Although the discourse on human rights has a long pedigree, traceable at least to early modern natural rights theory and politics, the philosophical case for human rights against one alternative, religion, has yet to be made. Hence Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction, the new volume edited by John Witte Jr. and M. Christian Green, both of Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion, elicits high hopes. Unfortunately, despite its range of expertise, constituted by contributions from scholars across borders and disciplines, it not only fails to make that case, but indicates an acute unawareness of its very need or urgency.
The book's fatal weakness is betrayed on its cover by the presence of the Christian "Golden Rule," as illustrated by Norman Rockwell. In reducing religion to the merry mantra "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," religion's latent critique of the contemporary human-rights agenda goes unnoticed. Instead, the book is from the start firmly in the human-rights camp. The authors' purpose, then, is to sell human rights to religious believers. This is accomplished in two ways: the book's first section investigates possible bases of religious authority for human rights amongst the world's major religious traditions, to demonstrate that the two are theoretically complementary; and the book's second section explores the reality of the encounter between human rights and religion in the contemporary world, to demonstrate that the two are empirically complementary.
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