How Christianity Influenced the Development of Individual Rights – Part 1

Inventing the individual.

Before we explore some of the data on religion and religious influences in American society generally, it’s worth examining how Christianity influenced the development of individual rights.  It’s not an immediately intuitive notion, since organized religion, just like any other large organization, has a tendency toward groupthink.  But historian Larry Siedentop has compiled the fascinating history of Christianity that shows how the religion itself (and not any rebellions against it) largely incentivized the development of the concept of individual rights.

A comprehensive survey of public political writings during the “founding era” of 1760 through 1805 noted “the prominence of biblical sources for American political thought, since it was highly influential in our political tradition, and is not always given the attention it deserves.”  Indeed, biblical citations in public political discussions during the founding era were the most frequent, greater even than references to Enlightenment authors and the common law.

But how did Christianity itself sow the seeds of the individual rights our Founders argued for and fought to preserve and expand?  What changes did Christianity itself spur over the previous 1,800 years?

In his book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Larry Siedentop describes how, long before the Protestant Revolution and the Enlightenment, the core ideas of Christianity developed a governing concept of sovereign individuals with unalienable rights.  In a book review, David Gress aptly summarizes the beginning of the book:

Mr. Siedentop begins his analytical narrative by contrasting ancient ideas of family and cosmos with the ideas provoked by early Christianity. In the ancient world, he says, the individual did not exist as such. Everyone had his place within a hierarchy, which in turn determined all aspects of existence. The core unit was the family, ruled by the “paterfamilias.” Similarly, the fundamental maxim of Roman law was to “give each his due,” which meant assigning to each a particular status within the all-encompassing web of social and legal norms: the father as ruler of the family, the emperor as ruler of the state and its people, and the slave as a “human tool” subject to the will of his owner. Roman law presumed indelible distinctions: slave-free, citizen-alien, master-follower.  Christianity, as preached by St. Paul in the first century and by St. Augustine in the fourth, promised something quite different, and revolutionary. “In Paul’s writings,” Mr. Siedentop writes, “we see the emergence of a new sense of justice, founded on the assumption of moral equality rather than on natural inequality.” A Christian idea of individual dignity, Mr. Siedentop says, led to what we call the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

As Siedentop writes:

First, Jesus crucified; then, Jesus resurrected. Previously in antiquity, it was the patriarchal family that had been the agency of immortality. Now, through the story of Jesus, individual moral agency was raised up as providing a unique window into the nature of things, into the experience of grace rather than necessity, a glimpse of something transcending death. The individual replaced the family as the focus of immortality … The biblical scenes painted on the walls of churches – especially scenes of the passion of the Christ and his resurrection – testified that the immortal soul, rather than the immortal family, was the primary constituent of reality. Is it mere chance that the doctrine of purgatory emerged at this time, with its emphasis on a period of purging individual sins? The doctrine reflected the spread from monasteries of penitential rules and the practice of individual confession. The claims of family, clan and caste were weakening.

The Second Commandment was also a great leap forward in recognizing the inherent dignity of others.  Siedentop quotes St. Paul:

“For the whole law is fulfilled in one word ... ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Those premises promised to create a transparency and freedom previously lacking in human relations. So in Paul’s writings we see the emergence of a new sense of justice, founded on the assumption of moral equality rather than on natural inequality. Justice now speaks to an upright will, rather than describing a situation where everything is in its “proper” or fated place. Paul’s conception of the Christ exalts the freedom and power of human agency, when rightly directed. In his vision of Jesus, Paul discovered a moral reality which enabled him to lay the foundation for a new, universal social role.

Then there was Christianity’s focus on the poor:

The rhetoric of the poor carried within it the seeds of a new form of society. “Urban notables had presented themselves as standing at the head of an entire social hierarchy, made up of all active participants in the life of the city. The Christian bishop, by contrast, erected his claim to authority over a social void. The poor were defined as those who belonged to no social grouping.”  Thus, “love of the poor” extended public concern beyond the citizen class, a privileged class. Bishops’”love of the poor” reached out to the servile, destitute and foreign-born, to groups without standing in the hierarchy of citizens. They were offered a home. It was an irresistible offer.

This direct recognition of the least-well-off tended to “cut out the middlemen” of elite society who might otherwise pick and choose who got what status:

Intermediaries became suspect. The cult of the ancient family, the association of citizens in the polis, local notables: these could no longer legitimately interpose themselves into the only relationship which had a divine sanction. Humans, despite their manifold inherited social roles, were becoming individuals, each deemed to have a soul. The ancient vision of hierarchy, social as well as natural, was fading … Peter Brown has noticed and described that impact: “The emperor … yielded to bishops and to holy men because even Christ himself had yielded, to become a man like those he ruled. Swathed in majesty, the emperor made plain, not that he shared a culture with his upper-class subjects, but, rather, despite all appearances to the contrary, he shared a common humanity with all Christians.”

While still subjugated in dramatic ways, women came to be afforded choices they hadn’t had before:

By the third century “dedicated virgins” had acquired a new prestige in upper-class families and, indeed, in the Christian community at large. What was the most striking possible evidence of a woman’s freedom in the “new age”? The answer was sexual renunciation, a manifest act of individual will … The creation of ascetic communities for women – what were to become convents – marked the emergence of women from the ancient family, from the permanent subordinations of the domestic sphere. It is hardly surprising that upper-class women led the way.

When men became priests or monks, they, too, were distancing themselves from the family and other old traditions, in whatever fits and starts:

Of course, these principles were often compromised in practice. Social conditions changed, particularly in the West, as the Roman empire succumbed to successive invasions by Germanic tribes in the fifth century. The habit of families “giving” their children to monasteries and convents developed, in part as a reaction to growing social disorder. And the notion that the children’s “vocation” had to be confirmed by themselves when they reached maturity – in a free act of will – tended to be more theoretical than real … Yet something survived the chaos and the compromises. Today, the mixed reputation enjoyed by monasticism since the sixteenth century makes it hard to recapture the prestige it had enjoyed in its earlier centuries. Yet at the end of antiquity the image it offered of a social order founded on equality, limiting the role of force and honouring work, while devoting itself to prayer and acts of charity, gave it a powerful hold over minds. Monasticism preserved the image of a regular society when the pax romana was being undermined, first by the overthrow of the Western empire (476) after the Germanic invasions, and then by Muslim conquests in the East. The image of social order that monasticism preserved was not that of the ancient world. Rather, it suggested a new foundation for social order. For, despite its many failings and compromises, monasticism associated the ideas of law and of obedience not with unthinking custom or external force, but with individual consent and the role of conscience. Monasticism offered the glimpse of “another world,” a world that at least approximated to Christian moral intuitions. Slowly, but surely, that glimpse of another world further eroded beliefs and practices surviving from the ancient world.

Siedentop points out that even the concept of “purgatory” allowed for one last chance to choose before final judgment:

Invoking a day of judgement testified to the reality of human freedom (something also implied by the church’s constant struggle against vulgar forms of determinism such as belief in astrology, the stars’ control over human destiny). That emphasis on the judgement of individual souls generated – during the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries – a new belief in the “purging” of individual sins during a transitional period after death (“purgatory”) but before the apocalyptic Last Judgement. A touch of freedom thus invaded even the afterlife.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore how the concept of equal status under God translated into (more) equal status under law.

Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.