Rights and Liberty in the Western Legal Tradition
by Mark David Hall, Public Discoure:
John Witte, Jr.’s The Blessings of Liberty offers a wonderful overview of the development of human rights in the West. He contends that natural rights are found in the Bible, were developed by Christian thinkers, and played an important role in the West long before Enlightenment thinkers wrote about them. Witte also focuses on religious freedom more narrowly as the preeminent right.
Far too many accounts of Western intellectual history claim that natural rights were largely unknown until brilliant Enlightenment thinkers discovered them. Christians, it is commonly asserted, opposed these rights, especially the freedom of conscience.
John Witte, Jr. tells a very different tale in The Blessings of Liberty: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the Western Legal Tradition. He contends that natural rights are found in the Bible, were developed by Christian thinkers, and played an important role in the West long before Enlightenment thinkers wrote about them.
Few academics are better equipped to make this argument than Witte, the Woodruff University Professor, McDonald Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Witte has authored or edited more than forty books and three hundred articles, many of which are on the relationship between religion and law. The Blessings of Liberty mostly comprises previously published works, but they have been updated and repurposed into a coherent book.
The volume provides well-researched insights not just into natural rights in Christian thought, but also into the significant role of a particular right—religious liberty—in Western law and politics. Witte also offers an excellent overview of the status of religious liberty and church–state relations in the United States and Europe.
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