Last month I gave a talk at the Evangelical Theological Society in which I defended the idea of human rights – not sham Rawlsian rights but real rights, grounded in objective claims about truth, justice and the nature of the human person. That is, rights as correlative to duties – I have a right to religious freedom because (and only because) I have a duty to worship God sincerely rather than insincerely.
I found that I was almost (not quite) the only supporter of rights in the room. I’ve been thinking about the discussion ever since, and I keep coming back to the following thought, which I think shows in a pretty solid way that religious freedom (by which I mean not mere toleration but a real openness to social pluralism) requires rights.
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