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Creeds, Society, and Human Rights:
A Study in Three Cultures
By Max L. Stackhouse
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1984. 315 pp. $19.95.

This is a highly ambitious book. Max Stackhouse, Professor of Social Ethics at Andover-Newton Theological School, has undertaken three demanding tasks: (1) he seeks to offer a comprehensive account of the attitudes toward human rights, and of the sources for those attitudes, in the United States, the German Democratic Republic, and India; (2) he endeavors to use that account to exemplify what he believes is a new method for comparative study of religious ethics, and (3) he makes an apologetic case for a "Liberal-Puritan" and "ecumenical-Christian" foundation for human rights.

Stackhouse believes that the discussions over human rights currently exercising the world community concern "religious" questions, and that, therefore, human rights should properly be studied as an exercise in

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comparative religious ethics. Attitudes toward human rights are "religious" in that they are based on a commitment to "an ultimate metaphysical moral vision about what is meaningful"--or to a "creed," as Stackhouse calls it, and to "the concrete foundation of ritual behaviors, loyalties, solidarities and relationships" or social membership. This double function is, Stackhouse asserts, what makes religion uniquely potent in contrast to philosophy and politics. Of its own accord, philosophy does not generate creedal commitment or social membership, and politics, left to its own devices, "lives by commitments and organizes constituencies to structure its power, but it has no inherent body of belief" (7). "Only religion can transform doctrine into creed and evoke committed membership without coercion in the fundamental way." Since human rights is to him clearly a matter of creed and of commitment to social-institutional action, it is therefore squarely a religious matter.

Stackhouse does not say that the subject of human rights might be examined in connection with religious beliefs, as one among other possible approaches, but that, given his specifications, it must be so studied if it is rightly to be understood. His proposed method of study involves, first, "longitudinal" or historical investigation according to which the "sacred" or "holy" sources of particular expressions of human rights-as, for example, in the Anglo-Saxon West, in the G.D.R., and in India-are exhibited and compared. Second, it involves "cross-sectional" analysis by which the "dominant" institutional structures of a given society-educational, legal, familial, political, etc.-are identified and their connections with human rights in a given culture laid out and compared with other cultures. Finally, the approach demands comparative evaluation of the creeds and institutional expressions of human rights in the different cultural settings. This aspect of Stackhouse's method corresponds to the third or apologetic task we mentioned above, and it is the heart of his approach.

The connection between human rights and religious creeds is an important subject, and Max Stackhouse is to be thanked for addressing it in such a lively and provocative way. Still, he is not altogether successful in carrying out the three tasks he sets himself. As for describing the institutional patterns and the spiritual sources and rationales for those expressions in America, East Germany, and modern India, the account is rather casual and loose. In the cases of East Germany and India, there is too large a gap in the analysis between the cross-sectional and the longitudinal study. Descriptions of family, medical, occupational, and other social arrangements are followed by broad, general historical discussions of the religious and philosophical backgrounds of these arrangements. Unfortunately, there is no attempt to recount and analyze in depth what participants themselves (official and otherwise) have to say about their institutions from a human rights perspective. From their point of view, does human rights reform make sense in the G.D.R. or in India, or doesn't it? Why or why not? This is,

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for example, a particularly acute problem in contemporary India, since the constitution often goes one way and custom another. In short, the reader is not enlightened about the particulars of intra-cultural tensions and disputes over institutional reform as those questions bear on human rights.

The description of the "Western Revolutionary Tradition," which yields for Stackhouse the normative model of human rights, is also too casual in the face of the complicated and much-disputed problems involved. His emphasis on the importance of the "Liberal-Puritan" axis in the development of the natural-rights tradition is welcome, though by now requires more nuanced and careful treatment. For example, his large claims about the role of the free church in supplying theological legitimacy for secular voluntary associations (64) is not substantiated by his references. Nor is the discussion of John Locke and his role in the natural rights tradition sufficiently in line with recent scholarship.

Again, both the longitudinal and the cross-sectional discussions of modern American life as it bears on human rights are not sensitive enough to the deep-seated intra-cultural disputes over human rights in our own tradition--disputes, for instance, over property and economic rights in relation to the so-called civil-political rights.

In respect to the requirements that human rights be studied as an exercise in comparative religious ethics, Stackhouse is less than persuasive. Both inside and outside the Christian tradition, venerable attempts have been and continue to be made toward grounding basic human rights on explicitly non-religious premises, for example, on "natural law." Accordingly, human beings could be held accountable for certain minimal rights and duties regardless of religious affiliation. Against the elaborate arguments of numerous opponents, it will not do for Stackhouse simply to assert, as he does, that all such appeals are basically religious after all (8). He must endeavor to support his claim that "where [the] religious assumption is not maintained, natural-law theory fades and reason does not lead us to universal moral principles such as those taken up by human rights concerns" (8). To argue such a case will, among other things, entail getting into the philosophical literature on human rights more than Stackhouse does, but that seems unavoidable.

Finally, Stackhouse's apologetic for the "Liberal-Puritan" tradition, while spirited and engaging, either rests on a circular argument or else suggests a rather different strategy and basic starting point from the one he adopts. Stackhouse contends in his concluding chapter, "Toward Comparative Evaluations," that the Marxism of the G.D.R. and the Hinduism of India are deficient for not creating the social institutions that enable "society to meet the most basic human needs" (274), and for not protecting the equal rights of persons by means of impartial judiciaries and legislatures. But what has Stackhouse done other than, first, to define what it is to meet the most basic human needs and protect the equal rights of persons in terms of his Liberal-Puritan system and then conclude (unsurprisingly) that the Liberal-Puritan system best

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accommodates these objectives? Such an argument cannot be expected to cut much ice in inter-cultural dialogue.

Perhaps Stackhouse means to do more than this, though if be does, be needs to be clearer about it. If he means to avoid circularity and generate serious inter-cultural dialogue, Stackhouse needs to elaborate and deepen his passing comments regarding the specific leverage and relevance of the human rights movement in societies like the G.D.R. and India (for example, at 248ff.) from the perspective of those cultures. To the degree that societies do feel the force of human rights prescriptions (no doubt for a variety of reasons), the reactions and reflections of the members of those societies need to be examined and weighed. What are their reasons for favoring or not favoring human rights reform? Do their reactions cause us to reconsider our own understanding of human rights and their world-wide application? How, in precise terms, shall we go about assessing their reasons pro and con? Because Stackhouse's method passes over this crucial dimension of the problem, his method needs to be further developed and refined.

David Little
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia