Anti-Enlightenment secularists are wrong on rights
In a country virtually drowning with rights, it is ironic that religious freedom should be the last cab off the rank – and the one that seems to be facing the greatest legislative opposition.
After all, religious freedom, with its intimate linkages to the freedoms of conscience, expression and association, was at the heart of the modern conceptions of liberty that took shape in the 17th and 18th centuries; and while the very early acceptance of those freedoms in the Australian colonies did not entirely avoid sectarian conflict, it contributed powerfully to our long history of social peace.
But that very early acceptance came at a cost: like the air we breathe, religious freedom was largely taken for granted. As new rights that impinge on it were sought and granted, we became, almost without noticing it, one of the advanced democracies in which religious freedom enjoys the weakest protections.
Condemned, as religious freedom now is, to struggle against vocal and determined enemies, it is not difficult to imagine a future in which expressing many longstanding religious beliefs will be rendered illegal, as will the actions that give those beliefs practical life.
There is, however, a deeper element to the irony that now sees religious freedom so seriously threatened: it is only thanks to religion, and in particular to the fusion of Judaic legalism with Christian universalism, that the idea of human rights emerged, eventually becoming a defining feature of the Western tradition.
No one has shown that more clearly than Jurgen Habermas, the German intellectual who has been a towering figure of the European left since the 1960s, in his recently published Another History of Philosophy, which will appear in English translation next year. The West’s Judaeo-Christian heritage was “not a mere passing phase” in the formation of the contemporary concepts of freedom, Habermas argues in this extraordinary – if forbiddingly lengthy – book; rather, that heritage contributed their essential core and remains their vital underpinning.
The path leading from the biblical precepts to today’s versions of those concepts was never simple, untroubled or pure. It was, however, the Judaeo-Christian heritage that allowed Western thought to repeatedly overcome the obstacles it encountered along the way.
For example, Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between divine law, which was accessible only through grace, and natural law, which was accessible to every human being through the God-given capacity to reason, may seem of purely antiquarian interest. However, from that distinction Aquinas, and his great disciples in the Salamanca School of theology, derived not just the bedrock principle of human equality but the entirely novel, intensely controversial and eventually immensely influential contention that “heathens” – whose minds had unimpaired access to natural law – had rights as good as those of their Christian neighbours.
Equally, John Locke readily conceded that some people were not as clever as others (though bitter experience also taught him it was not the uneducated who caused society’s troubles but the overweening “pretensions of power” of the “all-knowing Doctors”).
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