# Are Human Rights Just an Outgrowth of Christian Culture? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 17, 2015, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539 "2015-09-17T05:18:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2015, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/41 "2015-09-19T01:32:22Z")
> [@Stoneburg](#): > > Well the US culture, which seems to be very Christian, Cite, please. Looking at the most obvious cultural artifacts, such as movies, pop musics, etc…, I’m not seeing much that would stamp the culture of the US as “very Christian”. Quite the opposite, in fact. Strongly Christian groups in the US tend to be subcultures. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2015, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/42 "2015-09-19T01:38:49Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Henry VIII had no trouble taking church lands. In Elizabethan times Catholics found preaching found their heads on post. Is there really a lot of difference between a monarch jailing someone because he feels like it and him forcing the law writers to write laws to allow him to do so “legally?” > If rights grew out of Christian culture, it sure took them a long time to implement them. The fact that human rights protections in 16th-century England had not yet been elevated and solidified at the level we expect today, should not be used to dismiss the historical fact that the concept of rights was much more developed in England and other parts of western Europe than in the rest of the world. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2015, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/43 "2015-09-19T01:56:02Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > Errrr, sorry _what_? > > The Arab conquests of the seventh century took over and maintained the infrastructures of two functioning empires, empires which many Arabs had been part off (Rome and Persia both had Arabs within their borders even before the 630’s). And the inavsions were led by people who mostly were not tribal, except perhaps in a nominal sense, they came from settled urban cities, and regions, like Mecca, Yathrib (npw Medinah), Taif and Yemen > > Persia was not autocratic in the least, they pretty much left you alone, after conquering you. And that ignores places like India or the Far East. A couple points. First, the Arabs may have been under political control of Rome or Persia but they were never significant elements in either empire. The Arabs did not assimilate the culture of the Romans or Persians when they were subjects. So when they later conquered territory from those empires, they essentially did so as outsiders. The second point is that Europeans used Rome under the Caesars and Greece under Alexander as models for what an empire looked like. And the foundation of these empires pre-dated Christianity. So Europeans knew that religion was an outside force that was added to an empire rather than a necessary element needed to make an empire. Other people did not have this example; their historical empires had all been built up around a state religion and the precedent seemed to be that a state religion was a core element of an empire. This meant that European rulers could envision themselves as acting independently of religion in a way that rulers in other places could not. A European king could tell himself “If Alexander and Augustus could rule without some Pope looking over his shoulder telling him what to do, so can I.” ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2015, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/44 "2015-09-21T14:46:50Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > Cite, please. Looking at the most obvious cultural artifacts, such as movies, pop musics, etc…, I’m not seeing much that would stamp the culture of the US as “very Christian”. Quite the opposite, in fact. Strongly Christian groups in the US tend to be subcultures. OTOH, we have a higher percentage of regular churchgoers than they have in Europe. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2015, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/45 "2015-09-21T15:50:09Z")
The abolition of slavery in the West was mostly driven by Christianity, specifically the Great Awakening, so that aspect of human rights is pretty much an outgrowth of Christian values. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2015, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/46 "2015-09-21T15:59:00Z")
In exactly the same way that chattel slavery itself was an outgrowth of Christian values. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2015, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/47 "2015-09-21T17:14:51Z")
Chattel slavery predates Christianity. Abolition of slavery doesn’t. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2015, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/48 "2015-09-21T17:15:53Z")
Really? Manumission didn’t happen anywhere before 1820? ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/49 "2015-09-22T01:15:52Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > The abolition of slavery in the West was mostly driven by Christianity, specifically the Great Awakening, so that aspect of human rights is pretty much an outgrowth of Christian values. > > Regards, > Shodan This doesn’t quite hang together for me. The Great Awakening is largely a phenomenon of American Protestant Christianity, yet the US was one of the _last_ western countries to abolish slavery. Slavery was abolished in England, for example, in 1569; in Poland in 1347. So we can hardly attribute the abolition of slavery in the west to the Great Awakening. More to the point, if we confine our enquiry to “the West” then almost anything we care to study is going to turn out to be an outgrowth of Christian values, since Western culture is so profoundly marked by Christianity. Slavery was abolished in Japan by 1200, in India several centuries earlier (though it was later reinstated in some European colonial possession in India). ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/50 "2015-09-22T02:01:43Z")
> [@UDS](#): > > This doesn’t quite hang together for me. The Great Awakening is largely a phenomenon of American Protestant Christianity, yet the US was one of the _last_ western countries to abolish slavery. This was because the United States was one of the few countries where areas slavery flourished weren’t just colonies but had significant representation and power in politics. The Northern states of the United States were some of the first jurisdictions in modern times to abolish slavery in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution however, > [@](#): > > Slavery was abolished in England, for example, in 1569; in Poland in 1347. So we can hardly attribute the abolition of slavery in the west to the Great Awakening. Those were primarily driven by economic rather than moral factors and in the latter case at least was simply because it was supplanted by serfdom. > [@](#): > > More to the point, if we confine our enquiry to “the West” then almost anything we care to study is going to turn out to be an outgrowth of Christian values, since Western culture is so profoundly marked by Christianity. Slavery was abolished in Japan by 1200, in India several centuries earlier (though it was later reinstated in some European colonial possession in India). Erhm… [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery\_in\_Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Japan) > [@](#): > > Slavery persisted into the Sengoku period (1467-1615) even though the attitude that slavery was anachronistic seems to have become widespread among elites.[1] In 1590, slavery was officially banned under Toyotomi Hideyoshi; but forms of contract and indentured labor persisted alongside the period penal codes’ forced labor. Somewhat later, the Edo period penal laws prescribed “non-free labor” for the immediate family of executed criminals in Article 17 of the Gotōke reijō (Tokugawa House Laws), but the practice never became common. The 1711 Gotōke reijō was compiled from over 600 statutes promulgated between 1597 and 1696.[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery\_in\_India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_India) > [@](#): > > During the Delhi Sultanate period (1206–1555), references to the abundant availability of low-priced Indian slaves abound.[1][30] Many of these Indian slaves were used by Muslim nobility in the subcontinent, but others were exported to satisfy the demand in international markets. > > The revenue system of the Delhi Sultanate produced a considerable proportion of the Indian slave population as these rulers, and their subordinate shiqadars, ordered their armies to abduct large numbers of locals as a means of extracting revenue.[31][32] While those communities that were loyal to the Sultan and regularly paid their taxes were often excused from this practice, taxes were commonly extracted from other, less loyal groups in the form of slaves. Thus, according to Barani, the Shamsi “slave-king” Balban (r. 1266–87) ordered his shiqadars in Awadh to enslave those peoples resistant to his authority, implying those who refused to supply him with tax revenue.[33] Sultan Alauddin Khilji (r. 1296–1316) is similarly reported to have legalised the enslavement of those who defaulted on their revenue payments.[33] This policy continued during the Mughal era.[34][35][36][37][38] > [@](#): > > The Mughals continued the slave trade.[51] Abd Allah Khan Firuz Jang, an Uzbek noble at the Mughal court during the 1620s and 1630s, was appointed to the position of governor of the regions of Kalpi and Kher and, in the process of subjugating the local rebels, ``beheaded the leaders and enslaved their women, daughters and children, who were more than 200,000 in number.[52] > > When Shah Shuja was appointed as governor of Kabul, he carried out a ruthless war in Indian territory beyond the Indus. Most of the women burnt themselves to death to save their honour. Those captured were “distributed” among Muslim mansabdars.[34][53] “Under Shah Jahan peasants were compelled to sell their women and children to meet their revenue requirements…The peasants were carried off to various markets and fairs to be sold with their poor unhappy wives carrying their small children crying and lamenting. According to Qaznivi, Shah Jahan had decreed they should be sold to Muslim lords.”[54][55] The Augustinian missionary Fray Sebastiao Manrique, who was in Bengal in 1629–30 and again in 1640, remarked on the ability of the shiqdār—a Mughal officer responsible for executive matters in the pargana, the smallest territorial unit of imperial administration to collect the revenue demand, by force if necessary, and even to enslave peasants should they default in their payments.[53] ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/51 "2015-09-22T02:14:04Z")
It’s interesting to note that some of the staunchest opponents of slavery in the early Republic were hardline Covenanter Presbyterians who also urged a quasi-theocratic government based upon a national “covenant” with God and as a result opposed the US Constitution and refused participate in the US State due to its condoning of slavery and refusal to acknowledge God: [https://books.google.com/books?id=wnI\_CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=covenanters+slavery&source=bl&ots=S3ZZ\_olTa3&sig=0Ul8OZH7Fbv3VKRie2Betc8\_ZuE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CE0Q6AEwCGoVChMI3IqyqMiJyAIVyHs-Ch1bHgvo#v=onepage&q=covenanters%20slavery&f=false](https://books.google.com/books?id=wnI_CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=covenanters+slavery&source=bl&ots=S3ZZ_olTa3&sig=0Ul8OZH7Fbv3VKRie2Betc8_ZuE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CE0Q6AEwCGoVChMI3IqyqMiJyAIVyHs-Ch1bHgvo#v=onepage&q=covenanters%20slavery&f=false) ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/52 "2015-09-22T03:13:30Z")
Wait, who said Islam doesn’t have the concept of human rights? Sharia law provides a number of rights. It’s not a particularly well balanced set of rights, it’s not always followed, and it doesn’t measure up to modern standard, but it’s not nothing. Sharia law provides rules regarding marriage and inheritance that provide women with some rights to inherit property, something that many contemporary societies didn’t. It provides children with certain rights to be cared for financially. It requires that men support their wives equally, and that money that a woman earns is hers and hers alone to spend. It allows women to refuse to live with their in-laws. It prohibits forced and child marriages. It allows women to propose marriage. It provides limited civil protections for some religious minorities. It provides protections for prisoners of war. It provides some rights to slaves. Again, not up to modern standards. I’m not saying it’s okay at all. But it’s not no rights at all. I’ve been to parts of the world where Islam is considered positively progressive for women, because the traditional religions allow one to literally buy and sell wives like cattle, and women were sick of being “sold as wives” for just long enough to be forced to work the fields for no pay in harvest season. ---
**Author:** ![sqweels](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f19dbf/32.png) [@sqweels](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sqweels)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 4:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/53 "2015-09-22T04:03:34Z")
Don’t forget that Christianity was on the wrong side of history when it came to women’s suffrage. ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/54 "2015-09-22T04:14:12Z")
> [@sqweels](#): > > Don’t forget that Christianity was on the wrong side of history when it came to women’s suffrage. Was it? I’m not aware of much religious opposition to women’s suffrage. I think, come to think of it, that you might have a stronger case if you argued that Christianity was on the wrong side when it came to suffrage, period. Organised religion tended to be reactionary when confronted with the horrors of the French Revolution, and that’s something which marked it for at least a century. Throughout the nineteenth century it generally tended towards royalism rather than republicanism, and saw no inherent value in the extension of the suffrage by, e.g., dropping property qualifications. ---
**Author:** ![Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aji_de_gallina/32/260_2.png) [@Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aji_de_Gallina)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 9:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/55 "2015-09-22T09:52:44Z")
> [@sqweels](#): > > Don’t forget that Christianity was on the wrong side of history when it came to women’s suffrage. How do you know which side history is/was on? What does “on the right side of history” mean? How does “on the right side of history” differ from “sqweels’ prefered social outcomes”? ---
**Author:** ![Robert163](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/4af34b/32.png) [@Robert163](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robert163)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 9:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/56 "2015-09-22T09:55:14Z")
> [@Aji\_de\_Gallina](#): > > How do you know which side history is/was on? > What does “on the right side of history” mean? > How does “on the right side of history” differ from “sqweels’ prefered social outcomes”? 1 Timothy 2:11-12English Standard Version (ESV) 11 Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. ---
**Author:** ![up\_the\_junction](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f1d935/32.png) [@up\_the\_junction](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/up_the_junction)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 11:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/57 "2015-09-22T11:04:57Z")
LOL. WFT is ‘Timothy’. It doesn’t matter … it means “Christianity was on the wrong side of history”. What ever the fuck that means. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/58 "2015-09-22T12:30:21Z")
> [@UDS](#): > > This doesn’t quite hang together for me. The Great Awakening is largely a phenomenon of American Protestant Christianity, yet the US was one of the _last_ western countries to abolish slavery. Slavery was abolished in England, for example, in 1569; in Poland in 1347. So we can hardly attribute the abolition of slavery in the west to the Great Awakening. It was in the United States. > [@](#): > > By stressing the moral imperative to end sinful practices and each person’s responsibility to uphold God’s will in society, preachers like Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel Taylor, and Charles G. Finney in what came to be called the Second Great Awakening led massive religious revivals in the 1820s that gave a major impetus to the later emergence of abolitionism as well as to such other reforming crusades as temperance, pacifism, and women’s rights. By the early 1830s, Theodore D. Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Elizur Wright, Jr., all spiritually nourished by revivalism, had taken up the cause of “immediate emancipation.” [Cite](http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/abolitionist-movement). Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![andros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e480ec/32.png) [@andros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/andros)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/59 "2015-09-22T14:05:34Z")
> [@Aji\_de\_Gallina](#): > > How do you know which side history is/was on? > What does “on the right side of history” mean? > How does “on the right side of history” differ from “sqweels’ prefered social outcomes”? Don’t be disingenuous. Obviously his premise is that “universal suffrage is a societal good.” ---
**Author:** ![andros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e480ec/32.png) [@andros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/andros)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2015, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539/60 "2015-09-22T14:06:46Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > It was in the United States. Sure, but the US is not “the West.” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-human-rights-just-an-outgrowth-of-christian-culture/731539.md?page=4)