Essays on Religion and Human Rights; Ground to Stand on by David Little (review)

Religion has played a complex and strong role in US politics and history. The last fifty years have been no exception. Following a remarkable series of academic and public service appointments over these years (notably at Brown, Harvard, Yale, Virginia, the US Institute of Peace, and now Georgetown University), David Little has now brought together in this volume a fascinating collection of his own essays that seek to “ground” human rights within the US Protestant and secular liberal intellectual traditions. His foil is Samuel Moyn’s 2010 book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, which Little regards as “diametrically opposed to the underlying arguments”¹ of his essays. He devotes a whole chapter to refuting Moyn’s position. In the rest of the volume Little mobilizes support for his own position from a wide variety of western and Islamic philosophical and religious traditions, highlighting among many others the works of Abdullahi An Naiem, Talal Asad, John Calvin, James Carroll, John Cotton, Brian Leiter, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, James Madison, Hilary Putnam, Max Weber, and Roger Williams. Chapter VII is devoted to his own “personal testament” in which he reflects on his own thinking and convictions as a committed Protestant layman and the degree to which his convictions are value-free.

The primary value of the volume is the degree to which it covers the debates in the US over the last fifty years on religion in the public sphere, particularly the place of freedom of religion and belief in US domestic, and to a lesser extent, international politics. Little was very close to many of these debates, especially those in different academic communities seeking to influence US policies. These activities reached their political zenith in the US public sphere with the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, which set up major administrative mechanisms to monitor and promote religious freedom around the world. Little, however, is not concerned with the politics in this volume. He focuses on the evolution, reliability, and sustain-ability of the grounds for human rights and religion in the public sphere. In fact he notes that “[i]n many ways my entire educational career was an exchange, and sometimes a debate with the Puritan tradition from which I came.”² He is especially interested in historical roots, namely the ways in which the Calvinist elements of Protestantism evolved and conditioned first the British and then the American post-reformation societies. He finds that influence still present and significant in modern politics and economics. He debates, however, whether its ethical influence in particular has or has not been retained in contemporary US public affairs.

Little’s central concern is to show that human rights have a solid philosophical and religious grounding in human nature itself and not in any particular disposition of a given society or the world community. On one hand he admits that the “liberal Calvinist tradition provides a particularly strong historical and theological foundation for a belief in human rights. At the same time, it can by its nature be nothing more than a recommendation.”³ In other words, the tradition is just one contributor to the debate. This conclusion, which can be found with regard to his insights on other philosophical and religious traditions, puts into question his own sub-title: Ground to Stand On. Is there a single ground? Or are human rights just the product of a social consensus based on multiple different grounds?

Perhaps, Little believes there is no doubt that a wide variety of Western philosophers, theologians, and scholars have tackled the task of seeking grounds for human rights. As opposed to the long list of Western scholars, theologians, and philosophers whom he identifies as wanting to water down the idea of universal human rights that are rooted in human nature. Little sees the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a valid formulation of universal justice emanating from the “conscience of mankind,”⁴ namely one...