RELIGION, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND POST-SECULAR LEGAL THEORY

The idea of human rights embodies the moral outlook and aspirations of modernity. It is through the language of human rights that political obligations are established and articulated, and it is through the language of human rights that an account of human nature and personhood is given meaning and form. Not only did human rights discourses cut themselves off from any dependence on religion, the idea of human rights has increasingly been defined as a moral tradition that stands over and against religion. Secularism was an article of peace which, by replacing the particularistic claims of religion with a universal logic, removed the source of sectarian dissent and violence. The universal and the secular were intimately connected aspects of a modern project that identified religion as a threat to public life. Human rights norms, by extension, became the public moral vocabulary within this new moral order.