Religious Liberty and Evangelical Identity Politics

Last Thursday Baptist ethicist Russell Moore made a case for religious liberty in a way that perhaps startled critics who see conservative evangelicals as theocrats. He advocated on behalf of non-Christians. At a Washington, D.C., symposium entitled“Faith, Culture & Religious Freedom in the 21st Century,” Moore said that evangelicals have done a poor job of paying attention to the religious freedom of others. He declared, “One of the mistakes people made in the past is a kind of majoritarian understanding, maintaining our own rights without diligently fighting for religious liberty for all persons.”

To be sure, too many evangelicals still focus more on their own liberties than others’. But Moore’s declaration reflects the maturing of evangelical thinking on human rights and religious freedom. Late to join the human rights movement, evangelicals began to issue a stream of increasingly sophisticated books and conferences in the 1970s. The evangelical left led the way with hundreds of screeds against human rights violations perpetrated by totalitarian regimes, with special attention directed to Western imperialisms. Soon after, an increasingly invested evangelical right, which had been preoccupied with Communist and Muslim violations, joined the ranks. Frank Wolf, a Republican representative from Virginia, became one of Congress’s most active advocates of human rights. He spoke out against Iran’s “systematic persecution” of the Baha’is, China’s persecution of women and Christians, and genocide in Darfur. Pepperdine University School of Law’s human rights programhas blossomed. And a bevy of other human rights organizations has also emerged: the American Anti-Slavery Group, International Justice Mission, and Evangelicals for Human Rights, which has campaigned almost exclusively against American torture of Muslim detainees. Many of these groups lobbied to pass the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) of 1998, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, the Sudan Peace Act of 2002, and the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004. Out of a context in which many secular groups, seeing religion as an oppressive force, have been blind to the plight of persecuted Christians, some commentators now argue that evangelicals have become the new leaders of the human rights movement.

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