The Pietist Schoolman

At the end of last week, I had students in my Human Rights in International History course read and respond to an article by Joel A. Nichols, “Evangelicals and Human Rights: The Continuing Ambivalence of Evangelical Christians’ Support for Human Rights” (published in the Journal of Law & Religion in 2009). Nichols teaches law at the University of St. Thomas, the Twin Cities’ fast-growing Catholic university. Like me, he’s a self-described evangelical with an interest in human rights, so I was quite curious about this article when my colleague Stacey Hunter Hecht showed it to me last year.

Then having read it, I was curious to see what my students would think of Nichols’ thesis:

…that evangelical Christians have a greater connection to human rights than is often acknowledged (and greater than they often acknowledge themselves). But, it ultimately appears doubtful whether evangelical theology is amenable to a robust and deep understanding of human rights.

I asked my students to try to refrain from commenting as evangelicals (if that describes them) about their own beliefs and opinions about human rights. Rather, I wondered if their experience of evangelical churches and other organizations (like Bethel) confirmed or countered Nichols’ thesis, since his argument rested on theological implications (and, I think, his own experience) rather than sociological data.

And while I’ll share some student reactions and a few of my own thoughts, I’m also curious what readers think of the same question: Based on your own experiences of American evangelicalism (and as we’ll see, Nichols admits that it’s a highly diverse world, hard to pin down), is it inherently, perhaps inescapably ambivalent about human rights?

I’d like to know what others think precisely because I ended up feeling so ambivalent about Nichols’ ambivalence. While I understand where he’s coming from, his characterizations simply don’t square with my own experience of evangelicalism — which might be an unusual one, in that it wasn’t especially shaped by fundamentalism, dispensationalism, Reformed creedalism, or the other strands that seem most prominent in Nichols’ version of evangelical history. Also, I’ve taught adult Sunday school classes about human rights at one evangelical church and one mainline church, and I didn’t find the understanding of human rights at the former to be any more superficial than what I encountered at the latter. (A small sample size, I’ll grant you.)

Let me start by outlining Nichols’ article, since it’s not widely available unless you (or the library at the university you work or study at) happen to subscribe to the journal in question.

First, he sketches some contours of evangelicalism in the United States, acknowledging that it’s a “category that ‘defies easy description'” [quoting Robert K. Johnston] and “is best described as a diverse movement within conservative Christianity that may be likened to a ‘big tent or large extended family’ [that from Richard Kyle]” (Journal of Law & Religion, vol. 24, p. 632). The lack of a church hierarchy and the basically democratic ethos of the movement (and, I’d add as a Pietist who works with Baptists, the suspicion of creedal definitions of faith) leave evangelicalism unavoidably fuzzy. Nichols finds that the “glue” holding together evangelicalism is best understood in terms of Johnston’s “triad” of “axiological convictions” (personal conversion, Biblical authority, evangelical witness) or David Bebbington’s “quadrilateral” of historical “hallmarks” (conversionism, crucicentrism, biblicentrism, activism).

Examples of Johnston’s “witness” or Bebbington’s “activism” take us into the histories of human rights and humanitarian action (two related but distinct traditions — I wish Nichols would have used the terms less interchangeably), where we find evangelicals working to abolish slavery and the slave trade, to promote temperance and prohibition, and then to advocate against abortion rights (or, depending on your perspective, for the rights of the unborn).

Nichols also acknowledges that human rights is a more slippery concept than it may seem. While he holds up the “International Bill of Rights” (the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, plus the twin UN covenants of 1966 meant to give the UDHR some force of international law) as the “centerpiece of modern human rights law,” he also notes that frustration with “top-down” approaches to human rights centered on the UN and international courts and commissions has led some advocates to focus on grass roots initiatives led by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) — a set of organizations that increasingly includes evangelical activists.

But while Nichols praises some of these Christian organizations (e.g., International Justice Mission, the Viva Network — with which he himself works), he can’t shake the belief that evangelicals remain ambivalent about human rights. In no small part, he points out, because so many secular human rights activists have been so disinterested in or dismissive of evangelical concerns, and sometimes even hostile to the role of religion in shaping a vision of human rights. But in larger part, he concludes, because of some theological emphases he views as central to evangelicalism. Let me just highlight three of them (actually, four — I conflated two):

1. The primacy of evangelism: understood as seeking the conversion of individuals. While this explains evangelical interest in religious liberties (freedom from persecution, freedom to share one’s beliefs with others, freedom to change one’s religion), it also makes Nichols doubt that evangelicals are ever seeking human rights for human rights’ sake so much as laying the groundwork for the winning of souls.

While most of my students found this an accurate description of evangelical evangelism, at least one found the implications for human rights work easy to dismiss: “Doesn’t everyone have multiple motives?” At the very least, I didn’t see Nichols grappling with an important question in the theory of human rights: are human rights ends in and of themselves? Or are they simply means by which we might realize certain values (like justice)? If the latter, then I’m not sure that Nichols’ “human rights qua human rights” ought to be anyone’s highest goal.

2. Emphases on human sinfulness and the atonement: among other things, Nichols suspects evangelicals of having a less than robust commitment to human dignity — rooted in their preoccupation with sin and atonement, plus an underdeveloped understanding of humans being created “in the image of God” (the Imago Dei, from Genesis 1:27). By contrast, he points to Catholic social teaching and foundational documents like the 1963 encyclical by Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris. In one of the excerpts I had my students read in class, that pope (who, as a Vatican diplomat in the late 1940s, had worked behind the scenes on behalf of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) writes:

[Man’s] is a nature… endowed with intelligence and free will. As such he has rights and duties, which together flow as a direct consequence from his nature. These rights and duties are universal and inviolable, and therefore altogether inalienable.

When, furthermore, we consider man’s personal dignity from the standpoint of divine revelation, inevitably our estimate of it is incomparably increased. Men have been ransomed by the blood of Jesus Christ. Grace has made them sons and friends of God, and heirs to eternal glory.

While Nichols is probably right that the language of “human dignity” is more familiar to Catholic and mainline Protestant audiences than to evangelicals, I don’t see him offering any evidence beyond supposed self-evidence that evangelicals’ “very strong focus on Jesus and his atoning sacrifice comes at the expense, one might say, of a more fully developed theology of imago Dei” — p. 651. Indeed, just a few lines earlier, Nichols admits that when teaching, say, an evangelical adult Sunday school class, he “would likely use the phrase ‘made in the image of God’ rather than ‘human dignity’….” And when he goes on to note that there are evangelical leaders who clearly have a robust theology of Imago Dei, one of the examples he gives is the late John Stott, who was merely the most widely respected evangelical in the world. (Google “Stott evangelical pope” and you’ll get over 100,000 hits, including several obituaries using that phrase, some even as their title.)

3. An “other-worldly” eschatology: or what one of my students described (as heard from his parents) as a belief that saving this world would be like trying to save a burning house instead of escaping from it. Of all of Nichols’ contentions, this seemed to resonate most strongly with my students: both that they’d heard versions of it from family, friends, pastors, etc., and that so many of them clearly rejected it. (Perhaps not surprising, given that they self-selected into a class on the definition and protection of human rights throughout history.)

Of course, as another student pointed out — and as Nichols acknowledges — it’s virtually impossible to generalize what “evangelicals” think about anything. As a Pietist and evangelical (and perhaps on behalf of the Wesleyan-Holiness wing of evangelicalism as well), I certainly don’t accept Nichols’ contention that evangelicals have scant interest in sanctification (p. 655), or his repeated assertion that evangelicals are primarily concerned with getting belief right. And he himself qualifies virtually every argument with a list of exceptions or a comment on how there’s generational change happening in the movement, as perhaps evidenced by many of my students…

Since Nichols’ arguments resonated far more strongly with many of them than I had anticipated. Undeniably, such a critique of evangelical engagement with human rights, written by a scholar with a foot in both worlds, deserves serious consideration.

So again, I’m curious to hear from readers who themselves are evangelicals, or interact regularly with evangelicalism…

Do you agree, first, that the theological emphases Nichols identifies are indeed descriptive of evangelicalism, and second, that they make it unlikely that evangelicals could ever fully embrace the human rights movement? And if you said yes to the first and second… How significant is the resulting ambivalence that Nichols describes?