King Mwanga II ascended the throne of Buganda at the age of 16 on 18th October 1884. The 19th century Bantu kingdom, located in present day Uganda, was the focus of Christian missionaries during the Scramble for Africa. Traditionally, the Bugandan king’s power was absolute, and that included pleasing his sexual appetite through the unyielding pages of his harem. His great humiliation arrived in the form of recently converted Catholic pages refusing his sexual advances. Furious, Mwanga burnt alive 45 Christian converts at Namugongo in 1886, later christened as the Uganda Martyrs.
On a purely physical basis, Mwanga’s power appeared unshaken. Resisting his political authority led to certain death. But there was a sphere where his power was forever curtailed: the human mind. By conferring a belief in individual dignity hitherto unknown to the harem pages, Christianity created the will to resist absolute power. For Mwanga, his power no longer extends to the minds of his subjects, but only their physical bodies.
Imago Dei and Individual Dignity
The Christian affirmation of individual dignity is most clearly inferred from Scripture’s notion of the Imago Dei, the idea that God made humanity in his image. There are three principle implications of this belief. Firstly, dignity is inherent. By virtue of being a human being, this basic dignity is conferred. Secondly, dignity is equal. All humans are afforded a basic level of dignity because they are made in God’s image. Lastly, dignity is individual. It is not an honour conferred to a family, clan or tribe, but a dignity that individuals possess.
Christianity’s notion of individual dignity is not universally shared by all cultures. The pre-Christian inability for Mwanga’s harem pages to resist sexual advances by the king is but one example. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle described slaves as ‘living tools’ . Aristotle surmised that if slaves did not possess the vaunted capacity for Reason, it would not be good to free them, for they would be incapable of governing their own lives and needed a master to direct their livelihoods. Larry Siedentop, in his book Inventing the Individual, pointed out that Greek conception of Reason implied social superiority, where there is a ‘natural hierarchy’ of human beings who are more or less rational (p.34 – 35). In fact, Homeric Greek did not have the word for ‘intention’. Rather, rational individuals were ‘naturally’ predisposed to command, while those with less capacity for reasons were ‘naturally’ predisposed to obey (ibid., p. 35- 36). Greek dignity is therefore an aristocratic and cognitive birthright, neither inherent nor equal in all individuals.
The advent of Christianity transformed how the Greco-Roman world understood human dignity. According to St. Paul, God’s love is non-exclusive. The famous passage in Galatians 3:28-29 speaks of neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, being one in Christ. A modern reader might not notice, but the proclamation of slaves and freemen being equal in Christ will likely rankle the aristocratic citizens of the Greco-Roman world. Christ’s universal love, available to all, would in the coming centuries displace the notion of Greek rationality and its hierarchy of dignity. When the modern West speaks of freedom and equality as fundamental rights for all individuals, this is at its core, a recognition of basic dignity inherent in all human beings. This is a heritage of the West that owes more to Christ and St. Paul than to the Greco-Roman civilisation.
Individual Dignity and the Limits of of Political Authority
Christianity’s notion of dignity being present — at least to a basic degree — in all individuals, has political consequences. The most obvious is the right to resist, as Mwanga found to his consternation. If all, even the lowliest slaves, possess an inherent and basic degree of dignity, there will be actions committed by rulers upon the ruled, that are morally prohibited. A sphere of individual rights had been unconsciously delineated, beyond the control of the ruler.
This anti-autocratic tendency in Christianity is not self-evident, for historical Christianity has occasionally been part of imperial apparatuses desiring absolute power. Due to the limits of this article, I shall focus specifically on the Spanish Catholic monarchy which established the first European colonial empire. In particular, I cite historian Edwin Williamson’s highly accessible The Penguin History of Latin America for my subsequent argument.
It is important not to, in the name of postcolonial repentance, sanitize the pre-Columbian societies predating Spanish rule. The Aztecs and Incans too were imperial powers, with subject kingdoms unhappy with the exploitative tributary system. Both empires were militaristic, suggesting a false stability created through force (ibid., p.41). The Aztec and Incan religions were tools of imperial projection. For instance, the Incan emperor (Sapa Inca) was believed to possess divine descent that legitimizes its heriditary rule (ibid., p.51). Pachacuti, the 9th Sapa Inca, instituted the belief in the Supreme Being Viracocha, in order to derive all Incan ancestor gods from him (ibid., p.52). This is an imperialistic religion, as it allows the deities of subject polities to be subsumed under a supreme Incan god and hence justify Incan rule.
It is important to make a critical assessment of the Incan faith in relation to human dignity at this juncture. The doctrine of divine descent necessarily implies a hierarchy of dignities, where Supa Inca is inherently more dignified than his subjects, not just by virtue of his position, but by his divinity. This is similar to an extent with the Spanish monarchy, which exalted the king’s God-given authority over the rights of nobles and other subjects (ibid., p.59). Spanish political thinkers commonly construed Church and State as interdependent element within the Catholic monarchy, forming a mutual alliance guaranteeing political legitimacy (ibid., p.65). Indeed, king John II of Castile even proclaimed, in 1439 in response to critique of royal power:
So great is the king’s right of power that all the laws and all the rights are beneath him, and he holds this position not from men but from God, whose place he holds in temporal matters (ibid).
While both the Spanish monarchy and Incan empire used religion as justification for political absolutism, only the Spanish had any significant degree of religious opposition to imperial autocracy. Althought Spanish governance fostered a political ideology that interweaved Catholic faith with absolute monarchy, it was also the very Catholic faith that challenged unchecked political power. The theologian Francisco de Vitoria argued that, in addition to the laws of God, the Spanish king’s will ought to be constrained by natural law common to all humanity (ibid., 64). This theory was intended to protect the ‘pagan’ Indians in America against the abuse of power by Spanish conquistadors.
Again, we must pause to assess the Christian concept of dignity and its influence on imperial Spanish politics. Firstly, the idea of natural law confers inherent dignity, at least in theory, to the oppressed Indians. This is absent in the Incan religion towards its tributary subjects. Secondly, natural law restricts the monarch’s power by delineating a sphere of inalienable rights individuals possess that the State cannot interfere upon. Lastly, natural law provided effective deterrence — not just in theory, but in practice — against unrestrained autocracy, as it derived from the same Catholic foundations of Spanish absolutism. In short, the Spanish project of justifying political absolutism has within itself a mechanism to deny said absolutism.
It is from this final point that the Salamanca theologians argued that Spain has no intrinsic right according to natural law to conquer or dispossess Indian territories and lands, and only had the right to preach Christian faith to the New World (ibid., p.65). The renowned Dominican Bartholomew de las Casas went further: to advocate the end of conquest and withdrawal of Spain from the colonized Indies (ibid., p.66). Las Casas defense of Indians had a significant impact on imperial policy and its legal framework regulating relations between Spaniards and their colonial subjects.
This is, of course, not to deny or downplay the massive societal upheaval caused by the Spanish conquest, nor of the severe inequality between natives, mestizos and Spaniards, and not least the resulting epidemics from the Old World that scourged the natives without natural immunity. But there is truth that the church played a significant role in granting a degree of dignity to subjects and hence limited Spanish political absolutism. This was not true of the pre-Columbian imperial religions.
Individual Dignity: Social Contract & Public Accountability
The doctrine of Imago Dei led to a unique conception of Christian dignity equal in and inherent to all individuals. From Spain to Buganda, Christian faith led to checks on limitless political power by delineating a sphere of individual dignity that a ruler cannot transgress. Yet, this is fairly rudimentary, for beyond this limited sphere, Christian dignity seemed to speak little on how rulers should behave. Instead, the idea of a ruler’s political obligation towards the ruled emerged under a different set of conditions in the 11th – 13th century.
In the 11th century, the conflict between sacred and secular powers reached a new height. The conflict between Pope Gregory VII and the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV ignited a major debate in medieval political thought. The debate centred primarily on the reach of secular powers into the sacred. For the papal reformers, they sought separation of church from state. Unlike modern debates which assumed secularism to guard against the interference of the church into state affairs, the converse was true in the 11th century. The reformers hence sought to end the kingly practice of arbitrarily appointing bishops. Gregory went further as to claim his legitimacy to depose a secular king. For Henry, his interest in retaining power in bishop selection was because bishops served critical roles in the governance of his kingdom. This view rested upon the argument that the royal office was an ecclesiastical one, thus the king was head of the church (B. Tierney, The Crsis of Church and State, 1050 – 1300, p.74).
Of critical importance to this article’s argument is the thought of Manegold of Lautenbach. Unlike his papal reformist peers, his argument did not assert the pope to possess temporal jurisdiction to depose kings. Rather, he proposed what we would now understand as a social contract theory. For Manegold, the king’s power was derived from the people, with the understanding that he would rule justly. Consequently, if the king became a tyrant, the contract is broken and hence the citizenry has a right to resist (ibid.).
Manegold’s social contract theory is explicitly of Christian provenance, for it fundamentally assumes the idea of natural law that the Spanish theologians in subsequent centuries would use. Natural law conjectures a divine moral law above human laws, and hence public power cannot subvert moral conscience (Siedentop, p.213). By claiming that citizens are released from obligation to obey a tyrant, Manegold is assuming the right to public accountability. This goes beyond a sphere of individual dignity that is untouchable by rulers, but also that individual dignity can only be preserved by a ruler obliged to his citizens, and hence expanding the sphere of Christian dignity to include political obligation of the ruler to towards his citizens.
By the 13th century, Pope Innocent would expand the idea of natural law and natural rights to pagans. The initial intent is to protect the possessions and rights of Christians in non-Christian lands, but it would unintentionally sow the seeds for protecting pagans in Christian kingdoms as well (ibid., 257-258). Although not consciously intended by the Pope, this is a natural development of Christian dignity’s inherent equality. Just as Paul proclaimed there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ, likewise there is neither Christian nor pagan who lack the inherent dignity of one created in God’s image. Here, Siedentop rightly recognized the Latin church’s development of natural laws and rights as the precursor to modern liberalism and its focus on human rights (ibid., p.244).
Individual Dignity and Human Rights
Christian dignity not only confers a sphere of individual will free from a ruler’s control, but eventually creates a belief in a ruler’s political obligation towards citizenry conferred through ideas of natural law and rights. The next consequence of this is the emergence of a conception of human rights, for rights fundamentally presuppose inherent, equal and individual dignity.
A few points of clarification are necessary before we trace the history of ideas from natural law to human rights. Firstly, it is important not to assume human rights to be universally accepted across time and geography. Historically, as this article demonstrated of ancient Greece, Rome and Buganda, many cultures presume an inequality in worth of individual humans. This assumption of universal rights is understandable, for we currently live under an international system that pretends to be international, but is in fact of specifically Christian (or post-Christian) provenance. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted, the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Sai Rajaie-Khorassani declared the UDHR to represent a “secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition”, and that it was not possible for the Islamic world to implement without transgressing Islamic law. One might be tempted to distrust a diplomat of an autocratic state, but he is in fact very observant. The West takes for granted human rights only because of its millennia-long Christian heritage, and despite the mass deconversions in recent decades, their deep-rooted Christian moral instincts remain, albeit unconsciously.
Secondly, the human rights are developed differently in different cultures, of which the UDHR only represents a distinctively Christian version of. This is not to claim that other cultures have no conception of human rights, nor that there are no overlapping similarities. The scholar Dipti Patel had written an excellent paper on how Judeo-Christianity and Hinduism share great congruence on matters of rights, equality and religious freedom. Likewise, the Middle Eastern states have agreed upon the Cario Declaration on Human Rights in Islam with some similarity to the UDHR. However, the understanding of human rights differ to some extent. For instance, Article 10 of the CDHRI prohibits compulsion away from Islam towards another faith or atheism, contrasting with the UDHR’s proclamation of religious freedom of conscience. This latter ideal, although frequently violated throughout church history, has nonetheless a long history in the Christian tradition that can be traced back to Tertullian in the 2nd century (Siedentop, p.78). In short, ideals of individual dignity are protected to a subtle and sophisticated degree in non-Christian cultures, but they are distinct from the UDHR’s Christian-influenced ones.
With these clarifications aside, it is still not self-evident how Christian dignity led to human rights. The greatest challenge is the West’s post-Enlightenment historiography, which posits the freedom from religious faith to be the foundation of modern human rights. This dominant narrative minimizes Christianity’s influence on modern Western values while maximizing (and romanticising) the Greco-Roman civilisation’s impact. The inherent inequality propounded by Aristotle, and the hierarchical conception of Reason puts this historiography to question. If the Greeks and Romans believed in natural inequality, then the modern West’s notion of equal dignity can only arise from the West’s second civilisational source: Christianity.
In fact, to think the Enlightenment to be detached from Christianity is mistaken. The opposite is true: the Enlightenment is a product of Christian faith. In the American Declaration of Independence, the connection between theism and human rights is immediately clear:
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
The above statement make clear the Christian origins of human rights. The term ‘unalienable’ presupposed the inherent dignity conferred by the Imago Dei. The proclamation of ’all men’ assumes the equality of basic dignity that Paul alluded to in Galatians. Only the term ‘self-evident’ represented a break from the Christian tradition. The assumption of self-evidence is questionable given how many cultures, past and present, lack a conception of equal, inherent dignity. In fact, it betrays the reality that Christianity has entrenched itself so deeply within the West, that Christian notions of dignity are naively assumed to be universal; so commonplace they have become by the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment therefore did not so much reject Christianity as unleashed it. It is akin to a train that derailed but continued chugging along. Christian dignity, in the form of secularized human rights, found its way into the language of the UDHR. It is unclear whether this is a positive development. On one hand, a secularized version of Christian dignity had appealed to non-Christians across the world. This is what I meant by an ‘unleashing’ of Christianity; where its values are no longer confined to a certain religious demographic or geography. When we see human rights activists in China, Latin America or the Arab world, they unconsciously drink from the assumption of Christian dignity.
Yet, the modern detachment of Christianity from human rights, as can be seen from organizations such as Amnesty International, made their rhetoric far less effective. Without the epistemic foundation of Christian dignity, how can human rights organizations defend the reality of their values? In December 2023, the UN reported that the Taliban is putting women abuse survivors into prison for their protection. One Taliban official claimed there is no need for shelters as they were a ‘Western concept’.
He is entirely wrong: it is Christian concept. But his rhetoric does expose a weakness in the secular West. If human rights have no clear religious foundation, then cultures that degrade human dignity can use the excuse that human rights are culturally-specific and cannot apply to theirs. This relativist argument exposes the weakness of secularized human rights; it requires a far stronger concept, one drawn from the 2000-year old Christian tradition, to ground human dignity in.
Christian Dignity: A Cultural ‘Sanctification’?
The Protestant doctrine of sanctification describes the process by which an individual who has already believed in Christ, is made holy. This is perhaps speculative, but from a broad historical sweep, is it reasonable to claim that Christianity can sanctify entire cultures too?
As this article has endeavoured to demonstrate, Christian dignity, although not explicitly of political purpose, has long-term political consequences. Firstly, it curbs political absolutism by making sacred the individual will, off-limits to political coercion. Secondly, it confers citizenry the dignity to be treated fairly, hence expecting political obligation of a ruler towards the ruled. Thirdly, in its more developed phase (papal reforms, Spanish Catholic monarchy), the idea of natural law and rights entrench individual dignity in both culture and legislation. Lastly, the unleashing of Christian values in secularized institutions such as the UDHR led to Christian dignity becoming an international phenomenon. This process of ’cultural sanctification’ took place across many centuries. Its development was uneven, and occasionally, even the Church undermined this process. Yet, the long-term results are clear: Christian values create societies with unparalleled dignity compared to most parts of the world.
Although cultural sanctification is usually slow, sometimes, these instincts can arise very quickly. Christianity is a relatively youthful religion in Singapore, yet the contrasts in political instincts of Christians and other faiths are striking. In September 2023, a Pew Research report on Southeast Asia revealed that 55% of Singaporeans believe in the right to publicly criticize the government. Yet significant differences emerge by religious group: 59% of Christians believe in public critique of the government, while only 40% of traditional Chinese religions affirm this. The Christian instinct for public accountability is, expectedly, significantly stronger.
There are some limitations to this brief article, chiefly the lack of attending to Eastern church history and their cultural sanctification. This is quite a crucial, as the early Eastern church practiced a form of ‘democratic’ governance that is dissimilar to the papacy’s centralization around the Pope. This is complicated by the currently most politically influential Eastern church, that of Russian Orthodoxy. While much of my article has focused on the anti-absolutism of political power found in Christian instincts, Russian Christianity had taken historically the anomalously different direction of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality“. I hope to address the Russian question in another article.
The Stranger Beyond the Gate 