You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The relationship between religion and human rights is one of the richest and most contested areas of the AQA dialogues, because religion stands on both sides of the ledger at once. On the one hand, the very idea that every human being possesses an inviolable dignity that no state may override has deep religious roots, and religious believers and institutions have been at the forefront of many of the great rights struggles — the abolition of slavery, the civil-rights movement, the campaign against apartheid. On the other hand, religious law and authority have repeatedly collided with the modern human-rights framework, most sharply over the freedom to change or leave one's religion, the equal treatment of women and of LGBT+ people, blasphemy and free expression, and corporal punishment. The deepest question running through the whole topic is whether human rights are genuinely universal — binding on all cultures because grounded in something true about the human person — or a particular, historically Western and substantially secular construction now being pressed, sometimes coercively, on traditions that never consented to it. This lesson examines the founding documents, the architecture of the right to religious freedom, religion's positive contribution to rights, and the principal points of conflict, before modelling an evaluative essay.
Key term: Human rights — fundamental rights and freedoms held to belong to every human being simply by virtue of being human, regardless of nationality, sex, ethnicity or religion; asserted as universal (everyone), inalienable (cannot be forfeited) and indivisible (a single interdependent set).
Key term: Universalism vs cultural relativism — the dispute over whether human rights are valid for all peoples and cultures (universalism) or are merely the values of one culture, illegitimately generalised, so that each society should be judged by its own standards (relativism). The religion-and-rights debate turns largely on this axis.
The modern human-rights framework was forged in the moral wreckage of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948, sets out a comprehensive list of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights declared to be universal. Its drafting committee, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, was deliberately cross-cultural — including the Lebanese Christian philosopher Charles Malik, the Chinese (Confucian-influenced) diplomat P. C. Chang, and the French Jewish jurist René Cassin — a fact defenders cite against the charge that the UDHR is merely a Western document. The UDHR is a declaration and so not in itself legally binding; it was given binding force through two 1966 covenants (the ICCPR on civil and political rights, and the ICESCR on economic, social and cultural rights). At the regional level the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR, 1950) makes a similar set of rights enforceable in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and in the UK the Human Rights Act 1998 brought those rights directly into domestic law.
| Article | Right (relevant to religion) |
|---|---|
| UDHR Article 1 | All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights |
| UDHR Article 2 | Rights apply without distinction of any kind, including religion |
| UDHR Article 18 | Freedom of thought, conscience and religion (including to change one's religion) |
| UDHR Article 19 | Freedom of opinion and expression |
| ECHR Article 9 | Freedom of thought, conscience and religion (with a qualified right to manifest) |
| ECHR Article 10 | Freedom of expression |
Religious freedom is the single right most central to this topic, and the candidate must understand its precise structure. Article 18 of the UDHR states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance." The explicit inclusion of the freedom to change one's religion is, as we shall see, the most internationally contested clause in the entire Declaration.
The right has an internal architecture, expressed in Article 9 of the ECHR and the case law around it, that turns on a crucial distinction between holding and manifesting belief:
| Dimension | What it covers | Can it be limited? |
|---|---|---|
| Forum internum | The inner freedom to hold, adopt or change beliefs | Absolute — never restrictable by the state |
| Forum externum | The freedom to manifest belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance | Qualified — may be limited where lawful, necessary and proportionate |
| Freedom to change | The right to convert to, or leave, a religion | Protected in international law; contested by some traditions |
| Freedom from coercion | Protection against being forced to adopt or abandon a religion | Protected (ICCPR Article 18) |
The point of the internum/externum distinction is that the state may never dictate what a person believes in the privacy of conscience — belief itself is beyond the law's reach — but may regulate outward religious acts where they affect others. Article 9(2) of the ECHR accordingly allows limits on manifestation only where they are prescribed by law and necessary in a democratic society for public safety, the protection of public order, health or morals, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others — and any such limit must be proportionate to the aim pursued. The asymmetry is deliberate and principled: a society can tolerate any belief however eccentric, because beliefs harm no one, but it cannot tolerate every action done in a belief's name, because actions can harm others — which is why the genuinely difficult cases are always about manifestation, where one person's religious practice meets another person's rights. This is the legal machinery that the famous British cases turn on.
Key term: Forum internum / forum externum — the distinction, central to Article 9 ECHR, between the absolute inner freedom to hold or change a belief (forum internum) and the qualified freedom to manifest it outwardly (forum externum), the latter being limitable where necessary and proportionate to protect others.
The abstract machinery becomes concrete in the conjoined cases decided by the European Court of Human Rights as Eweida and Others v United Kingdom (2013), which are the indispensable worked examples for this topic. Nadia Eweida, a British Airways check-in worker barred from wearing a visible cross, won: the Court held that her employer's interest in a uniform corporate image did not justify the interference with her Article 9 right to a discreet manifestation of faith that harmed no one. Shirley Chaplin, a nurse asked to remove a cross on health-and-safety grounds, lost, because the hospital's safety concern was a legitimate and proportionate reason. Lillian Ladele, a registrar who refused to officiate at same-sex civil partnerships, and Gary McFarlane, a Relate counsellor who would not provide sex therapy to same-sex couples, both lost: the Court accepted that their beliefs were interfered with, but held that the state was entitled to give priority to securing the equal treatment of gay people, which the employees' refusals would have denied. The pattern is highly examinable: a personal manifestation that imposes nothing on others may be protected, but a refusal of service that would deny others equal treatment generally is not. These cases sit at the precise intersection of religious freedom and the competing rights of others, and they recur throughout the topic.
The case that religion underwrites human rights is strong, and the specification expects it. The foundational Christian idea is the imago Dei — that every human being is made "in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27) — which grounds an equal, inalienable dignity that does not depend on rank, race, sex, ability or usefulness and that no state confers or may remove. Because the image is held to be possessed equally and unconditionally by all, it underwrites exactly the equality and inalienability that distinguish human rights from mere privileges. This is reinforced in Christian ethics by the command to love the neighbour (and even the enemy) as oneself, and by Jesus' identification of himself with "the least of these" (Matthew 25), which dignifies the poor, the prisoner and the stranger. Catholic Social Teaching has built this into a comprehensive doctrine: from Rerum Novarum (1891) on the rights of workers, through Pacem in Terris (1963) — which explicitly welcomed and endorsed the UDHR — to Laudato Si' (2015) on the environment, the Church has articulated a full account of human dignity, the common good, solidarity and rights.
Key term: Imago Dei — the doctrine that every human being is made "in the image of God," held to ground an equal, inalienable and unconditional dignity that does not depend on any variable human quality; the principal religious foundation offered for human rights.
The other traditions supply parallel foundations, and a strong answer ranges across them. Islam affirms the human being as God's khalifa (vicegerent or steward) on earth, charged with responsibility and thereby dignified, and the Qur'an teaches that humanity was created "from a single soul" (a basis for the unity and equality of the human family) and that "there is no compulsion in religion" (Qur'an 2:256), a text reformers cite in favour of religious freedom. Judaism roots human dignity in the same Genesis creation and in the vocation of tikkun olam — the repair or mending of the world — which has fuelled a strong tradition of Jewish social activism, including prominent involvement in the American civil-rights movement and the founding of human-rights organisations. Buddhism, lacking a creator God, grounds its ethic differently, in karuna (compassion), ahimsa (non-harming) and the interdependence of all sentient beings, an approach articulated globally by the Dalai Lama, who argues that compassion is the universal basis of ethics across religious and secular lines alike. The convergence of these very different metaphysics on a shared affirmation of human worth is itself, defenders argue, evidence that the religions are tapping a real moral truth rather than merely a Western convention.
Philosophically, the sharpest version of the religious case is made by Nicholas Wolterstorff in Justice: Rights and Wrongs (2008). He argues that natural human rights — rights one has simply as a human being, prior to and independent of any social agreement — are best, perhaps only securely, grounded in the worth bestowed on each person by being loved by God. Secular attempts to ground equal dignity in some empirical property (rationality, autonomy, the capacity for pleasure and pain) face what he calls the problem of variation: those properties come in degrees and are diminished or wholly absent in infants, the comatose, those with severe dementia and the profoundly cognitively impaired — yet we rightly hold that their dignity is undiminished and exactly equal to anyone else's. A rights-foundation that tracked the empirical property would have to say their worth is lesser, which we emphatically deny. Only a worth conferred from outside the person — by God's equal and unconditional love for each — matches the equal, inalienable dignity that human rights presuppose. On this view the secular rights tradition is, in a memorable image, living on inherited theological capital it has stopped being able to replenish: it asserts the equal worth of all while having quietly discarded the only framework that could explain it. Critics reply that secular groundings (Kantian rational agency, or a Rawlsian overlapping consensus) are at least coherent and avoid controversial metaphysics; Wolterstorff's claim is the strong one that the religious grounding is the most secure, not merely one option among equals.
Yet religion is also, notoriously, a challenger of rights, and the conflicts cluster around several flashpoints. The most direct concerns apostasy — the freedom, guaranteed by Article 18, to change or abandon one's religion. Under some traditional interpretations of Islamic law, apostasy (ridda) from Islam is a grave offence, and a small number of states (e.g. at times Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Mauritania) have retained the death penalty for it, while many more impose lesser civil penalties. This is a head-on collision with the UDHR, and the drafting history shows the clash was recognised at the time: several Muslim-majority states objected to Article 18 precisely because of its explicit "freedom to change his religion" clause, and Saudi Arabia abstained from the vote on the UDHR in 1948 in part on these grounds. Reformers respond that the Qur'anic verse "there is no compulsion in religion" (2:256) and the absence of any Qur'anic penalty for apostasy (the punishment derives from hadith and classical jurisprudence) leave ample room to align Islamic teaching with Article 18 — illustrating once again that the conflict is with a particular interpretation rather than with the scripture's core.
Key term: Apostasy — the abandonment or renunciation of one's religion; the freedom to do so is guaranteed by UDHR Article 18 but treated as a serious, in places capital, offence under some traditional interpretations of Islamic law, making it the sharpest single conflict between religion and human rights.
Closely related is blasphemy, where the right to free expression (Article 19/Article 10) meets the wish to protect the sacred from insult. The global furore over the Danish newspaper's cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad (2005–06) and the murders at the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (2015) dramatised the collision: a Western media culture that treats the freedom to satirise, including religion, as near-sacrosanct, against a conviction that the gratuitous mockery of the holy is a grave wrong and, for depictions of the Prophet, forbidden outright. Blasphemy laws still carry severe penalties in several states — Pakistan most prominently, where accusations have led to mob killings and death sentences — while most Western jurisdictions have repealed them; England and Wales abolished the common-law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in 2008, on the principle that in an open society ideas, including religious ones, must be open to criticism and even ridicule. The hard question the topic poses is whether free expression should be absolute or whether respect for the deeply held beliefs of vulnerable minorities sets a legitimate limit — a genuine clash of two rights rather than a simple case of right against wrong.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.