Religion and Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures

Religion and rights

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

Religion and rights

The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2008

edited by

Wes Williams

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2011

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Contents

Notes on contributors page

Preface and acknowledgements

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

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

Response to Simon Schama Matthew Spooner

2 Pentecost: learning the languages of peace Stanley Hauerwas

Response to Stanley Hauerwas Pamela Sue Anderson

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

Response to Charles E. Curran Nicholas Bamforth

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

5 Terror and religion Ronald Dworkin

Response to Ronald Dworkin John Tasioulas

6 Can human rights accommodate pluralism? Chantal Mouffe

Response to Chantal Mouffe Stuart White

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

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

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 Afro-Brazilian 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).

RONALD DWORKIN 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 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 three-volume 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).

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 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.

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 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 sociopolitical 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 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 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