Christianity and Human Rights

The controversial history of encounters of Christianity with the modern concept of human rights has been analyzed by social scientists using two master narratives: opposition and engagement. This chapter follows the socio-historical perspective of Hans Joas in overcoming this binary approach by presenting diverse elements of Christian contributions to an affirmative genealogy of human rights. First, the existing master narratives of relations between Christianity and human rights will be explained. Second, the sociological importance of distinguishing the Christian genesis of human rights from the process of their intellectual justification will be overviewed in comparative perspective, providing examples from the traditions of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Third, by analyzing how the concept of human dignity is the grounding idea of human rights within both secular sociological and Christian perspectives, the interconnectedness of secular-religious narratives will be shown. Thus, an affirmative genealogy of human rights reveals the degree of modernization of each historical branch of Christianity.