A Shared Vision? Human Rights and the Church
From: Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland 2000
The language of human rights - as used by NATO governments - is subservient to the ideology of war and violence, and allied to the 'culture of death' that is part of our world. In the process the impoverishment of a people, the terrorising of communities and the deaths of men and women - military and civilian - is legitimised in the name of what is effectively a moral crusade. Christians of all people should be aware of the perils and tragedies of pursuing a moral vision by violent means.
Finally, the human rights tradition presents serious difficulties for churches inasmuch as this tradition - when it addresses matters of religious freedom - does so on the basis of an understanding of religion that owes everything to liberalism's banishing of religion to the sphere of private belief and nothing to Christianity's understanding of itself as a life and world encompassing alternative society. Human rights legislation may protect a person's right to believe certain things, to persuade others to believe those things and to meet with others to talk about those things, but this conception of religion allows no public role for religious belief. So churches that run facilities that provide social services may find themselves under increasing pressure to remove any reference to the ethos of the establishment from job advertisements.9 If these jobs are being funded from the public purse there may be a case for advocating this. However, at another level this kind of pressure on churches demonstrates the inability of advocates of the rights culture to conceive of Christian belief having a public significance. The assumption is that anyone can do the job no matter what his or her sympathies and beliefs.
Religious rights will only be protected as long as religious believers agree not to upset the social arrangements of liberal societies. Those societies are the products of a gradual process the goal of which was to exclude religion from the public sphere except on its own terms. This has not changed.
The potential abuse of human rights
In 1989 Vaclav Havel gave a talk entitled 'Words on Words'. He reflected on the liberating power of words like 'human rights'. However, he also noted that alongside these there were many other words whose effects were enslaving. More than this, he argued that the very same words that could sometimes be "rays of light" could, in different circumstances, become "lethal arrows."10 Rights talk has within it the potential to become a 'lethal arrow'.
The human rights tradition is grand in its scope. Successive Declarations, Covenants and Conventions have extended the sphere of rights to almost every conceivable aspect of human society. To the extent that this tradition attempts to interpret the whole of human life according to its own criteria, and then attempts to impose this interpretation through national or international bodies, it is subject to a significant totalising tendency, which is potentially deeply subversive of the very freedoms it claims to uphold.
This tendency is already present in some of the key UN human rights documents. Article 29 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child states that:
1: States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:
(a) The development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;
(b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.
David Smolin notes an American Bar Analysis of this Article which concludes that "permitting a private fundamentalist Christian school to teach that the United Nations is evil, or that Christianity is the only true religion, would constitute a violation of the Convention."11 Smolin himself looks at some of the implications of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, claiming that "the Convention...far more than prior human rights documents, creates a clear conflict between human rights norms and the religious and cultural practices of the majority of humankind,"12 a claim he seeks to demonstrate by looking at the implications
of some of the Convention's articles for Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish communities.
|
