Human Rights

In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence asserted it was "self-evident" that human beings were "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Indeed, unless rights are based on the will of a supreme deity, it is hard to see what firm basis they can have. A primary aim of the Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1789, was to "establish Justice," and the reverence accorded this influential document has given it the quality of sacred law. But if a "right" is merely a special privilege granted to people within a particular corpus of laws, then there is nothing to prevent the government from rescinding it, and there is no justification for claiming the right outside the legal jurisdiction that enacted it. Social theorists from Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) to George Homans (Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, 1974) have attempted to derive principles of justice from the facts of human interaction and group life, yet by their very nature all these secular theories make justice highly contingent on immediate situations and therefore both narrow and mutable. Thus, to say that one has a particular "right" is a highly dubious rhetorical assertion of privilege unless the right has a religious basis.

At the same time, religion seems to be among the most potent forces limiting human rights. Repeatedly in human history, adherents of one religion have persecuted believers in another. At present, debates rage over the capacity of Islam to ensure women's rights. Some argue that it traps women in second-class status—for example, favoring sons over daughters in inheritance and making divorce far easier for husbands than for wives. On the other hand, it can be argued that the Qur'an conferred rights on women that they did not earlier possess in Arabian society, and that Islam can adapt to modern social and political conditions just as Christianity has done.

Seymour Martin Lipset has argued that Protestantism favors the development of democratic values more than Catholicism does, because Protestantism encourages individual responsibility. In contrast, Andrew Greeley has argued that Catholicism has a greater democratic potential because it considers the needs of the entire community. Perhaps the relation between religion and human rights is one of dynamic ambivalence. Belief in a supernatural power can serve either tyranny or liberty, depending on the historical circumstances. As Benjamin Disraeli said in his preface to Lothair (1870), "The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress."

Pitirim Sorokin's classic theory of cultural transformation suggests that the concept of human rights belongs to an intermediate stage in the secularization process. Initially, according to Sorokin, each great civilization is born out of a period of chaos and barbarism, in a spasm of essentially religious creativity. A new ideational culture is established on a particular set of sacrosanct beliefs that consider reality to be fundamentally spiritual. Instead of rights, there are commandments that authoritatively tell humans how they should behave. As time passes, people turn away from spirituality toward materialism, and faith is gradually supplanted by rationality. In the midst of this historical process, people seek rationalizations such as natural rights to explain why the old customs still should be followed. Sorokin called this compromise idealistic, and belief in the existence of natural rights is a half-religious, half-secular idealism. Finally, the society becomes sensate, finding truth entirely in reason and the physical senses. God vanishes from the picture, and humans become the center of all moral judgment. Individual human desires supplant both commandments and rights as the ruling principle. For the sake of social stability, people may agree that individuals should avoid directly harming other individuals. But once the culture accepts the principle that humans may indulge their individual desires almost without limit, freedom begins to devour itself. Sorokin believed that any extreme sensate society was in grave danger of disintegrating into the chaos and barbarism out of which a new ideational culture might arise.

Americans reveal only lukewarm support for many civil rights when they respond to opinion polls such as the General Social Survey, which has measured the attitudes of a cross section of the population periodically since 1972. One standard question offers three choices to express the respondent's feelings about the Bible: (1) "The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally." (2) "The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word." (3) "The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man." Among those who have a literal interpretation of the Bible, more than half (56.6 percent) feel that antireligious books and films should be outlawed. Remarkably, even about one of eight people (12.9 percent) who feel the Bible is just a book of fables also would ban books that attack religion.

The following table gives percentages of people who hold thirteen different rights-related opinions, for each of the different feelings about the Bible. Four items on freedom of speech reveal a consistent tendency of biblical literalists to support this right less often than others do. Support for giving homosexuals the right to marry each other is weak in all groups but weakest among literalists, and the same is true for legalization of marijuana, which might be a step toward the right to decide freely what one smokes, eats, or injects into one's body. Opposition to abortion can be couched as a "right to life" position. Although there is widespread support for some kind of "right to die," the euthanasia item still shows significant religious differences. The right to legal due process would be compromised if it were legal to imprison a person merely on an anonymous tip that he or she was planning a crime. The majority want to deny legal immigrants the immediate right to government assistance such as Medicaid, food stamps, or welfare, but opposition is greatest among literalists. The question about racial intermarriage was asked in 1989, and it is surprising at this late date that significant opposition was found. The right of people to exclude a particular group from their neighborhood is clearly not

widely supported today, but nearly a third of white biblical literalists affirm it. Much statistical research has examined whether lower support for many civil liberties might really be the result of some other factor, such as low education or region of the country, but these religious effects generally survive statistical controls and thus are probably accurate.

Considerable evidence suggests that religion can encourage respect for the rights of others, but only in certain ways. For example, rates of property crimes such as larceny (but not of homicide) are lower in parts of the United States where church membership rates are high. Research on juvenile delinquency suggests that religion does not instill respect for rights in isolated religious individuals but has a powerful effect by sustaining a communitywide moral order. In communities where churches are weak, delinquency is just as common among religious teenagers as among non-religious ones. But where the churches are strong, religious teenagers are far less likely to be delinquent. Thus the relationship between religion and human rights is too complex to take for granted, and only careful scientific research can determine the circumstances under which religion promotes rather than compromises human freedom.

See alsoAnimal Rights; Civil Rights Movement; Ethical Culture; Ethics; Humanism; Lesbianand Gay Rights Movement; Material Religion; Religious Persecution; Secularization.

Bibliography

Davis, James A., and Tom W. Smith. General Social Surveys, 1972 –1996: Cumulative Codebook. 1996.

Esposito, John L. Women in Muslim Family Law. 1982.

Finlay, Barbara. "Right to Life vs. Right to Die: Some Correlates of Euthanasia Attitudes." Sociology andSocial Research 69 ( July 1985): 548–560.

Greeley, Andrew. The Catholic Myth. 1990.

Lipset, Seymour Martin. "The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited." American Sociological Review 59 (1994): 1–22.

Mayer, Ann Elizabeth. Islam and Human Rights. 1991.

Sorokin, Pitirim A. Social and Cultural Dynamics. 1937.

Stark, Rodney, and William Sims Bainbridge. Religion,Deviance, and Social Control. 1996.

William Sims Bainbridge