementation of human rights. Liberal democracy is presented as the ‘good regime’, the ‘just regime’, the only legitimate one. Indeed a great deal of liberal democratic theory aims at proving that it is the kind of regime that would be chosen by rational individuals in idealised conditions like the ‘veil of ignorance’ (Rawls) or the ‘ideal speech situation’ (Habermas). The dominant view, found in many different currents of political theory, asserts that moral progress requires the acceptance of the Western model of liberal democracy because it is the only possible shell for the implementation of human rights. It is interesting to note that such views are found not only among those who

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belong to the universalist-rationalist camp but also among those who argue for a ‘contextualist’ approach. One example of the latter is Richard Rorty who, despite being an eloquent critique of Habermas’s brand of universalism and its search for ‘context-independent’ arguments to justify the superiority of liberal democracy, comes very close to Habermas when it comes to asserting this superiority. To be sure, there are important differences between them. Habermas believes that the universalisation of liberal democracy will take place through rational argument and that it requires arguments from trans-culturally valid premises, while Rorty makes a distinction between ‘universal validity’ and ‘universal reach.’ In his view, the universalisation of liberal democracy needs to be envisaged in this second mode since it will be effected not by rational argument but by persuasion and economic progress. According to Rorty, the universal adoption of liberal democracy will occur when people have more secure living conditions and share more of their beliefs and desires with others. He is adamant that, through economic growth and the right kind of ‘sentimental education’, it is possible to build a universal consensus around liberal democratic institutions. His disagreement with Habermas concerns the means by which this universal consensus will be reached, not whether it is possible to reach it; he never questions the superiority of the liberal way of life.1 Taking issue with both Habermas and Rorty, I want to challenge the idea that moral progress consists in the universalisation of Western liberal democracy with its specific understanding of human rights. I will argue in favour of a pluralist conception allowing us to make room not only for the pluralism of different cultures and ways of life but also for a plurality of ‘good’ political regimes. In my view, liberal democratic institutions and the Western language of human rights represent only one possible ‘political language game’ among others and they cannot claim to have a privileged relation to rationality. We should therefore accept the possibility of a plurality of legitimate answers to the question: what is a ‘good regime’? Let me clarify one point at once and pre-empt a standard objection. This pluralist approach does not entail relativism. This is not an ‘everything goes’ approach incapable of distinguishing among existing regimes. According to the pluralist perspective that I am advocating, some ethico-political conditions need to be fulfilled in order for a regime to qualify as just. The question of which requirements have to be met for a given political form of society to be accepted as a ‘good regime’ is of course a very big one and I do not intend to resolve it here. I will limit myself to giving some indications as to how this problem could be tackled. Panikkar: human rights as human dignity When we begin to inquire about the requirements that would need to be met by a ‘good’ regime, the idea of human rights may indeed play an important role, but on condition that it is reformulated in a way that permits a variety of interpretations.

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The need to acknowledge a multiplicity of formulations of human rights has been put forward by a variety of authors but I have found an important source of inspiration in the work of Raimundo Panikkar, whose insights I wish to bring to our discussion. In an article entitled ‘Is the notion of human rights a Western concept?’2 Panikkar argues that, in order to understand the meaning of human rights, it is necessary to scrutinise the function played by this notion in our culture. This will allow us to consider whether the function is fulfilled in different ways in other cultures. In other words, Panikkar urges us to enquire about the possibility of what he calls ‘homeomorphic’ equivalents, that is, functional equivalents of the notion of human rights. In Western culture, human rights are presented as the basic criteria for the recognition of human dignity and the necessary condition for a just social and political order. Therefore the question we need to ask is: do other cultures have different ways of envisaging the respect of human dignity? Once it is acknowledged that what is at stake in human rights is the dignity of the person, the possibility of envisaging the issue in different terms becomes evident. What Western culture calls ‘human rights’ is in fact a culturally specific form of asserting the dignity of the person and it is therefore very presumptuous to declare that it is the only possible one. Many theorists have pointed out how the formulation of dignity in terms of ‘rights’ depends on a form of moral theorising which, while appropriate for modern liberal individualism, can be inappropriate to the task of specifying the dignity of the person in other cultures. According to François Jullien, for instance, the idea of ‘rights’ privileges the freeing of the subject from its vital context and devalues its integration with a multiplicity of spheres of belonging. It is a defensive approach that relinquishes the religious dimension and presents the individual as absolute. Jullien notes that the concept of ‘rights of man’ finds no echo in the thought of classical India, in which man is not envisaged in isolation from the rest of the natural world. ‘Liberty’ may be the last word in European culture but for the Far East from India to China the important word is ‘harmony’.3 It is in the same line of thought that Panikkar illustrates how the concept of human rights relies on a well known set of presuppositions, all of which are distinctively Western, namely: there is a universal human nature that can be known by rational means; human nature is essentially different from and higher than the rest of reality; the individual has an absolute and irreducible dignity that must be defended against society and the state; the autonomy of that individual requires that society be organised in a non-hierarchical way, as a sum of free individuals. All those presuppositions, says Panikkar, are Western and liberal and as such distinguishable from other conceptions of human dignity in other cultures. For instance, there is no necessary overlap between the idea of the ‘person’ and the idea of the ‘individual’. The ‘individual’ is the way in which Western liberal discourse formulates the concept of the self. Other cultures envisage the self in different ways.

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Bikhu Parekh, for his part, has shown how non-liberal societies rest on a theory of overlapping selves: Those bound together by familial, kinship, religious or other ties do not see themselves as independent and self-contained ontological units involved in specific kinds of relationships with ‘others’, but rather as bearers of overlapping selves whose identities are constituted by and incapable of being defined in isolation from these relationships. For them individual and self are distinct and their boundaries do not coincide, so that naturally distinct individuals may or may not share their selves in common. Each individual is deeply implicated in the lives of those related to him and their interests, lives and life plans are inextricably interlinked and incapable of individuation.4

Many consequences stem from those considerations. One of the most important ones is that we have to recognise that the idea of ‘autonomy’, so central to Western liberal discourse and our understanding of human rights, does not have such a high priority in other cultures, where decision-making is less individualistic and more cooperative than in Western societies. This in no way signifies that those cultures are not concerned with the dignity of the person or the conditions for a just social order. They simply deal with those questions in a different way. This is why the search for homeomorphic equivalents is a necessary one. We should establish a crosscultural dialogue based on the acceptance that the notion of human rights as formulated in Western culture is one formulation among others of the idea of the dignity of the person. It is a very individualistic interpretation, specific to liberal culture and which cannot claim to be the only legitimate one. Sousa Santos’s mestiza conception To be sure, neither acknowledging the cultural specificity of the notion of human rights nor questioning their universal validity means that – to use Rorty’s distinction – we should necessarily deny their universal ‘reach’. In other words, this does not force us to reject the idea that they could become universally accepted. But in that case we need to be aware of the conditions that would have to be fulfilled for such a process to take place. It would, in fact, require that Western culture become the universal culture. Of course this is not impossible and there are many liberals – not least Rorty – who would rejoice in that course of events, since they believe in the superiority of the Western culture. They consider that European thought with its theory of human rights represents moral progress and for that reason should be accepted worldwide. This thesis has rightly been criticised for its Eurocentrism – since it is of course European thought that deems human rights a form of moral progress. Another view presents the universal character of human rights as the consequence of the fact that the Western way of life, linked to the joint development of science

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and capitalism, has finally managed to impose itself on the rest of the world and that all societies are now bound to accept the mode of thought that accompanies those transformations. In this case the link between human rights and the hegemony of the Western model is openly proclaimed. Many people are no doubt ready to celebrate Western hegemony along with its conception of human rights – although they might of course justify this hegemony on different grounds. But many others will see no cause for celebration in Western hegemony. In fact several thinkers have been calling our attention to the dangers that such a process of homogenisation would imply. One of them is the Portuguese theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos to whose work I will now turn because I find his ideas particularly fruitful for the pluralist approach that I am advocating. Sousa Santos argues that, as long as they are conceived as ‘universal’, human rights will always be an instrument of what he calls ‘globalization from above’, that is, something imposed by the West on the rest of the world. 5 And he warns us that, understood in that way, they might contribute to the clash of civilisations announced by Huntington. Taking his bearings from Panikkar, Sousa Santos also stresses the importance of looking for functional equivalents of the idea of human rights in other cultures. The very suggestion that human rights are universal in nature, he says, indicates their Western provenance; it is an index of a specific culture. The focus on universality is characteristic of Western culture and this goes some way to suggesting why human rights cannot be presented as culturally invariant. While critical of the dominant language of universalisation, Sousa Santos does not conclude that this is a reason for rejecting the idea of human rights. He believes that the notion can be used in positive ways. His main concern is to envisage how human rights could be put at the service of a progressive emancipatory politics. Acknowledging that human rights policies have often been at the service of the economic and geopolitical interests of the hegemonic capitalist states, Sousa Santos nevertheless recognises that the discourse of human rights has also been articulated in the defence of the oppressed. He draws our attention to a counterhegemonic human rights discourse and argues that, in order to be able to operate as a counter-hegemonic form of globalisation, human rights need to be reconceived as ‘multicultural’, that is, as allowing for different formulations suiting different cultures. He calls for another form of globalisation, a globalisation ‘from below’, which he proposes to call ‘cosmopolitan globalization’. To avoid any misunderstanding let me indicate straight away that Sousa Santos utilises the term ‘cosmopolitan’ in a manner which is very different from the conventional modern sense, where it is associated with rootless universalism and individualism, world citizenship and negation of territorial or cultural borders. For him ‘cosmopolitanism’ refers to crossborder solidarity among groups that are exploited and oppressed by (or excluded from) the hegemonic ‘globalization from above’. His main idea is that the top-down

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globalisation prevalent today does not exclude subordinated nation-states, regions, classes or social groups and their allies from organising trans-nationally in defence of perceived common interests and using for their own benefit the capacities for trans-national interaction created by the world-system. As examples of cosmopolitan activities he gives: South–South dialogues and organisations, new forms of labour internationalism, trans-national networks of women’s groups, indigenous peoples’ and human-rights organisations and so on. In his view, despite their heterogeneity, the various anti-globalisation movements are a good example of cosmopolitanism and he has been very active in them, being one of the founders of the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre. It is, I submit, crucial to realise that an important political struggle is taking place around the discourse of human rights, and this at multiple levels. There is of course a struggle between those who want to use it to impose the Western model on the rest of the world and those who resist such an imposition because they see it as a vehicle for Western imperialism. But there is also a struggle in the West between different formulations of those rights. As Fred Dallmayr reminds us: ‘[i]n the literature on human rights, it is customary to distinguish between three “generations” of rights: first, civil and political rights (anchored in modern Western individualism); next social and economic rights (sponsored chiefly by socialist movements); and finally, cultural and collective rights (championed mainly by non-Western and indigenous people)’.6 Some authors believe in the existence of a harmonious synthesis between all those different rights but many others, as Dallmayr notes, affirm that they are in conflict. For instance it is clear that the realisation of ‘second generation’ rights such as adequate housing and health care, requires a curtailment of ‘first generation’ rights like private property. Other problems arise with the integration of third generation rights because individual civil rights can easily enter in conflict with the preservation of cultural and collective claims. Even in the West, then, there is widespread debate about human rights, their definition and mode of implementation, and no ‘once and for all’ answers can be expected. This should, in turn, lead us to acknowledge cultural specificity and to accept the existence of different versions of human dignity, rather than invoking a dubious universalism. Different forms of democracy? Since such a strong link is generally made between the Western notion of human rights and the liberal democratic model, I should like, in the second part of this lecture, to examine some of the consequences of a pluralist approach for the question of democracy, placing particular emphasis on the role of religion. One of the issues I wish to tackle is this: how new or different forms of democracy can deal with religion in a way very different to that of the liberal democratic model. My

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claim is that a political theory that takes ‘value pluralism’ seriously in all its multiple dimensions needs to make room for the pluralism of cultures, ways of life and political regimes. This means that we should acknowledge not only the possibility of a variety of different approaches to ‘human rights’ but of a variety of forms of democracy. Societies that envisage human dignity in a way that differs from the Western understanding of human rights may also have a different way of envisaging the nature and role of democratic institutions. Let us return to an affirmation I made at the beginning of this presentation. You will remember that I asserted that the liberal democratic regime had to be envisaged as one possible political language game among others, with no privileged claim on rationality. This led me to the idea that there could be a plurality of answers to the question of the ‘good regime’. I also proposed that, on condition that they were reformulated in a pluralistic way, respect for ‘human rights’ (if we want to keep that term) could be seen as a necessary attribute of a good regime. It is in that context that I brought the ideas of Panikkar and Sousa Santos into my argument. Now, the conclusions that we have drawn concerning human rights cannot help but influence our understanding of democracy and in the light of them, we are bound to question the ‘universalisability’ of liberal democracy. As I have argued in The Democratic Paradox, liberal democracy yokes together two different traditions: on the one hand, liberalism with its emphasis on individual liberty and universal rights and on the other, democracy, which privileges the idea of equality and ‘rule by the people’, that is, popular sovereignty.7 This combination is not a necessary but a contingent one; it is the product of a given history. Indeed, the liberal democratic model, with its particular conception of human rights, is the expression of a specific cultural and historical context, in which, as it has often been pointed out, the Christian tradition has played a central role. That model of democracy is constitutive of our form of life and is certainly worthy of our allegiance but there is no reason to present it as the only legitimate way of organising human coexistence and try to impose it on the rest of the world. The kind of individualism dominant in Western societies is alien to many other cultures, whose traditions are informed by different values. Democracy understood as ‘rule by the people’ can therefore take other forms, in which for instance the value of community outweighs the idea of individual liberty. Before developing this point, there is an issue that I need to address in order to clarify my position. Can a plurality of understandings of human rights be accommodated within a liberal democratic regime? To put it more precisely, what constraints must we place on multiculturalism in order to ensure that it remains compatible with liberal democracy? I would answer that adopting a pluralistic approach that questions the privileged position usually granted to liberal democracy does not entail accepting legal pluralism. Conflicting principles of legitimacy cannot, in my view, be made to coexist inside a political association without

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putting its very existence into question. That is why I do not believe that in a liberal democratic regime pluralism requires allowing different communities to organise themselves according to their own laws, when those laws are in contradiction with the constitutional essentials. To acknowledge the existence of a plurality of legitimate answers to the question of the good regime does not imply asserting that those different regimes could coexist within a single political association. In the context of a liberal democratic political association, it is perfectly legitimate for the state to require allegiance from its citizens to the ethico-political principles of liberty and equality for all. These principles are embedded in its constitution and constitutive of the liberal democratic form of life; they are its ‘political grammar’. To be sure, pluralism is one of the central values of such a regime, but here we are dealing with another kind of pluralism, the liberal pluralism which celebrates the individual and asserts the priority of the right over the good. In my view, this liberal pluralism demands that we recognise the legitimacy of a multiplicity of different interpretations of those shared ethico-political principles. What is at stake is the multiplicity of ways in which liberal-democratic citizenship can be envisaged. But this kind of pluralism can only be exercised within certain limits and it cannot set itself up against the principles of the constitution. Of course, the constitutional framework itself can be the site of conflicting interpretations. Many important political struggles among competing conceptions of citizenship do in fact take place at that level. But what cannot be denied is the need for a juridical framework, with the limitations of pluralism that this necessarily entails. The next question concerns the role that religion should be allowed to play in a liberal democratic regime. One of the central tenets of such regimes is the separation of Church and State – which does not, of course, mean (as we in Britain know better than anyone) that the separation is fully realised in existing liberal democracies. That separation permits the existence of a regime of toleration where the state tolerates a multiplicity of religious groups and forces these groups to tolerate one another. Some liberals believe that this regime of toleration should be defended on the basis of the supposedly neutral character of the liberal state. I disagree. To be sure, in order to respect individual liberty and pluralism, a liberal democratic state must be agnostic in matters of religion and morality; but it cannot be agnostic about political values, since by definition it postulates certain ethico-political values as underpinning its legitimacy. Far from being based on a relativistic conception of the world, liberal democracy is the expression of specific values which inform a particular symbolic ordering of social relations. It is this symbolic ordering that defines its specificity as a regime. Toleration should therefore be justified on the ground that it is required by the values constitutive of the liberal democratic regime and the form of human coexistence that they inform. Those who do not share those values will of course claim that this is ‘liberal fundamentalism’ and they will see the institutions of liberal constitutionalism as a form

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of coercion. In my view this is unavoidable and the problem will never be solved by liberals stigmatising their opponents as ‘unreasonable’. This, by the way, is the reason why the agonistic model of democracy that I have been elaborating asserts that, with any pluralist approach, antagonism is inevitable. As a new political form of society, liberal pluralist democracy is characterised by a certain number of critical separations: between the public and the private, between Church and State, between civil law and religious law. It is these separations that have made possible the emergence of civil society as a distinct realm. But how exactly should we understand this separation between Church and State? In my view it does not require that religion should be relegated to the private sphere and that religious symbols should be excluded from the public sphere. As Michael Walzer has argued, what is really at stake in the separation between Church and State is the separation between religion and state power. This implies that the state must have the monopoly of legitimate violence and that religious associations should not be given any control over coercive power. Religious associations in a liberal democracy are voluntary associations and there is an important difference between our belonging to the state and our belonging to a religious group. According to some views, this entails a strict separation between religion and politics. But is this really the case? I do not think so. To speak of separation between Church and State is very different from speaking of the separation between religion and politics or of the separation between the public and the private. The problem lies in the fact that those three types of separation are sometimes presented as equivalent and mapping onto each other. Consequently the separation between Church and State is seen as implying the exclusion of all forms of religious expression from the public sphere. The tendency to identify politics with the state and the state with the public sphere has led to the mistaken idea that the separation between State and Church means the absolute relegation of religion to the private. I do not believe that such a view can be defended. As long as they act within constitutional limits, there is no reason why religious groups should not be able to intervene in the political arena to argue their cause. Indeed many democratic struggles have been informed by religious motives and the participation of religious groups has often proved essential in advancing the cause of social justice. We can now leave the terrain of liberal democracy to enquire about the ways in which the democratic idea can be inscribed into other cultural contexts. This means moving from the liberal understanding of pluralism, which deals with individual liberty, to another kind of pluralism, the pluralism to which I referred at the beginning and which implies recognising as legitimate other forms of political associations than liberal democracy. As I have already made clear, I am convinced that, if we are avoid Eurocentrism, we must relinquish the idea that Western modernity represents the only legitimate model of development and that liberal democracy has an exclusive claim on rationality.

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This takes us to the crucial issue of secularisation. Even in the West, there is a long-standing debate about the relation between democracy and the mode of existence of a secular society. As Jose Casanova has convincingly shown, an impasse has been reached in that debate between the European and the American approaches and the different ways in which they envisage the nature of a secular society and the link between secularism and modernity.8 On one side are the European sociologists who believe that the decline in the societal power of religious institutions and the decline in religious beliefs and practices among individuals are necessary components of the process of modernisation; on the other, the American sociologists of religion who reject the theory of secularisation because they do not see any decline in the religious beliefs and practices of the American people. What is really at stake in this debate is this: should secularisation be seen as a necessary feature of modernity? And should it be seen as a precondition for modern liberal democratic politics? I am going to leave this question aside. The issue that I want to tackle is a different one: even supposing we give an affirmative answer to this question in the context of Western (and more specifically European) democracy, does it follow that secularisation is a condition for all forms of democracy? Can we not envisage the possibility of democratic societies where that process has not taken place? Casanova asks: ‘Can the theory of secularization as a particular theory of historical development be dissociated from general theories of global modernization? Can there be a non-Western, non-secular modernity?’9 I would like to make this question even more specific: can there be a non-Western, non-secular modernity with a non-secular form of democracy? If, as many people assert, the European concept of secularisation is not particularly relevant for the United States, it is clear that it is even less relevant for other civilisations with very different modes of social structuration. What could be its relevance – for instance – to worldly religions like Confucianism or Taoism? As Casanova notes, their model of transcendence can hardly be called ‘religious’ and they do not have any ecclesiastical organisation. In a sense they have always been ‘worldly’ and do not need to undergo a process of secularisation. One could say, for instance, that China and the Confucian civilisational area were secular avant la lettre.10 The best way to avoid those pitfalls is to acknowledge the possibility of multiple modernities and to accept that the path followed by the West is not the only possible or legitimate one; that non-Western societies can have different trajectories befitting their cultural traditions and religions. The ‘multiple modernities’ approach has important consequences for the notion of democracy. Once it is granted that the set of institutions constitutive of liberal democracy – with its vocabulary of human rights – is the result of a contingent historical articulation in a specific cultural context, there is no reason to see it as the criterion of political modernity. A pluralist approach should therefore envisage the possibility of other forms of

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articulation of the democratic ideal of government by the people, articulations in which religion would have a different type of relation with politics. Towards a multipolar world order To follow this line of thought requires us to question the currently fashionable model of ‘cosmopolitan democracy’, predicated on the universalisation of the Western model, and to put forward a different conception of the world order, a conception that acknowledges value-pluralism with all its implications for politics. I am convinced that in the current situation we need to relinquish the delusions of the universalists. We need to listen to those who warn us about the dangers of the universalist-globalist discourse, in which human progress is defined as world unity based on global acceptance of the Western definition of human rights and on the dream of world-unification achieved by transcending the political, conflict and negativity. At a time when the United States is – under the pretence of a ‘true universalism’ – trying to impose its system and values on the rest of the world, the need for a multipolar world order is more pressing than ever. We should envisage the establishment of a pluralist world order where a number of big regional units could coexist, each with their different cultures and values, and where a plurality of understandings of ‘human rights’ and forms of democracy would be considered legitimate. At this stage in the process of globalisation I do not want to deny that we need a set of institutions to regulate international relations. But those institutions should allow for a significant degree of pluralism and should not require the existence of a single unified structure. A single unified structure would necessarily entail a centre that would be the only locus of sovereignty. In my view, this is a recipe for disaster. A pluralistic world order is the only way to avoid the predicted clash of civilisations. It is crucial to realise that the universalist approach contributes to this clash. By attempting to impose the Western conception of democracy as the only legitimate one on recalcitrant societies, it is bound to present those who do not accept this conception as ‘enemies’ of civilisation, thereby denying their right to maintain their culture and creating the conditions for a struggle between civilisations. It is only by acknowledging the possibility of a plurality of just forms of society and recognising that the liberal democratic model is only one form of democracy among others that conditions can be created for an ‘agonistic’ coexistence between different regional poles with their specific institutions. To be sure, this multipolar world order will not eliminate conflict but conflict is less likely to take violent forms in that world than in one that does not allow pluralism. There is a greater chance of humanity securing a long-lasting peace through some sort of equilibrium between regional units than through the imposition of a culturally specific

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world-order by a single hyper-power. If we are concerned with diversity, justice and democracy this is, I submit, how we should approach these issues. Notes 1 Those views are to be found (for example) in the following books: Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), and Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999). 2 Raimundo Panikkar, ‘Is the Notion of Human Rights a Western Concept?’, Diogenes, 30, 120 (December 1982), 81–2. 3 Francois Jullien, ‘Universels, les droits de l’homme?’, Le Monde Diplomatique (February 2008), 24–5. 4 Bikhu Parekh, ‘Decolonizing Liberalism’, in Aleksandras Shtromas (ed.), The End of ‘Isms’? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), p. 89. 5 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Towards a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition (New York/London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 337–42. 6 Fred Dallmayr, ‘“Asian Values” and Global Human Rights’, Philosophy East and West, 52 (April 2002), 182. 7 See Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London/New York: Verso, 2000). 8 José Casanova, ‘Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective’, Hedgehog Review, 8, 1–2 (spring/summer 2006), 7–22. 9 Ibid., 10. 10 Ibid., 13.

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Response to Chantal Mouffe Stuart White

The question is not merely whether the idea of ‘human rights’ can accommodate ‘pluralism’, but whether, or to what extent, it should. Chantal Mouffe claims that there is at present a dominant conception of human rights which is closely tied up with one conception of the legitimate polity, that of ‘liberal democracy’. The idea of human rights needs revision to accommodate a wider range of legitimate polities. There is no doubt that Mouffe is exploring a key problem for human rights theory. Moreover, she is not alone in arguing that a more appropriately pluralistic conception of human rights will require some revision to the established conception of what human rights consist in. This is, for example, also a notable (and controversial) feature of John Rawls’s account of human rights in his The Law of Peoples.1 However, Mouffe’s claim that conventional human rights doctrine rests on an objectionably parochial conception of (alleged) human interests is not sufficiently elaborated to be persuasive. Related to this, Mouffe’s own position remains worryingly vague on the limits of pluralism. In the comments that follow, I will begin by looking at how Mouffe handles the question of pluralism’s limits. I will then consider her rejection of ‘autonomy’ as a parochially Western value. Ambiguous universalism To begin with, we should note that the idea of human rights does imply some limit to (morally legitimate) pluralism. Mouffe tells us that there is something ‘very problematic’ about the idea of human rights ‘as a cultural invariant’. But, by definition, human rights – whatever these rights are – must in some significant sense be culturally invariant. That is, presumably, why they are human rights and not merely (say) ‘Western’ or ‘Asian’ rights. Mouffe might still be right to question whether a specific theory or conception of human rights has universal validity. But if one is using the language of human rights at all, one is, I think, committed logically to the existence of some ‘culturally invariant’ rights that are common to humans as

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humans. If one thinks there really are no culturally invariant rights, then one is rejecting the idea of human rights, not calling for a more pluralistic interpretation of the concept. Mouffe does not want to go this far. She says that her version of moral pluralism nevertheless holds that ‘some ethico-political conditions need to be fulfilled in order for a regime to qualify as just’. So she accepts some degree of moral universalism, i.e., that there are some standards of just treatment applicable to all societies. It would be interesting to know more about the content of this universalism; and about how its content compares to conventional conceptions of human rights. Mouffe sketches the beginning of an answer to this question in her discussion, drawing on the work of Raimundo Panikkar, of the concept of ‘dignity’. (She sometimes speaks of ‘human dignity’; at other times of the ‘dignity of the person’; and at others, simply of ‘dignity’.) Any ‘good’ polity must secure ‘dignity’ for its members. But there are lots of ways of securing this, Mouffe suggests, other than by the dominant conception of human rights. However, the notion of dignity, taken by itself, is far too endogenous to existing social systems and their supporting ideologies for it to provide the independent normative benchmark that moral universalism requires. As Kazuo Ishiguru reminds us in his novel, The Remains of the Day, ‘dignity’ can be understood to consist in knowing, and sticking loyally to, one’s place in a hierarchical social order.2 Those who try to step outside of their proper place jeopardise their dignity – and fail to show a proper respect for that of others (such as their notional superiors). Efforts to restrict them, to force them back into place, can accordingly be seen not as assaults on their (human) dignity, but as ways of defending their dignity and of those they fail to respect. In short, respect for dignity is perfectly compatible with grotesque social hierarchy and everyday brutality. ‘Dignity’ is not enough. Autonomy and the question of Western bias Mouffe’s anxiety about the universalism of conventional human rights talk is related, she says, ‘to the fact that human rights are presented as being both universally valid and uniquely European in their origin’. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Mouffe is correct to say that human rights – at least in the presently dominant conception of human rights – is an idea of (only) European origin. Still, would this in itself be a cause for concern? To be sure, this would be a reason to be alert. We would be wise to consider, for example, whether the conception of human interests underpinning the idea of human rights isn’t too parochial – an issue we will return to below. But the fact that the idea has a specifically European origin need not be a problem in itself. One can (and should) look at it like this. The idea of human rights is an invention, like, say, the invention of the washing-machine. It is an invention occurring

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in a particular time and place which, put to use, can advance certain interests. The mere fact that it originates in a particular time and place, as the product of a particular culture, does not, by itself, have any implications for the relevance or applicability – in short, the utility – of this invention for other places. The question is: What can we do with this invention? Does it do good or bad things? One worry that Mouffe expresses is that this invention can be – is being – used to support some very bad things. It is used as part of the legitimating ideology of contemporary Western imperialism, for example as expressed in U.S. foreign policy and the so-called ‘War on Terror’. It all too easily rationalises a ‘clash of civilisations’ that could issue in catastrophe. But there are at least three replies to this. First, the fact that the idea of human rights features in one or more of the premises of arguments used to try to justify, say, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, does not necessarily mean that the idea actually does justify such interventions. That Saddam Hussein’s regime violated human rights is undeniable. But whether this justified the invasion of 2003 is another matter. One can readily hold to a conventional conception of human rights and also hold the view that rights violations justify external military interference only under very special circumstances. The concern to avoid a ‘clash of civilisations’ can enter directly into our thinking about just how to define this threshold for intervention (pushing us to set the threshold at a high level). Second, the idea of human rights can be – and is being – used to contest the very foreign policy approach which Mouffe is concerned about. If Guantanamo Bay isn’t a violation of human rights, what is? Third, while it is undeniable that the conventional idea of human rights is one that politicians can harness to give a semblance of moral credibility to morally dubious projects, the same is also true of the concept of ‘pluralism’. The demand that we respect ‘pluralism’ all too easily becomes a move in a rhetorical game in which authoritarian polities seek to evade the accountability that recourse to human rights threatens to impose on them. It would be intellectually lazy of me, however, to conclude that the potential and actual abuse of ‘pluralism’ in this way discredits the very idea. But then the same must apply to the conventional idea of human rights. Properly conceived, human rights are a tool to protect and advance basic human interests. The key question raised by Mouffe’s paper is whether the conception of interests implicit in the dominant conception of human rights is too culturally specific. Mouffe wonders in particular about the implicit emphasis in conventional human rights doctrine on individual ‘autonomy’ as a vital human interest: We have to recognise that the idea of ‘autonomy’, so central to Western liberal discourse, and our understanding of human rights, does not have such a high priority in other cultures, where decision-making is less individualistic and more cooperative than in Western societies.

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‘Autonomy’, in other words, is not something of universal value; or, at least, not universally of sufficient value to ground rights that all societies must respect. Mouffe’s claim is hard to assess because she does not elaborate the notion of ‘autonomy’ which she holds is of only culturally specific (Western), rather than of universal, (high) importance. To evaluate the claim, we will need to explore a little further what ‘autonomy’ might mean. One version of the idea would be this: the point of existence is to develop oneself as a unique, individual expression of human potential. Anything less than this is a kind of life failure. Some liberals – J. S. Mill perhaps in chapter 3 of On Liberty – have arguably held something like this viewpoint. And it does seem a sectarian viewpoint, one which overlooks the distinctive goods possible in leading a more tradition-bound life. However, this need not be what the liberal means by ‘autonomy’. Imagine that someone grows up in a tradition-bound community, perhaps one based on the precepts of a specific religion. As they reach maturity, they find that their gay or lesbian sexuality puts them at odds with the values of this community. Should they be free to leave if they want? Should they be free to practise their sexuality outside of the group? Consider another question: in growing up, should they have the opportunity to learn about other ways of life? Someone who believes in the value of ‘autonomy’ need not think that the individual ought to leave the community and strike out on their own. All he or she need think is that the option ought to be there, and that the individual ought to have the opportunity to learn something about alternatives as part of the background to being able to exercise this option. Note also that this notion of ‘autonomy’ does not imply a commitment to any dubious thesis about the ‘ontological’ independence of the individual. People are, quite obviously, born and raised in networks of social relationships, and they typically understand their own lives and selves as deeply implicated in these networks. But individuals can find themselves in conflict with elements of a given network (as in the maturing gay or lesbian sexuality case). And membership of one set of networks need not rule out knowledge of, and a self-chosen, gradual engagement with, other networks (with repercussions for how one participates in the original set of networks). ‘Autonomy’ is not a matter of living outside such social networks, but about the options one has within them. Now is ‘autonomy’ in this sense plausibly seen as something only of great importance to people of the cultural West? Mouffe has not made any case for this claim, and there is reason to doubt it. The conflict between, say, maturing gay or lesbian sexuality and established social norms strikes me as a conflict which can be, and frequently is, experienced in many parts of the world. The interest in freedom of exit from communities – often, of course, religious communities – with norms hostile to such sexualities strikes me as a correspondingly universal interest. And

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so too does the interest in knowing something about alternatives so that one can exercise the freedom to exit in an informed way. To be sure, much more would need to be said to show that these interests, while universal, are sufficiently important to be the focus of universal rights. But the above discussion shows, I think, that we need to take some care to disaggregate the notion of ‘autonomy’ in this context. Some of the concrete interests associated with the term are of universal importance; and further analysis might show that some of them do indeed ground universal rights claims. The price of pluralism ‘Pluralism’ is a nice word. It is suggestive of diversity; and diversity is, for many of us, aesthetically pleasing. However, as George Kateb has warned, we need to beware of a bad aestheticism when thinking about the relationship between pluralism and individual rights. We need always to ask: What is the price – in terms of concrete individual interests – of pluralism?3 Mouffe is right to explore the question of whether the conventional conception of human rights places excessive limits on pluralism. But if we are going to revise these limits, we had better have good reasons to do so, given the costs that extra pluralism could involve. On this key issue, Mouffe’s essay disappoints. It distances itself from moral relativism by means of an ambiguous notion of ‘dignity’, while at the same time distancing itself from conventional accounts of human rights by means of an indiscriminate repudiation of ‘autonomy’. In both cases, the concrete interests at stake (e.g., should people be free to practise gay or lesbian sexuality without fear of punishment?) and thus the real price of pluralism, go unexamined. Notes 1 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: MA, Harvard University Press, 1999). 2 Kazuo Ishiguru, The Remains of the Day (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). 3 George Kateb, ‘Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility’, in Patriotism and Other Mistakes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 117–49.

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7 Symposium: Freedom of belief, freedom from belief

7.1 The tolerance policy: way out or compromise? Asma Jahangir It is an honour and a privilege to be invited to speak at the Oxford Amnesty Lectures. Amnesty International has been a longstanding friend of human-rights defenders everywhere. In Pakistan the protection it extended to us kept our spirits up. Oxford University, too, has a special significance for Pakistan. It gave us our finest and most cherished politician – Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto. Her assassination traumatised our nation. We were – and still are – overwhelmed with grief. There is despair all around. Pakistan will never be same without her. Despite her shortcomings, she gave hope and strength to all marginalised sections of society. She believed in the politics of tolerance and lost her life at the hands of forces of intolerance. We live in difficult times. The values of freedom on which the mandate of Amnesty International was built are being undermined in many parts of the world. Governments of democratic systems have justified their flexible approach to human rights on the plea that short-term deviations are necessary to combat international terrorism. In reality these interim measures have undermined settled principles of human rights. In addition, totalitarian governments have resorted to large-scale human rights violations on the pretext of fighting against terrorism. I am here to say that intolerance cannot be wiped out through intolerant means, though I recognise that governments face a challenge in dealing with a complex situation. In my work as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, I continue to receive reports that make one shudder. Throughout the world individuals and groups are brutally abused simply because of their faith or belief. Some examples stand out, as the intensity of abuse is severely dehumanising. In Afghanistan, a man was arrested and tried on the criminal charge of conversion from Islam to Christianity in a Kabul court. According to the national law of Afghanistan, the penalty for conversion from Islam is the death sentence. In my

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latest communications report I urged the government to ensure compliance with article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which clearly states that the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion ‘includes the freedom [for this man] to change his religion or belief’. I didn’t receive a reply from the government but subsequent press reports indicate that he was freed after being deemed mentally unfit to stand trial on a charge of apostasy, and that in the meantime he has been granted asylum in Italy. In Eritrea, a prominent female Christian singer was arrested, held incommunicado and detained in a shipping container. Reportedly, she was put under pressure to sign a statement renouncing her faith and promising to cease her participation in any Christian activities in Eritrea. She has not been brought before a judge, despite the fact that the Eritrean Constitution requires that detainees appear before a judge within 48 hours of being arrested. In Indonesia, the Eden Community’s premises were surrounded by a group of Muslims who threatened to burn it down. In response, the Jakarta police took the leader of that community and her followers into custody under the pretext of protecting them. The leader was later formally charged with blasphemy and the Eden community has been forced to stop its religious activities. In Nepal, Dalit women were allegedly harassed by the Priest of a Temple and some local men when they attempted to worship on the occasion of a Hindu festival. They were eventually barred from entering the temple. The District Administrative Officer then issued a formal notice that Dalits have the right to enter and worship at public temples, and that those who choose to discriminate on the basis of caste will be prosecuted. However, the worship of Dalits was disrupted subsequently in a different temple in the same district. Finally, I raised with the government of the United States of America the situation of several former detainees of the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. According to the information received, they were victims of ill-treatment, such as sexual harassment during prayers as well as humiliation through desecration of the Holy Koran, which was deliberately designed to damage their religious beliefs. Religious intolerance is not limited to any region nor is it exclusively practised by followers of any single religion or belief. At the same time, societies with aspirations of pluralism discourage acts of religious intolerance. Dictatorial and autocratic regimes are known for spawning religious intolerance either directly or indirectly. In a number of cases religion is politicised and misused to the detriment of the rights of marginalised people – in particular women and religious minorities. There are examples where children, too, are not spared. The mandate that I hold calls for respect of all religions and beliefs. It does, however, have its limitations. Article 18 (3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides that ‘Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to

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protect public safety, order, health, or morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.’ In the context of the war on terrorism, ‘religious extremism’ or ‘fundamentalism’ amongst Muslims is often identified with terrorism. Religious extremism gives rise to bigotry and an intolerant society, but every shade of religious ‘extremism’ may not necessarily be linked to terrorism. During my missions I have noticed that head coverings of Muslim women have acquired a stigma of ‘extremism’. I have interviewed several Muslim women, who prefer to cover their heads more as a ritual than as a religious compulsion. Others have little say in the matter – peer pressure or the dictates of their community gives them little choice. There are those who believe that Islamic religion makes it mandatory for women to cover themselves in a particular manner, but they cannot be automatically painted as extremists and by no means have links to terrorism. There are several patterns, I have noticed, where Muslims are being stigmatised as terrorist in the aftermath of September the Eleventh. Some of the counterterrorism measures target Muslims unfairly. At the end of my country visit to the United Kingdom in June 2007, I noted that counter-terrorism laws have been introduced which are largely perceived to target the Muslim population. Furthermore, a discriminatory application of stop-and-search powers and religious profiling may ultimately prove to be counterproductive. Whilst I am conscious of the fact that States are obliged to take effective measures in combating terrorist attacks, I have received allegations of the abuse of counter-terrorism laws and in particular of provisions which make the failure to disclose information about acts of terrorism a criminal offence. The tolerance policy can neither afford to find an easy way out by resorting to the very norms of injustice, intolerance and discrimination employed by the forces of terrorism, nor can compromises be made that will eventually dilute the universal standards of human rights. Many governments swing from one end to the other: they bend in the face of intolerant public opinion, but do not hesitate to use disproportionate force or illegal means to settle scores against individuals suspected of terrorism. The international community must also resolve contentious issues on the question of freedom of religion or belief. All religions and beliefs must be respected. Governments cannot be selective but must only intervene if they are permitted to do so by applicable human rights standards. In this regard it should be noted that restrictions are allowed only in very exceptional cases. In particular the fact that article 18 (3) of the ICCPR mentions the protection of ‘fundamental rights and freedoms’ (emphasis added) of others as a ground for restriction indicates a stronger protection than for some other rights whose limitation clauses refer simply to the ‘rights and freedoms of others’ (e.g. articles 12, 21 and 22 of the ICCPR).

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Two of the most controversial issues that polarise societies at the international level are the freedom to change one’s religion and the tension between freedom of religion or belief and free expression. In my last report to the Human Rights Council I emphasised that the mandate has received numerous allegations that an individual’s freedom to adopt, change or renounce a religion or belief had been infringed whereas article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) clearly states the freedom to change his religion or belief. The international community will celebrate the UDHR’s sixtieth anniversary this year. However, the text of article 18 UDHR seems to be challenged by several states. On 14 December 2007, during the last session of the Human Rights Council, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) dissociated itself from the phrase ‘including the right to change one’s religion or belief’. In an explanation of the vote before the vote on behalf of the OIC, the Pakistani Ambassador stated that this phrase was not considered operative in its legal validity or effect by the OIC.1 The Saudi Arabian representative added that the draft resolution did not include certain essential points relating to certain religions and that a resolution that went against the Shari’a law could not be accepted by Saudi Arabia. Ultimately, resolution 6/37, which includes the reference to the ‘right to change one’s religion or belief’, was adopted by the Human Rights Council with 29 member states2 voting in favor, none against and 18 member states3 abstaining. The intersection of freedom of religion or belief with other human rights can be illustrated by the relationship to freedom of expression. In response to the Danish cartoons controversy, three mandate holders (on freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief and on racism) in a joint press statement encouraged states to promote the interrelated and indivisible nature of human rights and freedoms and to advocate the use of legal remedies as well as the pursuance of a peaceful dialogue on matters which go to the heart of all multicultural societies. Article 20 of the ICCPR provides that ‘any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law’. In this regard I would like to reiterate that any attempt to lower this relatively high threshold at the global level would not only shrink the frontiers of free expression, but also limit freedom of religion or belief itself. In my latest report to the General Assembly I have also addressed concerns raised by atheistic and non-theistic believers. Many of them argue that the very concept of ‘defamation of religions’ is flawed, since it is individuals – both believers and non-believers alike – who have rights, not religions. They furthermore assert that the lack of an objective definition of the term ‘defamation of religions’ makes the whole concept open to abuse. A recent UNESCO report emphasised that freedom of religion, thought, conscience and opinion ‘allows the same rights to atheists, agnostics and secular humanists to express their views, so an agreement which deals only with sacred beliefs would run counter to the fundamental principles of

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human rights and non-discrimination agreements’. I take the concerns of atheistic or non-theistic believers and religious minorities very seriously. In my reports I have emphasised that blasphemy laws and the concept of ‘defamation of religions’ can be counterproductive since they may create an atmosphere of intolerance or fear and ultimately might establish a normative hierarchy of beliefs. In 1995, when Benazir Bhutto was Prime Minister of Pakistan, I defended three Christian Pakistanis, who were accused of blasphemy. The penalty for it in Pakistan is mandatory death. All three, including a 14-year-old boy, denied all allegations. At the trial, the complainant made no direct allegation against the accused. There was no evidence of the expression of blasphemy allegedly used by any of the accused. Religious emotions can, however, be easily aroused. An angry crowd of religious zealots surrounded the trial court on every hearing calling for the death of the accused, the defense lawyers and the judges. Finally, the trial court relented to their call and convicted all three with a death sentence. It was terrifying. We appealed against the sentence. Bhutto’s government provided protection to the accused, the lawyers and the judges. Five senior lawyers of Pakistan were directly engaged by the court to assist it. Four of them argued that the death sentence was not maintainable. The state counsel too argued that death sentence be overturned. Finally, the accused were acquitted. Bhutto remained concerned and ensured that the accused, especially 14-year-old Salamat was sent abroad under heavy police protection. She could not though, save the presiding chief judge, who was subsequently murdered by religious militants. Nevertheless, the message of the government was clear – no one could take the law in their own hands in the name of religion. It was equally apparent, that governments alone cannot change intolerant acts carried out in the name of religion. A sincere effort has to be made by governments, local civil societies and the international community to devise comprehensive policies to build pluralistic societies, where all freedoms and diversity are respected. Policies, then, which do not discriminate nor provide impunity to those who abuse rights in the name of religion. We often speak of the root cause of religious intolerance. In fact there are several root causes and they vary from society to society. What we need is the capacity and vision of political and religious leaders to react to it in a balanced manner. In my opinion it is essential to detect early signs of developments which might lead to religious persecution or intolerant behavior. Balanced and proportionate responses are necessary because extreme measures only give rise to further extremism. 7.2 Religion and rights A. C. Grayling Every internationally agreed human rights convention contains a clause protecting freedom of belief and conscience. Quite legitimately, the chief interpretation of such

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a provision is that religious commitment and practice is to be safeguarded from prohibition and persecution. The implication that this requires a functionally secular socio-political setting, precluding situations where the votaries of one faith can have privileges that act to the detriment of votaries of another or others, is not often drawn, and indeed in many countries that are signatories to human rights instruments, the strength and influence of a majority religious group can sometimes weigh against the interests of members of minority religious groups. The phenomenon is too familiar in the contemporary world to require detailing. But one implication of the ‘freedom of belief and conscience’ provision that seems never to be drawn is that it can be held to imply that people of no religious commitment should be free from proselytisation (this, most controversially, might be said to apply to children), and from having the views and practices of religious groups imposed on them through the effects of lobbying on public policy matters, where the religious groups are given privileged and therefore unequal access to processes of public policy formation. This point is a key to understanding fully what a secular dispensation should be like, as the following aims to make clear. One good way into the centre of the case I seek to make is to point out that religious groupings and organisations, standard examples of which would be a church like the Roman Catholic Church, are self-constituted interest groups, whose members at very least in principle voluntarily belong to them (as entailed by the fact that they can choose to leave). They should accordingly see themselves, and be seen by society and government, as being on a par with other self-constituted interest groups such as political parties, trades unions, private associations and NGOs of all other kinds. In just the same way as such bodies, religious groups and organisations have every right to exist, to have their say, to lobby, to seek to influence policy and in general to make their contribution to the public debate on any matter and especially matters in which they have a special interest – in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, this might include lobbying against such practices as abortion, divorce, allowing women to take religious office and homosexual relations. One might regard their policies as illiberal and reactionary, yet still accept that they have a right to argue for them. But as self-constituted interest groups on a par with others such, they have no greater right than these others to be given more ear by government, or a louder voice in the public square, than they. And yet it is standardly the case that religious organisations enjoy these inflated privileges. Take the example of England (sic: not the United Kingdom as a whole), where the Church of England has less than 3 per cent of the population attending its churches on a regular weekly basis, but has 26 bishops entitled to sit in the House of Lords, officiates at every public ceremony, runs thousands of schools with funding from general taxation and where the public service broadcaster has a specialist religious broadcasting department that puts out at least four programmes a day every day of every week. This is what I

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mean by an ‘inflated’ presence in the public domain, and a resultingly disproportionate influence on public policy and public life. If any other organisation demanded and received the voice, presence and funding that the Church of England has in England, even with the double the numbers of active subscribers, it would not be given the time of day. That the reasons for the inflated presence of religious organisations in the public domain is the result of history does not excuse, though it explains, its continuance into the present. They are able to use their privileged and protected position in society to try (with decreasing success as polling data and census returns show in the case not only of the Church of England but churches everywhere in the West, including the United States) to maintain their base, for example in England by having religious observance and instruction in schools as a matter of statute. The Jesuit order long ago recognised that if it could instill religious sentiment in small children, the likelihood of retaining or recovering the resulting adults for the faith would have far greater success than attempting to recruit adults who do not have a previous inclination. All religions everywhere use every means at their disposal to continue to recruit through the minds of children, a task made easier by the central and funded position given to faith-based schools in England, and the virtual monopoly of primary education in madrassas in Pakistan and elsewhere. In the United States religious lobbies are powerful and correspondingly influential. They are well funded, with their own television and radio stations, educational establishments and permanent lobby groups in Washington. Benefiting to the full from the protection afforded them by the right to freedom of belief and conscience, they use these resources to impose as much as they can of their own views and preferences on the rest of society. For a recent US example: efforts by the Obama administration to introduce a national health insurance scheme only progressed through the House of Representatives following acceptance of a clause sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church stating that beneficiaries of such a scheme would not be able to have terminations of pregnancy paid for by it. Such examples raise a general difficulty about the way that powerful minorities and interest groups, whatever their ideological character, can control the direction of policy in democracies. Someone might say in response to the above points: surely an industrial or energy lobby, a trades union or a political minority party serving in a coalition, does just such things with whatever influence they can muster: how is that different from a church or religious group doing the same? The answer is that there would be no difference if the church or religious group existed on the same terms as trades unions and political parties. But religious groups, with charitable tax-exempt status, public funding for some of their activities, historically derived special standing and access to government, and direct access to influence of the young, do not exist on the same terms as other lobby groups. Their status and influence is disproportionate. And this is the nub of the problem.

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In describing this as a rights question, I seek to situate it in the context of debates about how the democratic order should work so that the regime of rights agreed by all involved in it can be fully realised. An idealisation of such an order would recognise two public pillars – a democratically and recurrently elected legislature with properly constituted and constrained powers, and an independent and properly constituted judiciary to oversee the rule of law. Government and the public bodies it variously sets up to carry out its programmes and responsibilities would be accountable to the legislature. All self-constituted private associations and bodies without exception would have the same status and rights as all others: they would depend for their funding wholly on donations or subscriptions of their members, and none of them would be given any special status or privileges in society on the basis of claims they made about themselves, their aims, activities or historical background. In particular, if any such bodies wished to set up schools to train infants into their ideology, and if this remained acceptable to the society as a whole, they should do it at their own private expense. Moreover, a clear distinction would need to be made between matters of conscience and morality dictated by the special tenets of a self-constituted organisation, and matters of general public policy. Let us suppose that a religious group regards homosexual acts as repugnant to its morality. What should be the attitude of society at large to efforts by it to deny the legal right of homosexuals to enjoy relationships with consenting partners? How do matters of morality that selectively trouble this or that conscience-group compared to laws relating to theft, fraud, rape, observance of contracts, and the like, which have a wholly general public significance? The answer, though it remains contested, is or ought to be clear enough: and it bears directly on the concept of the right to freedom from interference by, or imposition from, religious organisations in a liberal democracy. The situation in religion-dominated countries (for example, Saudi Arabia, where ‘religious police’ enforce strict observance of Shari’a) exemplifies the extreme opposite of a secular or functionally secular society where the society as a whole, while protecting religious commitment and practice within it, by parity of the right that enables this, should protect the whole society and its non-religious constituencies from the undue influence of religion. In short and in sum: there should be, and arguably there is by implication in the conventions protecting freedom of conscience and belief, a human right to freedom from attempts to impose the special teachings of a religion on those who do not share its outlook. 7.3 Freedom and human rights John Pritchard The relationship of religion and human rights is a contentious area but more straight-forward to a person of faith than to a secularist. There is a coherent fabric

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of religious thought and practice that unites the origin of human rights to contingent expressions of them and to their defence. However the argument is cumulative and deserves to be examined in its emerging steps. The starting point is the issue of universality. To the person of faith human rights are ineluctably rooted in religion. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an example of a human agreement on rights, but if that is all it is, why are the rights claimed to be universal and not just binding on those countries which are signatories to the Declaration? The answer of the person of faith is that states do not create basic rights but rather acknowledge them and that for their deeper origin we have to look to a metaphysical reality that encompasses all human beings, whatever the contingent social and political context may be. Grounding rights in a common humanity can only be a starting point. It is encouraging that people do come to agreements about what counts as human rights, but there is an inherent fragility about those rights because they are mutable and subjective. They change from culture to culture and from one epoch to another. Even cannibalism turns out to be acceptable in some contexts. The result is that when the argument is pressed, a point is reached where you have constructed what Jeremy Bentham called ‘nonsense on stilts’ – the phrase he used for natural rights. People of faith will want to find common cause with anyone who champions human rights but those rights are not woven unbidden into the fabric of the universe. Our European understanding of rights has its roots in Judaeo-Christian theology and the view that God is the giver and guarantor of the rights of every human being created in God’s image and likeness. A number of issues now come into focus. First, freedom of religion or belief is a litmus test for all human rights because it is about how we frame our lives at their most profound level. So when in Turkmenistan imams are forced to quote the ‘spiritual writings’ (so called) of the late President Niyazov,4 or when Pakistani Christians are casually accused of blasphemy, which carries a mandatory death sentence,5 or when in Uzbekistan the police arrest and beat men and women simply for the possession of Jehovah’s Witness literature;6 when such things happen (as they do, hundreds of times a day), we are all under threat. If we lose freedom of belief then, literally, nothing is sacred. Second, freedom of religion or belief is indivisible, so if one person does not have that freedom as a Christian, another person does not have that freedom as an atheist. A Christian would be persecuted in Soviet Russia; an atheist would be persecuted in the Spanish Inquisition. So believer and non-believer alike have a common interest in maintaining religious freedom. They may profoundly disagree with each other, but freedom of religion or belief is indivisible. In what theological convictions, however, does a believer ground his or her concern for human rights? A comparison of different faith positions on this question

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would take us beyond the range of this essay, so a single example must suffice. A Christian understanding of human rights takes at least three doctrines seriously. Firstly, creation: every person without exception is created in the image of God and is therefore of ultimate and unique value. Moreover, the chief attribute of the divine Giver is freedom. In Christian theology, God gives Creation freedom to be itself; from that freedom every other freedom flows, in particular the freedom to love and be loved. The goal of human freedom is the ground of a Christian concern for rights, much though it has been abused by Christian practice at different times. The second theological principle is that of incarnation. This is the doctrine that sees God inhabiting humanity in the person of Jesus Christ, and that gratuitous privilege gives an absolute guarantee of the unique value of every human being. What more can humanity want than to be the vehicle of God’s emergence? Human lives are as significant as that. The third doctrine that Christian faith looks to in the matter of human rights is the resurrection, which speaks of the possibility of a new creation, a new ordering of life, where justice, peace and freedom are enjoyed by everyone. The Old and New Testaments have a coherent social vision focusing on a God who longs for justice, who takes the side of the poor and who calls for a radical new understanding of human love, glimpsed in the man Jesus from Nazareth. Other theological doctrines are relevant to the Christian basis of human rights, but the three above are examples of the strong theological ground on which many people of faith stand. We can continue to draw out the implications of the synergy between religious belief and human rights by pointing to another clear link: religious belief has always provided a strong motivating energy for human rights of all kinds. Religious belief drives people out onto the field of play to contend with those who deny others their fundamental rights. At every meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod there are likely to be motions concerning some aspect of human rights. This may be to do with the protection of people with mental health problems, or supporting the rights of the urban poor to proper economic and social opportunity, or opposing the attenuation of the rights of citizens to be free of detention without trial, and much more. History demonstrates, moreover, that the protests of people of faith often lead to the founding of great charities. The founding fathers and mothers of the Samaritans, Amnesty International, Alcoholics Anonymous, Oxfam and countless other charities in Great Britain were Christian people; the visionaries who start hospices are nearly always people of faith; the founders of schools and hospitals all over the country (long before the state got involved) were inspired by religious convictions about the supreme value of every human person. In addition it can be demonstrated that many of Britain’s great political traditions were built on religious foundations – democracy on the Protestantism of the Puritans, civil disobedience and pacifism on Quaker beliefs,

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the Labour movement on Methodism, and more. British political life is hugely in their debt. Another point needs clarifying. When things go wrong in the field of human rights, it is generally inaccurate to ascribe the blame to religion. Bradford University Centre for Peace Studies produced a major report which concluded that of the thirty-one wars of the twentieth century only three were directly attributable to religion. Usually they were a toxic combination of politics and tribalism. Of the 150 million deaths in the wars of the twentieth century, 75 per cent were the result of four events – World Wars I and II, Stalin’s massacres in Russia and Mao’s in China. None of these conflicts had a major religious component. Indeed only 1 per cent of deaths came from conflicts that did have that component. Of course religion should not be the basis of any kind of war, given the title deeds and teaching of the founders, but human nature is frail and there is undoubtedly a distinction to be made between healthy religion and the unhealthy religion that is its distortion and of which there is too much. For example, few Christians would seek to defend the religious right in the United States giving so-called spiritual support to the war in Iraq. Nor would many Christians be supportive of those who are tearing apart the fabric of the Anglican Communion over issues of human sexuality. It remains true, however, that when things go wrong in the field of human rights it is generally a false move to make religion the main cause of the breach. This essay is clearly written by someone from within the Christian faith community. However, Christians often defend the human rights of those they deeply disagree with theologically – Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and others. Archbishop Rowan Williams’s foray into the place of Shari’a law within the British legal system is an example in point. There are profound theological reasons for that defence. If all human beings are made in the image of God and made to share God’s freedom, then all people of faith will be concerned for the integrity and health of every other religious community. Talk of human rights, however, is ultimately for a Christian only a partial answer to the question of a believer’s responsibility for his or her neighbour. A fundamental Christian concern is with human flourishing and the flourishing of communities. A Christian will make common cause with believer and unbeliever alike to protect and promote human rights. However, as we explored earlier, those rights are focused in the life and character of God. For a person of faith human rights always point beyond themselves and the mere fulfilment of rights; they point to a focal length in the rich reality of God. When the TV pundit Malcolm Muggeridge was preparing a film on Mother Teresa, she wrote to him saying, ‘Let’s do something beautiful for God’,7 and that captures the true spirit of Christian ethics, within which human rights play their part – but only a part. It is not sufficient merely to fulfil some obligation dutifully; the believer wants to do something beautiful for God.

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7.4 The right to believe Andrew Brown I’m extremely grateful for the chance to talk on this subject here because this is a lecture series which has over the years done a great deal for human rights and also illustrated very clearly their relationship with religion. In particular I’m very grateful here to Nick Humphrey, whom I like and whose work in other contexts I esteem, for giving one of the most shameful speeches ever made in the name of human rights as one of these talks ten years ago. By doing, quite inadvertently, he showed very clearly the true nature of the relationship between religious belief and human rights. There isn’t one. We’re all familiar with the evil things done by religious believers blinded by the love of God. I just want to say that hatred of God can blind you to human rights too; but Nick Humphrey, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris have all done so more eloquently than I could. Humphrey, in this very lecture series ten years ago, proposed that the state treat the transmission of religious belief as a form of child abuse: in other words, that it should be a crime to teach your children religious ideas of which he disapproves.8 This suggestion was later taken up by Richard Dawkins, in the God Delusion, where it was given an extra flavour by coming only fifteen pages after his passionate denunciation of a nineteenth-century Pope who supported the forcible baptism of a Jewish child and its removal from its parents to bring it up free of the contamination of Judaism. Because, you see, the truly rational state wouldn’t just do it to Jewish children because they’re Jewish, but to Catholic children because their parents are Catholic (remember that Dawkins considers religious belief more vile than what one might call conventional child abuse) and Muslims lest they grow up to be little Muslims too. And note that his only qualification to this theory is not that it might be wrong in principle to penalise parents for teaching their children nonsense, but that it might be difficult to decide what exactly constitutes pernicious nonsense. And then there is Sam Harris, one of the dimmer lights of the New Atheism, who spends quite a lot of one of his little books constructing an argument for the torture of Muslims.9 There have been states that treat religious believers like that, and I have talked to some of their victims. The Russian state used to exile Baptist parents to Siberia, and put their children in orphanages. The Chinese are still doing very similar things to the children of Muslims, Buddhists and even followers of Falun Gong. Against all these abuses of human rights, Amnesty quite rightly protests. Many of the protesters, as I am myself, are atheists. I don’t want to claim that atheism must lead to a totalitarian view of human rights. There’s no connection either way. I am making the much smaller, but quite irrefutable, point that atheism just as much as religious fervour, can coexist with utter contempt for human rights; other people’s human rights, in any case.

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Logically and psychologically, belief in human rights and religious belief are independent of one another. You can have both, either or none. But I want to make one slightly wider point too: that human rights and religious belief do share, and have to share, a certain attitude to hope, and truth. Both religions and human rights organisations can be considered in their sociological aspects as voluntary, idealistic movements. Sometimes they can conflict. Sometimes they can be practically the same thing – I look at my local Quaker meeting and I suspect that it is quite a small minority who are not also Amnesty members. I am interested in their area of overlap, which has to do with the idea of the sacred. The idea of the sacred sounds suspiciously religious, and perhaps in practice it can only be experienced as religious, but I want you to look at it as neutrally as possible as a term meaning ‘incomparably valuable’. In this sense, the king is sacred on a chessboard. When you’re programming a computer to play chess, you tell it that the king is worth more than every other piece on the board put together. Everything else will be sacrificed to defend it, or, of course, to destroy your opponent’s. This sacredness is not inherent of course, in a piece of wood or ivory. It is what John Searle would call a social reality. It arises from an agreement to treat a piece of wood as if it were a king. In fact you don’t need wood or even plastic. Political prisoners in the USSR would make their chess sets out of hoarded breadcrumbs and then they were playing with a king, and not with food. But the things which whole societies hold sacred are different from games, because you can’t step out of them. When the starving prisoners eat their chess pieces, they can no longer have a game of chess. But when tortured prisoners sign a confession, we don’t say that they have contracted out of their human rights. Human rights are stronger, or metaphysically more real, than a king at chess because we think they still persist even – perhaps especially – when all the players ignore them. So, of course, are gods, at least to believers. I don’t want to get into arguments about the metaphysical realities of either human rights or deities. I merely want to observe that both have a metaphysical dimension, if anything does. We want to say that they exist even when they are ignored, and even when no instances of their being can be observed. We who believe in them say that human rights are not abolished by their absence. Instead we say that they are violated. But an atheist, at least, has to conclude that both gods and rights exist only in virtue of our belief in them. We have to face the possibility that if we were not here to believe in them, and to act on our belief, our human rights would be as dead as the gods of Olympus. Atheists very commonly misunderstand religious people to the extent of supposing that their actions proceed from their conscious beliefs. But I don’t think that’s psychologically true, either of believers or of anyone else. To an extent at least as great, our beliefs proceed from our actions. We behave as if something were true

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and then we find we believe that it is true and finally work out the implications of that belief. This is such a good general rule that a good working definition of an intellectual is that they are an exception: someone who really does start from the implications of their beliefs and then acts in accordance. Even in university towns such people are not as common as you might suppose, though, of course, I do come from outside Cambridge. Perhaps things are different here. Obviously, I don’t want to say that human rights are a form of religion, or even a form of atheism. I believe profoundly that they are neither. But I also think that commitment to human rights involves – and must involve – some of the same aspects of belief as a commitment to organised religion must do. In particular, it demands that we act as if certain things existed whose existence is in fact unknowable. There is a picture that makes this point more clearly: one of the great pictures of the twentieth century. That young man standing with his arms outstretched in front of a tank as it rolls towards Tiananmen Square. We know nothing about him, and nothing about what happened after the picture was taken. But when we look at it, we believe his cause must triumph; and we are right – I think – to believe. 7.5 Out with ‘religion’: a novel framing of the religion debate Emma Cohen Current debates about the value of religious belief for society often turn on unexamined and parochial notions of what religion is and mistaken assumptions about the causes of religious thinking and behaviour. These debates are often further characterised by the tiresome lobbing back and forth of carefully picked fruits of research into religion’s positive or negative value for the individual, the community and humanity at large. Here, I proceed by a different approach. I argue that a careful understanding of what sort of thing religion is illuminates debate on whether religion is a bad or good thing, and indeed challenges the very framing of the problem. I will argue that ‘religion’, as it is commonly construed, is neither good nor bad for society. In the following paragraphs, I will introduce some of the conceptual and empirical issues that bear upon current debates, and this argument in particular, but that are rarely explicitly addressed. A brief examination of fundamental conceptual assumptions leads us to more empirical questions than we currently have answers for. Nevertheless, this reframing of the issues offers some fresh directions from which to take the debate forward on a surer footing, both conceptually and empirically. The core premise underlying the claim that religion is neither bad nor good for society is that religion, as the notion is commonly conceived in and beyond scholarly debates, is not the sort of entity that can cause anything. ‘Religion’ is a commonsense interpretive category, the boundaries of which are fuzzy, and the content of which is variable among individuals. Of course, fuzzy categories are

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ubiquitous, inevitable, and invaluable in intuitive, everyday thinking. Fuzzy categories can be thought of as mental managers that tirelessly, and quite imperceptibly, filter and sort the myriad events that bombard our perceptual organs at every moment. Although they are an integral component of everyday cognition, such categories do not always carve the world up in terms of the presence or absence of identifiable and distinctive material properties. Trees are a well-known case in point. Most of us would probably agree that the everyday category of ‘tree’ is quite useful in marking off a certain biological domain – oaks seem as categorically distinct from orchids as elephants seem different from mice. Evolutionary biological science, of course, informs us that the differences between trees and what we commonly identify as ‘plants’ or ‘shrubs’, and even the differences among animal species, are not accurately portrayed as taxonomic differences in kind, but as differences in degree as measured by genetic proximity. So, while such categories generally serve our everyday purposes well, they do not always provide a useful and accurate conceptual foundation from which to develop scientific theories about how the material world works. This is certainly true for ‘religion’. If we say that religion is bad or good for society, we have identified religion as having certain intrinsic properties, and even having causal properties, the effects of which are then categorised as ‘nasty’ or ‘nice’ (ideally, but probably never, according to precise, agreed-upon, measurable criteria). Religion, however, as it is common-sensically conceived, cannot be intrinsically bad or good for society because it is not intrinsically anything. This premise is readily overlooked in a society in which explicit religious/non-religious, and religious/ secular distinctions are commonly made; a society in which there are so-called religious people and non-religious people; religious rights; religious buildings; religious texts; religious leaders, religious beliefs, and so on. The assumption underlying such descriptions is that there is something distinctively and essentially ‘religious’ that we are more or less all agreed upon. Of course, the ‘we’ here could not refer to the many people around the world who have no term, and possibly no concept, that resembles our ‘religious’, never mind the notion of ‘religions’. Nevertheless, among those of us who have and use the term, the grounds and criteria upon which the religious/not religious distinction is drawn are notoriously difficult to establish and to justify (just ask any expert in comparative religion or religious studies). ‘Religion’, then, is not a discrete, singular, material entity. But, more importantly, because religion is not a single thing, explaining religion is not a matter of accounting for a single trait. Magic bullet explanations – that variously attempt to account for religion in terms of guilt repression, or as an emotional crutch, or as satisfying intellectual curiosity – are invariably insufficient and often parochial. A more fruitful explanatory strategy can develop from the recognition that features of human thinking and behaviour that we commonly think of as religious have many divergent properties, and therefore cannot be accounted for in terms of the same sets

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of underlying factors. On this basis, an account of the persistence and spread of afterlife beliefs, for example, may tell us very little about the patterns of sociopolitical arrangements and coalitional dynamics that recur across organised institutions. Let’s take, then, the notion of the afterlife. This historically persistent and cross-culturally widespread idea concerns the continuation of the person, or self, following the cessation of all biological states at death. What could account for the persistence and spread of such a concept? Within the growing field of scholarship known as the Cognitive Science of Religion, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary and developmental psychologists, have identified what appears to be an early emerging predisposition to conceive of certain psychological states as persisting after biological death. So, young children, including those not brought up in particularly ‘religious’ households, will readily judge that a person who has died will never again need to drink water but continues to love her mum; or they will judge that her ears no longer work, but that she can still hear the birds singing. And this set of intuitions persists into adulthood – even self-confessed extinctivists (i.e. people who state that death marks the cessation of all biological and psychological states), when presented with a story in which a protagonist meets an unexpected death, were more likely to judge that he will still know, think and believe things after he has died than they were to judge that he would need to eat or drink, or that he would feel sexually aroused again. What could account for such predispositions and biases? One account, offered by psychologist Paul Bloom, is that afterlife concepts are parasitical on a number of cognitive mechanisms that evolved to deal with problems that had nothing at all to do with afterlife. These notions are natural cognitive by-products of mental tools that evolved under natural selection to serve functions relating to the solving of a completely different set of problems that our ancestors regularly faced. So, for example, the cross-cultural success of the notion that we (or our memories, or soul or self) outlive our bodies may be attributable in part to the fact that humans have two sets of cognitive mechanisms that deal respectively, and quite separately, with causation in the psychological world and causation in the physical world. Wants, desires, thoughts, beliefs, preferences and so on are the stuff of psychological causation. Push, pull, cohesion, contact and so on are the causal forces of the physical world of bodies and objects. Human (and perhaps some other) beings are special in that they are simultaneously psychological agents and physical objects. But because the outputs of our ancient mechanisms are differently activated, and never fully or consistently achieve integration, the various physical, biological and mental properties are readily conceptualised as functioning autonomously, at least in some domains. In particular, epistemic states, such as the capacity to know and remember, are more readily conceptualised as floating free of physical and biological properties and constraints than psychobiological states, such as the capacities to

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feel hungry or sexually aroused. An interesting potential implication of these findings is that the very same mechanisms that support the acquisition of certain kinds of afterlife concepts may underpin the intuitive catchiness of the notion of brain transplants, or comedic body swaps, or reincarnation, or spirit possession, or fanciful musings that if I could only combine that person’s body with that person’s mind I’d have the perfect partner. That such concepts receive strong support from panhuman cognitive structures should certainly contribute to their persistence and spread throughout culture. Now, you may be thinking that explaining the existence and persistence of cross-culturally widespread beliefs to do with afterlife, souls, gods and so on is not of importance to the question of freedom of or from belief, but rather the important issue concerns whether or not these beliefs are true. But this example raises a number of issues that are highly relevant to current debates about religion, and to the present debate in particular. At this point these may be best presented as questions whose investigation will require a concerted effort from a range of human science disciplines. What is belief, that we might consider freedom thereof? What is religious belief? Is religious belief different from everyday belief, or is it fundamentally continuous with it? Do notions about afterlife, ghosts, gods, a designed world and a purposeful life really need to be taught in order to be acquired, or are they readily and easily generated outputs of our evolved cognitive architecture, requiring minimal or even no schooling? If much of what we call ‘religious belief’ is in this sense ‘natural’, how might one ever really be free from it? Are all such beliefs equally amenable to revision through rational argument, logic and evidence? Are there any such beliefs that confer adaptive advantages on those who hold them? Does the belief in the watchful dead, for example, inhibit selfish behaviour or encourage pro-social behaviour, as some scholars in the Cognitive Science of Religion have suggested? If any such causal correspondence could be empirically demonstrated, should it then follow that the presence and maintenance of this belief is a good thing for society? Perhaps with the exception of this final question, all of these issues are potentially empirically tractable. Continued systematic, scientific research is required into what kind of mind the human species is endowed with, and what kinds of concepts and beliefs the human mind, in its environment, is naturally predisposed to generate and acquire. We will then be in a better position to deliberate, adjudicate and educate on issues of belief, behaviour and society. In the meantime, while we await the data, I suggest that people on both sides of the fence begin to consider what freedom from ‘religion’ – freedom from that reified illusion – might entail for their arguments both for and against the place of religion in society. It is all too simple to state that ‘religion’, whatever that may be, is good or bad for society. It’s all too misleading to use ‘religion’ as an importantly shared property and potentially relevant measure of comparison between faith schools and jihad training camps.

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And it’s all too unreasonable to claim special privileges for the ‘religious’ in law, policy and political authority – whether religious sensibilities, beliefs, rights or people – merely by virtue of their ‘religiousness’. ‘Religious’ is a property that has been applied to everything from a piece of toast to Professor Richard Dawkins – needless to say, such a polysemous cultural concept presents obvious challenges for constructive dialogue and scientific inquiry. Notes 1 See the United Nations Human Rights Council report: A/HRC/6/SR.35, para. 53. 2 In favour (29): Angola, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mexico, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Peru, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay and Zambia. 3 Abstentions (18): Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa and Sri Lanka. 4 Such practices have diminished since the death in 2006 of President Niyazov, the author of Ruhnama or The Book of the Soul, but the book remains all-pervasive and is still compared with the Bible and the Koran. See the report on Turkmenistan of Forum 14 at www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1167 (accessed 18.12.08). 5 See www.claas.org.uk/bcase_detail.aspx?ID=211 (accessed 18.12.08) and the contribution of Asma Jahangir in this volume. 6 See www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1176 (accessed 18.12.08). 7 Something Beautiful for God became the title of Muggeridge’s account of Mother Teresa’s mission, published by Collins in 1971. 8 Nicholas Humphrey, ‘What shall we tell the children?’, in Wes Williams (ed.), The Values of Science: Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1997 (Oxford: Westview Press, 1998), pp. 58–79. This volume also contains essays by John Barrow, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Mary Midgley, George Monbiot and Jonathan Rée – ed. 9 See Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (London: The Free Press, 2005) – ed.

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Index

Notes which contain only bibliographical references are not indexed. Abou El Fadl, Khaled 98 Abraham 6 Absolute Truth (al-Haqq) 87 Adam 55 Adams, John 22, 26, 35n9 Afghanistan 5, 138 afterlife 153, 154 Agamemnon 108 Algeria 103n13 al-Ghazali, Muhammad 5, 91, 92 al-Harith al-Muhasibi 91, 92, 100 Allen, Nick 18 Allen, Richard 32, 33, 36n15, 39n45, 41 Amato, Joseph 52, 62n21 Amaury, Arnaud 103n11 American Civil War 33, 40 America/USA 2, 5, 6, 12, 17, 21–48, 51, 52, 68, 69, 72n2, 77, 83, 98, 103n13, 105, 110, 112, 113, 130, 131, 139, 144, 148 Amnesty International 3, 4, 8, 98, 138, 147 Anscombe, Elizabeth 53 anthropology 2, 11, 13, 15, 153 apartheid 7, 97 apostasy 5, 7, 100, 113, 139 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 61n15, 63n29, 66n44, 72n2 Aquinas, Thomas 40, 63n27, 64n31, 75, 89, 116 Aristotle 15 Asad, Talal 7, 58n1, 59n9, 62n22–3

autonomy 3, 56, 61n15, 67–71, 74, 76, 106, 119, 123, 134–7 Babel 49, 51, 57, 59n4, 67, 69, 71 Banneker, Benjamin 25, 37n24 Baptists 2, 26, 32, 42–4, 149 Barth, Karl 56, 65n39, 70 Bastian, Adolf 1 Bauman, Zygmunt 52 Benedict XVI 60n13, 83 Benezet, Anthony 26, 37n25, 40 Bentham Jeremy 146 Bhutto, Benazir 138, 142 Bible 2, 10, 40, 47n21, 55, 60n13, 64n32, 70, 71, 108 Blakemore, Colin 12, 13 Bloom, Paul 153 Blumenthal, David R. 86 Bowen, John 5, 18 Bowlin, John 63n28 Britain 1, 9, 21–48, 49, 84, 128, 147 Bryan, William Jennings 22, 35n7 Buddhism 8, 16, 60n12 Burke, Edmund 2, 43 Bush, G. W. 105 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights 105 Carrithers, Michael 10 Carter, Jay 60n12 Casanova, Jose 130 Catholic Social Teaching 76, 77

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Catholic University of America 83 Catholicism 5, 11, 12, 15, 27, 42, 73–84, 143 Central Tibetan Administration 3 Chaney, James 25, 36n21 China 4, 130, 148, 149 Christianity 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 16–18, 22, 24, 26, 31, 32, 40, 41, 43, 44, 50–2, 55, 56, 60n11–14, 62n21, 62n23, 66n41, 66n43, 67–84, 87, 97, 98, 100, 127, 147, 148 Church of England 17, 28, 29, 38n37, 46n13, 143, 144, 147, 148 Churchill, Winston 23, 98 Civil Rights Act 24, 25, 36n18–19, 36n21 Clapham Sect 28, 37n31, 38n32 Clarkson, John 30, 38n35 Clarkson, Thomas 29, 38n35, 47n21 Clay, Henry 44 Clinton, Bill 24 Clinton, Hillary 22, 24, 25 Cognitive Science of Religion 153, 154 Colley, Linda 27 Collinson, Patrick 9, 18 colonialism 11, 61n16, 92 communication 52–4, 64n30 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 79, 80, 83 conscience 73, 74, 83, 84, 86, 112, 139, 141–5 Constantinianism 51, 67, 68 conversation 16, 49, 53 cosmopolitanism 51, 52, 56, 59, 61n15, 66n44, 69, 70, 72n2, 125, 126, 131 Cromwell, Oliver 23, 35n4 Curtis, Adam 24 Dalai Lama 3, 4 Dalits 139 Dallmayr, Fred 126 Davis, David Brion 44 Dawkins, Richard 35, 149, 155 Declaration of Independence 78, 105 Declaration on Religious Freedom 75, 78, 79 democracy 2–4, 14, 74, 75, 78, 101, 103n13, 104, 118, 121, 122, 126–33, 138, 144, 145, 147

dignity 9, 10, 14, 15, 49, 50, 68, 70, 74–7, 79, 80, 84, 86, 97, 111, 113–20, 122–4, 126, 127, 134, 137 Dinka 10, 11, 12, 16 Dirksen, Everett 25, 36n19 Dorje Shugden 3, 4 Douglass, Frederick 22, 25, 35n6 Drescher, Seymour 28, 38n33 DuBois, Laurent 44, 46n15 Du Bois, W. E. B. 23, 24, 34 Dutch Reformed Church 7, 97 Early, Peter 31, 38n40 Egypt 93 Elton, G. R. 27 Emancipation Proclamation 44 English Civil War 35n4 Enlightenment 18, 51, 60n11–2, 62n21, 64n32, 66n44, 67, 68, 72, 74, 75 Equiano, Olaudah 32, 39n44 Erastus, Thomas 38n36 Eritrea 139 ethics 51–5, 61n14, 63n29, 70, 71, 76, 88, 94, 97, 98, 114, 119, 120, 122, 128, 134, 148 Europe 8, 9, 11, 41, 42, 50, 51, 58, 60n12–13, 68, 69, 110, 113, 121, 123, 124, 130, 134, 145 European Convention on Human Rights 110, 112 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 11 Fadel, Mohammad H. 94 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 18 Finley, Moses 17 Foucault, Michel 6, 62n18 Fox, Charles James 29 France 5, 6, 62n22 Franklin, Benjamin 36n17 French Revolution 3 Garretson, Freeborn 32 Garrison, William Lloyd 33, 39n47, 40, 45n6

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gay rights 84, 100, 136 George III 25, 30, 43 globalisation 125, 126, 131 God 106–11, 119, 148 Goodman, Andrew 25, 36n21 Grotius, Hugo 86 Guantanamo Bay 104, 135, 139 Habermas, Jürgen 121, 122 Hall, Basil 21 Hamer, Fannie Lou 25, 36n20 Hammond, James H. 47n21 Harlem Renaissance 23 Harris, Sam 149 Hart, H. L. A. 107 Hastrup, Kirsten 15, 16 Hickenlooper, Bourke 25, 36n18 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth 33 Hill, Christopher 27 Hinduism 8, 16 Hollenbach, David 76 homosexuality 6, 17, 79, 80, 143, 145 Hughes, Langston 23 humanism 52, 53, 62n18, 62n21, 62n23 Human Rights Act 110 Hume, David 107 Humphrey, Nicholas 149 Huntington, Samuel P. 74 Hussein, Saddam 98, 135 identity 27, 34, 42, 58, 61n14, 61n15, 64n33, 99, 100 imperialism 68 Indonesia 93, 139 Iran 88, 98, 101 Ishiguru, Kazuo 134 Islam 2, 5, 6–10, 12, 16, 24, 60n12, 61n16, 86–103, 105, 112, 128, 140, 141 Israel 7, 32, 55, 64n33 Jacobitism 27 Jefferson, Thomas 22, 25, 26, 30, 31, 35n8, 42, 44, 105

159

Jesuits 42, 75, 144 Jesus Christ 8, 43, 55–7, 64n33, 65n35–6, 65n40, 66n43, 77, 147 John Paul II 73, 74, 78, 79, 81 Johnson, Lyndon B. 24, 25, 36n21 John XXIII 74, 75, 78 Jones, Absalom 32 Judaism 7, 16, 17, 49, 51, 59n10, 87, 100, 149 Jullien, François 123 Kant, Immanuel 18, 59n10 Kateb, George 137 Kennedy, John F. 22 King, Martin Luther 24, 25, 34, 41 Koran 10, 98–101, 102n5, 139 Ku Klux Klan 25, 34, 36n16 Leo XIII 73, 75, 76, 78 liberalism 62n23, 74–7, 105, 127 Liberia 44 Lienhardt, Godfrey 11 Lilla, Mark 65n38 Lincoln, Abraham 2, 23, 35n10, 36n13, 40, 44 Locke, John 108 Luther, Martin 74 Macaulay, Zachary 28, 37n31, 38n35 Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice 29 marriage 6, 7, 79, 80, 84, 117 Marx, Karl 18, 108 Mauss, Marcel 10, 17, 18 McCabe, Herbert 8, 52–7, 63n27–9, 64n31, 65n35, 65n37, 65n39, 69, 70 McDonagh, Enda 50 Methodism 2, 24, 26, 27, 31, 32, 36n15, 37n27, 39n45, 43, 44, 148 Mill, John Stuart 61n15, 136 Mills, Martin 3, 4 missionaries 2, 9, 10, 42–4, 46n13, 49, 60n12 Mitchell, Jon 15 Monroe, James 44

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morality 8, 9, 12–16, 18, 42, 53–6, 70–81, 84, 106–11, 114, 119, 128, 134, 135, 137, 145 Moses 41, 43, 47 Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church 24, 32, 36n15, 39n45, 41 Mother Teresa 148 Muggeridge, Malcom 148 Murray, John Courtney 75, 76, 78 music 1, 13, 16, 32 Myalism 42 Nahdatul Ulama 93 Napoleon 29 nation-states 3–5, 7, 62n23, 96n2, 101, 126 natural law 89 Nepal 139 Nuer 10, 11 Obama, Barack 22, 23, 24, 34, 40 O’Donovan, Oliver 61n16, 64n33, 66n41 Organisation of the Islamic Conference 141 Otis, James 22, 35n5 Pakistan 93, 138, 141, 142, 146 Panikkar, Raimundo 122, 123, 125, 127, 134 Parekh, Bikhu 124 Paul VI 78 Perceval, Spencer 29 Phillips, Wendell 40 Pinckney, Charles 32, 38n42, 43 Pius XI 75 Pius XII 75, 78 pluralism 2, 15, 18, 30, 34, 35, 77, 121–37, 139, 142 Porteus, Beilby 29, 38n37 presumptive universalism 50, 67–70 Prophet 87, 90, 93, 94 Protestantism 9, 26, 147 Quakers 9, 26, 28, 32, 147, 150

Index

Ramadan, Tariq 5 Randolph, John 31, 38n40 Ratzinger, Joseph 60n13, 83 Rawls, John 14, 71, 105, 117, 118, 133 Reconstruction 24, 34, 36n16 Reid, Charles 76 rhetoric 1, 3, 22, 23, 25, 35, 105, 135 Ricoeur, Paul 11 Roman Empire 7, 17, 42 Romilly, Samuel 29, 38n38 Romney, George 105 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 36n11 Rorty, Richard 122, 124 Rush, Benjamin 26, 37n26 Russia 146, 148, 149 Sacks, Jonathan 17, 49, 50, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59n4–6, 64n30, 64n32, 71 salvation 18, 22, 26, 32, 34, 40 Santeria 42 Saudi Arabia 93, 94, 98, 100, 141, 145 Schwerner, Michael 25, 36n21 Scott, Walter 33 scriptures 1, 7, 8, 31, 32, 47n21, 66n43, 101 Searle, John 150 secular/secularism 3, 5, 6, 11, 25, 51, 56, 60n11, 61n16, 62n18, 62n22, 62n23, 67, 68, 72n3, 84, 88–91, 93, 95, 98–100, 102, 105, 106, 121, 130, 141, 143, 145, 152 Seminar on Human Rights in Islam 95 Seneca Falls Convention 35n6 sexuality 6, 17, 79, 80, 83, 84, 100, 114, 117, 118, 136, 137, 143, 145, 148 Shari’a law 5, 98, 105, 141, 145, 148 Sharp, Granville 28–30, 37n31, 38n34 Shi’ia 88 slavery 2, 3, 12, 17, 18, 21–48, 98, 99 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 46n13 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de 124, 125, 127 South Carolina Volunteers 33

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spirituals 2, 32–4, 43, 44 Spooner, Matthew 2 Sudan 10, 11, 12, 98 Sunni 88, 91, 93 Sutton, Robert 33 Swabians 18 symbols 1, 3, 101, 113, 128, 129 Taylor, Charles 60n14, 62n18, 65n40 terror 49, 50, 103n13, 104–20, 135, 138, 140 Thompson, E. P. 27 Thornton, Henry 27, 28, 38n32 Thornton, John 38n32 Tibetan Shugden controversy 3 Tierney, Brian 76 tribalism 49, 148 Troeltsch, Ernst 50, 51, 59n10, 60n12, 67–70 Trollope, Anthony 21 Trollope, Frances 21 Tuck, Richard 59n9 Turkey 93 Turkmenistan 146 Turner, Nat 31, 38n41, 41 Tylor, Sir Edward 1, 10 Uduk 12 UNESCO 141 Unitarians 33 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 15, 78, 86, 93–5, 99, 102, 110, 112, 116, 118, 139, 141, 146

161

universalism/universality 3, 8–11, 13, 15, 24, 49–51, 56, 58, 61n16, 62n23, 64n30, 66n42, 66n44, 67–72, 86–103, 121–7, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 146 USA, see America/USA Uzbekistan 146 Vatican II (Second Vatican Council) 74–7, 79, 84 Vesey, Denmark 31, 38n41, 41 Villey, Michel 75, 76 Volf, Miroslav 66n41 Voodoo 42 Walker, David 25, 33, 37n22, 41 Walzer, Michael 129 Watts, Isaac 32, 39n43 Weigel, George 74 Wesley, John 26, 37n27 Wheatley, Phyllis 25, 37n23 Whitefield, George 26, 37n28 Wilberforce, William 23, 27–9, 37n31, 38n35 William IV 31 William of Ockham 75, 76 Williams, Eric 27, 28, 37n30 Williams, Rowan 65n36, 148 Wilson, Richard 2, 15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 63n27, 63n28 women 6, 7, 17, 21, 30, 35n6, 80, 97, 100, 111, 117, 126, 139, 140, 143, 146 Yoder, John Howard 59n4