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OPINION
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Human rights of divergent views even of those which we may disapprove. Some 17 years after the death of Constantine, there was born in Numidia the most important Christian theologian since St. Paul – indeed, arguably, the most important Christian theologian of all. He is known to us as Saint Augustine of Hippo. Augustine developed Pauline theology, in particular on the question of the individual conscience and the relationship of the individual soul with God. Siedentop also treats St. Augustine as decisive in the development of the moral notions which would, in later centuries, evolve into what we now recognize as liberalism. He notes that St. Augustine’s intense account of his own relationship with God in his autobiography, The Confessions, has led some to attribute to him with the birth of ‘the individual’. Inventing the individual, in the sense of acknowledging the equality of humans in the face of their maker, is not something that leads to isolation. Indeed, embracing or grasping the concept of the individual removes social class and status, clarifying the conditions that make true freedom possible. But, for St. Augustine, reason alone is not sufficient to motivate ethical behaviour; it must be accompanied, it must be invested with the grace of God. Siedentop outlines how St. Augustine understood this grace to motivate individuals to exercise their free
The idea of autonomous moral agency...can be directly traced to Christian belief.
will in order to ascend from everyday base desires to higher realms of thought and action. Now, one would rarely hear mention of St. Paul or St. Augustine in the political philosophy classes of a modern Australian university – except, perhaps, at this university – or, I daresay, in any Western university. One would be unlikely to find a professor of human rights law who acknowledged that human rights owed more to the Christian church than they did to the United Nations. Yet, the authors of the greatest affirmation of human rights ever penned – the Declaration of Independence – suffered no such limitation of their vision. “We hold these truths to be selfevident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable 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.” Thomas Jefferson was, of course, in every sense a man of the Enlightenment – indeed, some would argue, he was the Enlightenment’s most famous son. Yet Jefferson had no difficulty in accepting that the ultimate source of human rights is not any secular authority, but that they are an endowment of the creator. I do not say, of course, that human rights may not have a secular derivation. My concern is that, to an extent that is so frequent as to be almost universal, the discourse of human rights is conducted purely in secular terms. As I have argued in this lecture, that is partly due to the prevailing historical assumption that human rights, and the liberal premises which underlie them, are a product of the modern world alone. Yet, as the scholars to whom I have referred this evening demonstrate – and as Larry Siedentop, in particular, in his important
new book powerfully argues, the governing ethical principle which underlies our modern understanding of human rights – the moral equality of every human person and the right to liberty that follows from that, is a notion which had its origins in the Gospels, as developed and explained by the early Christian fathers, theologians and canon lawyers. If that be so, those who actually attack Christianity in the name of some personal view of human rights commit an egregious travesty. Religious belief is central to the human condition. Faith provides a means to help people that cannot be explained, even though it might be apprehended. It can also enable us to see ourselves as part of something larger, and thereby free ourselves from our base, everyday selfish concerns. Faith also has a unique ability to provide consolation in the face of life’s vicissitudes and to help us cope with its hardships. The Australia we know today is home to a diversity of faiths, united by tolerance, mutual respect and a commitment to democracy. Australians are free to choose their religion, and are able to express and practise their beliefs without intimidation and without interference, within the framework of Australian law and any attempt to interfere with that freedom is a profound outrage against our nation. + Senator George Brandis QC is Attorney-General of Australia. Full version of this speech is at biblesociety.org.au/brandis
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OPINION
OCTOBER 2014
23
Q. What do Muslims need? A. Love and truth MARK DURIE The past few weeks have been hard ones for Australians, not least for Australian Muslims. Various alleged plots by Islamic State supporters to slaughter Australians has Islam in the news. Even as I write, five out of ten of the “most popular” articles on The Australian’s website are about Islamic jihad and national security. What are ordinary Australians to make of conspiracy theories aired by Muslims on the ABC’s Q&A program, implying that recent police raids were staged as a cynical act to manipulate public opinion? Are Muslims being unfairly victimised by all these security measures? How are we to evaluate Senator Jacqui Lambie’s claim that sharia law “obviously involves terrorism”? Or the Prime Minister’s decision to mobilise Australian troops against the Islamic State? What about the Islamic State’s grandiose claim that “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.” Or Mr Abbott’s declaration that the balance between freedom and security needs to be adjusted in favour of greater security and less freedom?
Earlier this month, an 18-year-old Melbourne man, Numan Haider, was shot dead by police after he stabbed two officers outside a suburban police station. At the time of writing, news was breaking that authorities believed he intended to behead a police officer and post the photos online. Prison officers in Goulburn jail have struggled to contain the worst riot in ten years, during which rampaging prisoners were heard to be crying “Allahu Akbar.” A Christian woman who works in a church close by an Islamic centre has asked her employer to install security measures to protect her and others at the church. Someone else, a convert from Islam to Christianity, reports that his personal sense of being under threat has risen, because he feels that people he knew from his earlier life as a radical Muslim are more likely to be activated to violence after the successes of the Islamic State and their global call to arms. Are such responses reasonable? Or are they Islamophobic? Many young Muslims have been using the hashtag #NotInMyName on social media. Many are insisting that IS does not speak for them: as Anne Aly put it “This isn’t in my name, this isn’t what Islam is about,
Mark asks: are Muslims being unfairly victimised? #notinmyname thinks so. I am against it and they don’t have my allegiance, they don’t have my support.” How then can we know the truth about Islam? What is a Christian response to all this? How can we find our way through these crises: does protecting national security mean
we risk losing some part of our soul? A truly Christian response to the multi-faceted challenge of “Muslims behaving badly” must embrace both truth and love in equal measure. Truth will acknowledge that the Islamic State ideologues do claim to speak for Islam, and that
they justify their actions from the Koran and Muhammad’s example. Truth will acknowledge that IS has recruited tens of thousands of Muslims to fight for their cause, but apparently not a single Christian, Jew or Buddhist. As Brother [continued on pg 24]
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Source: Active Change Foundation Youtube channel
According to this view, the idea of autonomous moral agency – the essential pre-requisite of the liberal view of society – can be directly traced to the Christian belief in the moral equality of every human soul. In St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, he writes: “For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’” (Gal 5:13-14) In his time, St. Paul encountered diverse belief systems amongst Jews, pagans and Christians. And he recognised that conflicts could arise when persons of different consciences interacted. Joyce Shin, of the University of Chicago, in her paper “Accommodating the Other’s Conscience: Saint Paul’s approach to Religious Tolerance”, points out that, in St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians, he provides guidance on how to accommodate those differences of belief. St. Paul’s view was that, at times, it is necessary to behave in a way which accords with the beliefs of the person with whom one is interacting, even if one does not share those beliefs. For St. Paul, that adaptability, that capacity to accommodate was an ethical value. This is, in effect, an approach to religious difference that emphasises the importance of being accommodating or tolerant. That aspect of Pauline theology is an obvious precursor of modern liberalism’s injunction to tolerance
OCTOBER 2014