Aaron Rhodes begins The Debasement of Human Rights (Encounter, 2018) with a strong sentence: “The international community’s concept of human rights lacks intellectual and moral integrity.” He shows that expansion of “human rights” from an emphasis on liberty to include government provision of food, housing, and healthcare kills the term’s essential meaning and moral power, and even becomes “moral justification for strong states to restrict freedom in return for security.”

Rhodes traces the decline of the term to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights following World War II. Soviet functionaries and American progressives led the way to a document “emphasizing collective rather than individual rights.” For decades the emphasis was on economics—everyone has the right to a guaranteed income—but recently it has switched to sex: The International Sexuality and HIV Curriculum Working Group has declared that we have a right to sexual expression and the pursuit of sexual pleasure.

Children’s rights are also at the forefront: Nearly 200 countries have signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which says a child has the right to “receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds [in] media of the child’s choice”: Governments should ensure that a child “has access to information and material from a diversity of national and international sources.”

Furthermore, the UNCRC says “no child shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy”—which means that parents are out-of-line to seek information about a daughter’s abortion. The United States is the only UN member that has not ratified the UNCRC—which means we don’t believe that government officials outrank parents, and we don’t want American parents sent to jail for protecting their kids from propaganda and porn.

Rhodes says the basis for real human rights is “the moral teachings of Jerusalem and the rational philosophy of Athens,” but he acknowledges that Aristotle “shared his contemporaries’ expectations that the state should coercively shape the character of citizens.” That’s one reason Tertullian (c. A.D. 155-240) was wise to ask, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?”

Rhodes examines the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who “showed how moral and ethical questions can be solved by reason” and wanted a society “in which individuals employ reason in making moral and political decisions.” Rhodes shows G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) reasoning his way to calling human rights “empty abstractions” and arguing that “true freedom could be realized only through the state.” That opened the door to Karl Marx’s linking of progress to the seizure of governmental power.

Much of history demonstrates that two Biblical teachings offer the only consistent path to human rights: Political power should never be absolute, and the sacredness of each human soul is absolute.

BOOKMARKS

Craig Bartholomew’s Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition (IVP, 2017) is a scholarly introduction to the work of the great Dutch theologian/editor/prime minister. He shows how Abraham Kuyper opposed Friedrich Nietzsche by emphasizing Christ: “Certainly if there is anyone who is a radical protest against the very idea of evolution, it is he who came down from the Father of lights to manifest himself as God in the flesh.” Kuyper understood the logical outcome of belief in evolution: absolute nihilism. In From Broken Glass (Hachette, 2018) Steve Ross tells how he survived the applied nihilism known as Hitler’s death camps.

Jay Stringer’s Unwanted (NavPress, 2018) examines a key childhood driver of unwanted sexual behavior: Three-fourths of the 3,800 sexually struggling men and women he surveyed report having “rigid” parents and almost 90 percent say they grew up with “disengaged” parents: Clearly, the overlap can be particularly toxic. Nearly half reported that their mothers had confided in them frustrations concerning their fathers. Stringer argues that those with porn problems need more than exhortation to cease, admit, and join an accountability group. They need to recognize and end generational curses. —M.O.