Theology and the Politics of Christian Human Rights

This article provides a rejoinder to recent historical accounts which trace the origins of international human rights to the work of conservative Christians writing in the 1930s and 1940s. Focusing on the French Catholics usually identified as the architects of Christian human rights theory, I argue that this was neither a unified project, nor an unambiguously conservative one. Instead, I stress the political ambivalence of Christian human rights discourse-the way it defied distinctions between right and left, or liberal and conservative.