You Have No Reason for Your Rights

How can rights exist after the death of God? See, many early theorists proposed these nebulous rights to be God-given, and that they were violated at the expense of one’s eternal salvation. Put even more simply, rights could be violated, but their violation broke with something deep and unalterable about the framework of the universe.

Today we live in a Post-Nietzschean world. Although, of course, everyone didn’t become an atheist following Nietzsche’s famous declaration of the death of God, he provides a convenient historical point of reference. Agnosticism, if not atheism, is on the rise. And yet, the call for “rights” is as loud as ever. On one level, this situation is a clear-cut expression of “last man” Christianity: half of the Sermon the Mount and a quarter of the Gospel of Luke with the remainder filled by Comte’s Discours sur l’Esprit positif. But there is something deeper and scarier here which demands explanation.

As I mentioned last week, we’re trying to whitewash the idea of evil. Ultimately, our current grasping for “rights” reflects a similar spirit. Irony abounds. Read the U.N. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” for example. It provides almost no ground for its reasoning; it seems to acknowledge the constructed nature of the rights it puts forth. At best, it can slap you on the wrist for violating basic human dignity. Its reason for the slap? Because it said you couldn’t violate the rights it decided existed. How far we’ve come from a divine order.

Of course, I am not saying we shouldn’t respect human rights. As a Christian, I believe very firmly in the validity of this concept. My quibble is not with myself (on this account anyway), but with my non-believing brothers and sisters. If there is no god and the entire framework of “rights” is something we invent out of convenience, how and why should people actually abide by it? Because they want their constructed ideas protected too? I doubt that will hold back man’s darkest passions. The violation of this system might mandate legal action, but it provides no means of punishing actors outside of the legal entity’s jurisdiction. Given this formulation, the U.N. can’t tell North Korea what to do. We have no reason to go help starving people oceans away. Killing someone carries the same moral weight as not guaranteeing people free condoms and unlimited guns.

People may continue to help others, and that’s a good thing. But they may do so unreflectively, propagating vague, post-Christian feel-goodery, which can’t hold en masse when pressured. In this sense, we are living with unimaginable cognitive dissonance. Society tells us we must help and love others, but with no justification beyond its own fiat. Of course, for believers, God’s rule is also by fiat. The difference is, to a theist, God must exist, and this can’t be changed, while for the citizen, the state exists, and there’s every reason that can and will change. As the Christian anarchist, theologian, sociologist Jacques Ellul said, “what seems to be one of the disasters of our time is that we all appear to agree that the nation-state is the norm…Whether the state be Marxist or capitalist, it makes no difference. The dominant ideology is that of sovereignty.”

I’m no anarchist, but that’s a critique worth taking seriously.