Where do human rights come from?

Where do human rights come from? The question is fitting as this week marks two internationally recognized commemorations of fundamental human rights. But such rights are contested on today’s global stage, and that is because there are fundamental disagreements about their origin.

Dec. 9 is International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime. The day’s roots go back to the 1948 Genocide Convention, which was a legal response to Nazi efforts to eradicate an entire people group through grotesque applications of modern industrial techniques.

This heinous nature of the Holocaust shocked the world’s conscience. Why? Because almost everyone understood that these atrocities were evil. Why were they considered evil? Because those subjected to brutal medical experimentation, torture, starvation, and mass murder were human beings with inherent moral worth.

Everybody used to know this!

Dec. 10 is the annual commemoration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 1948 Declaration is important because it recognizes the fundamental liberties that protect individual human beings: freedoms of speech, conscience, religion, assembly, the press, private property, and the like. The Declaration is a non-binding, aspirational document, but most of its language on religious liberty and other freedoms is replicated in the legally binding International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights treaty. One hundred seventy-four countries—including some of today’s rogue governments such as Russia, Belarus, Vietnam, and Venezuela—have promised under the ICCPR to protect the fundamental rights of their citizens.

Americans should be proud that our own constitutional order was the model for these documents. Americans should be proud that morally ambitious Americans, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, provided leadership in the drafting of these covenants. Moreover, Americans should be proud that from a spirit of neighbor-love, not cultural imperialism, we demand that foreign governments respect their legal commitments to respect the religious freedom and other liberties of their citizens. The persecuted abroad know they have no better friend than America.

In a world of continuing human rights violations, these anniversaries are a teachable moment for answering the question, “where do human rights come from?”

Americans know the answer, as it is rooted in the greatest expression of our national identity:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

To be very clear, Americans used to have a firm conviction that human rights originate in God’s creation of humanity. Martin Luther King, Jr. called them “God-given rights” in his masterful Letter from Birmingham Jail. Being “endowed by their Creator” comes from the Judeo-Christian Scriptures that God breathed the breath of spiritual life into human beings, making them in His image: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Human beings have a natural, inherent, moral worth that is endowed by their Creator. It is not the gift of the powerful or government.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution picks up this theme that governments are “instituted among men” to secure, or protect, “these rights.” It does so by expressly limiting government intervention in the most fundamental individual rights: those of religion, conscience, assembly, speech, the ability to access and share information, and the like:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

We live in a time when this view of human rights is under attack. There have always been totalitarians and elites who believe that power dispenses rights and privileges, usually to their own elite group to the detriment of everyone else. We still have those people with us today, in places such as Havana, Moscow, and Beijing.

Unfortunately, the rise of so-called critical theories, which are supposed to call out power inequalities, are typically rooted in moral relativism: They do not just expose historic injustices but advance the postmodern view that there is simply no truth out there. That is how those wielding critical theories to analyze old inequalities have made themselves the new revolutionaries: Any and all authority—including religious authority, divine authority, scriptural authority—is anathema.

Power does not create human rights, though the powerful have a responsibility to respect and defend the rights of everyone. That is because human rights have a transcendent, enduring source.