Balkin on God and Human Rights

Jack Balkin weighs in on our conversation regarding the relationship between human rights and belief in God.  He mentions the treatment of Jews within the papal states, and suggests that we have:

assumed that belief in God is good for human rights because God himself approves of universal human rights, religious tolerance, and human equality. But that is not generally true of what people thought God wanted historically, even within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Throughout most of human history, God (and different gods) have been remarkably partial, at least if we credit the moral and political beliefs of people who professed to believe most fervently in Him throughout the ages, and who justified their practices based on their belief in Him.

For religion to ground universal human rights in the very attractive way that the previous discussion has assumed, that religion must be of a very special sort, and, I would suggest, it must be of a form that arises most commonly following the Enlightenment, when older versions of religious belief were repeatedly questioned and reshaped by religious strife, political necessity, the rise of modern secular institutions, and the growth of science; these historical phenomena -- and not simply belief in God per se -- led to increasing religious tolerance between sects and increasingly capacious and generalized conceptions of human liberty and human equality. That is to say, the sort of belief in God that most strongly undergirds the discourse of universal human rights as we understand it today is the sort of belief in God that has been chastened by and reshaped by several centuries of modernity, secularism, and religious skepticism.

Prof. Balkin is right to point out this underlying premise of our thesis, and that's why my claim has been fairly limited.  I see something distinctive in the fact (if it is a fact) that we were created by a God who wants a relationship with us.  But I can't speak with any confidence about the content of the human rights that would flow from that fact.  Perhaps God wants to reveal his glory to humankind through displays of awesome power against those who reject his chosen prophets' teachings.  Perhaps the natural order is built on a rigid human hierarchy.  If I was looking for a human rights advocate, Aquinas and Augustine would be nowhere near the top of my list.  Admittedly, I have the good fortune of pushing this conversation in a post-John Courtney Murray, "I'm OK You're OK" society of blurred religious lines, and in this context, a belief in a loving creator is a potentially rich and distinctive resource for supporting human rights.  The fact of creation has always been a potential resource, of course, and our own failure, as believers, to recognize it as such is one reason why non-believers (and many believers) are understandably skeptical.