Christianity and human rights

Jesus Christ said: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:30-31

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The Gospel Coalition website declares concerning Christianity and human rights

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In the most famous passage of the Declaration of Independence, it is easy to see the connection between theism and human rights: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” As I explained in God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress could have chosen more generic ways to explain the basis of equal rights (“all men are by nature equal”) but they decided to employ active, theistic language instead. Because they operated in such a broadly Christian mental world, we can interpret the Declaration’s language as rooted in Christianity, not just general theism. But there’s evidence that the beginnings of “human rights” advocacy really did have specific, deep Christian roots. I was fascinated to read Kyle Harper’s chapter “Christianity and the Roots of Human Dignity in Late Antiquity” in Timothy Shah and Allen Hertzke’s new volume, Christianity and Freedom, from Cambridge University Press. (The price of the book will make it affordable only for large institutional libraries, but you can get it through Interlibrary Loan programs or wait for a paperback edition, which I am told is forthcoming.) Harper, an expert on Christianity in late antiquity, and the provost at the University of Oklahoma, notes that we commonly associate ideas of human rights with the “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century, on which some of the Declaration draws. But Harper posits that human rights advocacy—especially that all people have equal dignity—had key, if not unique roots in Christianity of the fourth through the sixth centuries. Why did these roots not appear earlier, we might ask? Harper answers that the difference from the early church is that Christians in the age of Constantine were moving into positions of power. They could hope to effect social change, in accord with Christian principles, for the first time. The philosophers of Greek and Roman antiquity “lacked the concept of human dignity,” Harper explains. As Christianity became more widespread, leaders of the church developed more influence, and some rulers even became Christians. This “created the grounds for the development of human rights.”

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