Christianity and Human Rights

by BARBARA WARD

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IN the battle cries that are hurled across the European arena today, religion and democracy are used by both sides with equal emphasis. The West is lighting for democracy in the name of religion, and the East is fighting religion in the name of democracy. Yet the relation between religion and democracy should not be studied in the claims and counterclaims of two great power systems locked in struggle. Such a situation breeds exaggeration and distortion as fatally as it breeds fear and hate. This article is not concerned with “holy wars” or passionate crusades in which nationalism, imperialism, and power politics combine with sincere faith and devoted idealism to produce the usual tragic betrayal of the original hope. Its concern is much more modest: to ask whether democracy as we know it in the West — there is after all no other recognizable type of democracy—is in fact linked with the religion of the West, Christianity. And if the two are linked, how necessary is Christianity to the achievement of full democracy? And how necessary is it to preserve even that measure of democracy we have already achieved ?

The strongest argument against their essential relationship comes from the various schools of rationalist materialism. For them, religion is only a reflection of economic organization: so long as the distribution of wealth and power in society is irrational — as it must be when shortages prevail — it is necessary to bring in a God and another world “to redress the balance of the old.” But, so the argument continues, as scientific advance and economic organization create the greatest revolution of all time — the society of plenty — religion will wither away, as it is already doing in “advanced societies,” and democracy will exist in its own right — in reason, fraternity, coöperation, and high living standards.

The great weakness of this line of argument seems to me to lie in the modern mania of explaining (or explaining away) everything in terms of something else — men’s behavior in terms of their genes, art in terms of psychology, philosophy in terms of class structure, social institutions in terms of economic necessity. This method really explains nothing and destroys our sense of historical reality or of human personality. At the end of the Roman Empire, economic conditions in Western Europe, in the Near East, and, I believe, in China bore a very strong resemblance to each other. The source of wealth was the land. The land was parceled out in private ownership among landlords of varying wealth, but was worked by tenants in varying degrees of serfdom under a variety of arrangements we now call “share cropping.” On this economic substratum were built Western society, with its intense dynamism and its élan towards freedom; Byzantine society, which first in Constantinople and later in Moscow produced the most static despotism known to Europe; and Chinese society, which resembled Europe in nothing except its landowner-tenant relationship.

Can economic factors therefore be used to determine in the last analysis such profoundly different historical situations? To me it seems clear that, far from reflecting economic conditions, Catholic Christianity in Western Europe, Orthodox Christianity in the East, and the philosophies of Lao-tse and Confucius and the religion of Buddhism, were positive agents conditioning the development of society. In other words, religious faith is a separate, unconditioned strand in a total historical structure, alongside and not subordinate to economic relationships, geography, climate, racial groups, or the movements of peoples. In order to explain any historical situation, not one strand but all strands must be explained, and reality is destroyed if this rich picture is reduced to terms of one factor — just as the reality of a gem or a flower is destroyed if it is described only in terms of weight or measurement.

Similarly with human personalities, it tells me little about Rembrandt to know the economic factors underlying Flemish bourgeois society. These factors may throw interesting light on Rembrandt’s choice of subject but no light at all on the problem of why he painted so well. St. Francis of Assisi lived in the economic conditions of a tramp, but no study of these conditions will tell me why he differed from a tramp. What I am trying to point out is that religious belief is as much a determining factor of our historical and personal situation as economic necessity. The mania of explaining religion away, which is one of the capital manias of the last one hundred years, has simply done violence to reality — the reality of history and the reality of men.

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IF religion is accepted as a factor determining society in its own right, then one statement can be made with certainty about the relationship between Western democracy and religion. It is that Western democracy emerged from a profoundly religious civilization, and whether or not it could have grown from irreligious roots, we know from history that in fact it did not do so. If for a moment I may take the example of British society, which, with the United States, is the most typical example of Western democracy, the extent to which our political and social tradition is steeped in Christianity can hardly be exaggerated. Some of the most formative institutions in our country — Parliament, the boroughs, the universities, the law courts, and the older public schools — go back in unbroken tradition to the Catholic Middle Ages, and a vestigial religious atmosphere clings to them to this day. When, in the seventeenth century, the British revolution was fought, the men who opposed the centralizing and autocratic tendencies of the Stuart Kings fought for the “ancient liberties” of the law courts and of Parliament. They felt they were preserving a medieval tradition, and the conservative character of their revolution was one reason why English society, in spite of regicide, suffered no violent break with the past such as ruined the cohesion of French society at the French Revolution.

Nor was the influence of religion simply traditional. At two turning points in English history, Christianity played a decisive part. In the eighteenth century John Wesley broke away from the narrow Anglicanism of his day and took the Gospel to the poor. His reforms led to the tremendous expansion of the Nonconformist or free churches, which in their turn decisively influenced the beginning of the trade-union and labor movements in Britain. The first British organizers of labor were lay preachers, and to this day there is nothing incongruous when the Archbishop of Canterbury opens the Labor Party’s National Conference, or when the socialist. Minister of Education preaches from the Methodist pulpit.

The other decisive religious trend in British democracy lay in the astonishing grip of religion on all classes of British society in the nineteenth century. The men and women who first took reform into the prisons, the galleys, the mines, the factories, and the workhouses were Christians. The greatest and most typical politician of the day — Gladstone — was a churchman almost before he was a parliamentarian. A deep sense of personal obligation and religious responsibility dominated that intensely dynamic and creative period in whose aftermath the British people to some extent live even today. In face of so strong a tradition, with its roots in Magna Carta and its present evidence in the profound Christianity of such men as Sir Stafford Cripps, it is possible to say with categorical certainty that whether or not British democracy could have developed without Christianity, it has not in fact done so and the onus of proof lies with those who would seek to prove that the connection between them is inessential and that the one can continue without the other.

I cannot speak with the same certainty of American society, yet even a superficial knowledge of America’s history suggests how powerful were the religious forces which molded its democratic form of society. The first colonists founded societies so thoroughly religious that some of them were almost theocracies. The drafters of the American Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution may not all have been Christian, yet both documents breathe the spirit of a natural law and of a divine order which were bedrocks of European political and religious thought. The women who took “law and order” with them in the covered wagons based both on Christianity, and it was their faith that was in part, at least, responsible for the astonishingly rapid pacification and settlement of the frontier. And at the greatest crisis of the young republic, surely its religious genius found expression in Abraham Lincoln, who to many people — not only Americans—is one of the most Christian statesmen the world has seen.

No one will deny the strength of the other forces that have molded America, but the strength of the Christian strand is so formidable that once again those who wish to prove it immaterial to the development of democracy will not be able to bring in history to give evidence on their side. The answer of history is irrefutable. Democracy and religion have so far been inseparable. That they can be separable is a matter of theory, not of fact.

I do not wish to make too great a claim for the lessons of history. History does not prove that Christianity inevitably produces Western democracy. The experience of the Orthodox Church in Russia or of the Catholic Church in Spain is an example of the coexistence of religion and autocracy. The lesson of history is more limited. It is only that Western democracy has not in fact developed except in constant interrelation with Christianity, and that, particularly in the formative phases, the influence of Christian faith has been overwhelmingly strong.

When I go on to discuss the further problem — whether democracy can develop or survive without Christianity—the argument becomes in part an expression of faith. Personally I believe that democracy, the highest and most civilized form of society yet evolved by man, cannot realize its full potentialities without Christianity. Moreover, I do not believe that it can preserve its present achievements without religious faith.

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IT SEEMS to me that there are certain attitudes towards life, certain basic beliefs that come to us from the Christian faith, which are more essential to democracy than, say, the maintenance of reasonable economic standards, or freedom from invasion, or a situation in a temperate climate, or any of the other material factors which are often held to be indispensable to the maintenance of free society. One such belief is a belief in a moral order superior to the convenience of men or of man-made society. Every great civilization has felt, more or less strongly, that human laws have their validity not because of social convenience but because they mirror a divine order which is above all human appetites and ambitions. Acceptance of such an order is important in that it gives greater sanction to personal responsibility and good behavior — and no democracy can survive without a high measure of unforced personal responsibility among its citizens.

Even more important, belief in a morality which transcends the temporal order and its needs and conveniences is a vital factor in securing one of the essential characteristics of democratic society — the limitation of the state’s authority. When the medieval priest and lawyer, Bracton, wrote that “the king is under God and the law,” he was expressing a principle of cardinal importance for democratic society. He was striking at the foundations of royal and therefore of state absolutism. This belief — that the power of the state was limited by law — was, as I have pointed out, one of the chief factors in the struggle in Britain against the claim of the Stuart Kings to govern by Divine Right; and in the United States it took the form of limiting the power of the state by a written constitution. Today, modern theories — of racialism, of class interest, of “mass democracy” — have undermined the belief in the essentially limited authority of the state, and to my mind it is no coincidence that these theories have also abandoned all conception of a natural law in which is mirrored a divine order. Europe is plunging downwards towards forms of government as despotic as t hose which once prevailed in the pre-Christian Orient, forms in which the state was all and the subject the shadow of a shadow.

And this pre-Christian relationship of government and governed should remind us of another factor introduced into the world by Christianity and without which democracy is inconceivable — the belief in the infinite value of human personality and the essential equality of human souls. That these beliefs are profound acts of faith can be realized by glancing round any large assembly of people. To the eye of reason or the eye of science, men clearly are neither essentially equal nor equally valuable. And we have seen in our own time how easily this faith can be thrown aside, how easily Jews can be massacred by the million in the name of racial purity, and Balts and Poles and Trotskyiles and political opponents murdered in the name of “people’s democracy.” The act of faith essential to democracy — belief in human equality and human personality — springs traditionally from the Christian faith in the Fatherhood of God. It may be possible to maintain it without that faith, but one can at least say that in the twentieth century the fading of belief in God has coincided with a growing ferocity and inhumanity of the relation of man to man.

It is a curious paradox that the most revolting forms of cruelty, the most appalling exhibitions of the lust for power, and the most frenzied search for material gratification have, in our own time, coincided with an almost complete rejection of the idea of sin. I do not want to go into the reasons for this — the growing belief in economic determinism, the growing influence of Freudian psychology — but I do wish to stress my own belief that acceptance of the fact and possibility of sin is essential to the preservation of democracy. It is not simply that to admit the possibility of sin is to accept personal responsibility. This fact is certainly important, but the decisive influence of the sense of sin seems to me to operate at the level of government. The great tragedy of today is the number of men and groups and classes who are ready to massacre and torture their neighbors in order to achieve the rigid Utopia of their dreams — the Aryan paradise, the Marxist classless society. The more convinced they are of the utter infallibility of their political creed, the more ready they are to kill their opponents for daring to stand in the way of the realization of Absolute Perfection.

Now this spirit is in utter contradiction to the spirit both of Christianity and of democracy, Christianity teaches that all man’s political, social, and economic judgments are fallible, and that any effort he makes is marred by his own tendency to self-aggrandizement or lust or fear. And democracy takes up the same lesson in the shape of readiness for political compromise, the search for the provisional but workable solution, the policy “which divides the least.” When a nation pays the Leader of the Opposition a large official salary, it expresses its belief in the fallibility of the Government in power. And given the confidence of many heads of states in their own infallibility, it seems to me that only a profound belief in human fallibility, in human sin, can preserve the essential feature of democratic government — the search not for the perfect but for the practicable, and the profound sense of how provisional all human solutions must be.

This virtue — perhaps it can best be described as a sort of political modesty — is closely allied to another virtue, to my mind equally vital to the preservation of democracy: the virtue of pity. We live in an age in which the cult of success, the cult of power, of the huge, of the dominant, of the ruthless, have all been successfully incorporated in political parties and programs. Indeed, the cult of success has swept our own society in an economic sense as thoroughly perhaps as any other. Yet can there be a genuine democratic society unless the rights of the weak, the unhappy, and the unsuccessful are as cherished as those of the able and confident — or indeed more cherished since the weak are less able to carry on the battle of life alone?

It is perhaps by the violence and brutality of our economic struggle that we, in Western society, are most gravely endangering the future of our democracy. The sense of pity, the sympathetic understanding of the weak, the acceptance of failure as part of life and possibly as a redeeming and constructive part of life, came from a religious faith unique in history, whose God shared human suffering, even to a shameful death on the Cross. I do not know that we can preserve a profoundly human society — for that, in the last analysis is what democracy is — if wo lose that faith.

Again and again I have spoken of faith — the religious faith that underlies democracy, my own faith in the vital link between them. But some will dismiss faith and say that the ideal democracy of the future will not need superstition and must be based on the clear light of reason and enlightened self-interest. I do not believe it. I do not believe that men, save in brief moments of anarchy and despair, live without faith. Our age, which has seen the weakening and undermining of democracy, is an age of tremendous faiths — faith in National Socialism, in Communism, in Caesar worship, in the Divine Emperor. If faith in God drains out of society, faith in lesser gods flows in. If the supreme Godhead of the prophets and the philosophers and the mystics is banished, in His place rush in the idols of the tribe. Perhaps democracy can survive without a faith, but history gives no proof of it. And our new faiths have been without exception fatal to democracy.

One last point: the quality of a free society depends essentially upon the quality of its citizens. When Montesquieu wrote that virtue must be the distinguishing quality of republics, he was only underlining the necessity of democracies to depend upon the integrity, the responsibility, and the good will of their people. But is this essential quality of goodness so easy to produce? Let me give an analogy.

Three things above all others have been recognized by the philosophers as ends in themselves, as things which exist on their own merit, fit objects of human effort and search. The first is beauty, the second truth, the third goodness. Up to a certain point the claims of beauty and truth are recognized in most societies today. The artist, the scientist, and the scholar hold an honored place. Moreover, many people recognize, however dimly, that the quality of beauty and the appreciation of truth in society as a whole depend upon the number of men and women of genius who are prepared to devote themselves wholeheartedly and without stint to the realization of beauty and the search for truth. A great artistic age is an age of great artists. An age of supreme scientific achievement is an age of great scientists. It is the work and dedication of great individual men and women that raises the whole tone and level of society.

But when it comes to the third of the three absolutes — goodness — the absolute upon which the temper of a free society most obviously depends, do we find anything comparable to the work of great scientists and great artists? Only in religious faith, only— in our own society— in Christianity, do we find anything like the same effort to produce souls as heroic in their goodness as great artists and scientists are wholehearted in their pursuit of beauty and truth. It is these saints and mystics, these geniuses of goodness, who in the last analysis seem to me to be the only founts from which the spiritual vitality, the force of goodness in free society will flow. Democracy today seems to be hoping to counter the demoniac evil of a Belsen or an Auschwitz with nothing more dynamic than vague good will. I do not underestimate or decry its importance—it is far, far better than active malevolence — but surely democracy, beset with evil on so heroic a scale, must go back to resources of goodness more dynamic and vital than mere general benevolence. Some of the first founders of democracy in America called themselves a society of saints. Their ambition vaulted too high perhaps, but I doubt whether democracy will survive if it is to become at any time a society without saints.