The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Charles Habib Malik, a key evangelising figure in the intellectual debate that defined the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).When President Truman introduced Point
Four ‘development’ in his 1949 Inaugural Speech, he spawned an American globalist
mission with moral and economic dimensions. Point Four believed in an American
exceptionalism that linked the idea of ‘development’ to the salvationist ideals
codified in the budding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, though it would
be a decade or two before either ‘human rights’ or ‘development’ really gained
steam as a globalist mission.
Whatever the motive behind his speech,
Truman and the US government’s declared belief in the ‘good’ of this mission and
belief that international law should be used to accomplish it – although appealing
as a ‘self-evident good’ – had little theoretical or empirical justification. It
was simply something that Truman presented as the right thing to do, and as
early as 1955, African and South Asian countries were on board with the ‘development’
part of that equation, as indicated by the documents that emerged from the Bandung Conference.
President Sukarno Opening Speech at the Bandung Conference, 1955, Indonesia. YouTube.However, ‘development’ amongst the
‘developing’ carried different implications than it did amongst the
‘developed’. For example, in accepting some of the budding globalist doctrines
of the west, the Bandung Communiqué repeatedly emphasized this significant
caveat: while Bandung’s participants accepted capitalism and globalization as
tools through which so-called ‘developing’ countries could better their economic
situation relative to western states, western states were not to dictate the
terms of how that ‘development’ occurred. Such an approach, to Bandung’s
participants, would reek too strongly of colonialism, whose grips even in 1955
had not completely receded from either the African or Asian continents.
This contrasts sharply both with
President Truman’s salvationist ‘development’ mission in Point Four and the
universalist mission codified in the UDHR. Against this backdrop, this essay
analyzes how US evangelical organizations have tapped into the UDHR and other
secular codifications of debatably religious ideals. It argues that – armed not
only with the surety of belief in the ‘responsibility to act’ from Truman’s
Point Four, but also with international legal tools that enable the
actualization of that belief – Christian civil society organizations, gleaning
funding from the US and UN, have used international law to further US Christian
goals internationally.
Harry Truman delivering his famous inaugural address, in which he announced the US mission to bring the benefits of capitalism to 'peace loving peoples' through the project of 'development'January 20, 1949. YouTube.After analyzing three exemplary cases
(among the many that exist), I suggest that evangelical civil society’s use of
law reveals much more than it perverts the potential of the human rights and
development legal regimes to be used as instruments of international social
control.
The first two short cases deal with concrete
cases of conservative US evangelical groups using domestic and international
legal regimes to suppress LGBT rights internationally; the domestic component
of this has to do with funding and the international component has to do with
human rights treaties. The third short case deals with the more abstract case
of how international development legal regimes are exploited by conservative
civil society groups as instruments of social control, dealing also with the
use of US law regarding ‘development’ funding.
Case
1: The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (“UDHR”) Art. 16 and its varying expressions in
other international legal texts have been used most prominently by the Alliance
Defending Freedom (“ADF”) to repress LGBT rights.
Founded in 1993 as the ‘Alliance
Defense Fund’, the ADF is a US Conservative evangelical NGO whose mission is to
fund litigation that ‘defends’ “religious freedom, sanctity of life, and
marriage and family”, meaning opposite-sex marriage as traditionally defined.
The ADF is funded predominantly by the National Christian Foundation (“NCF”), which
is the largest organization in the US engaged in re-syphoning tax breaks to
Christian causes; and to a lesser degree, by the DeVos Foundation and Academi (the
former Blackwater Group, famous for government-funded murders in Iraq).
While the NCF uses law to channel money
that would otherwise join the public tax pool into special Christian interests,
Academi uses profits supported by government contracts (ultimately supported by
public funds) to pursue those same interests. And although this was not the case
when it began supporting the ADF, the DeVos Foundation has now narrowed its
proximity to the state: Richard and Helen DeVos founded the Foundation, and
their daughter-in-law, Betsy DeVos, now serves as Secretary of Education in the
Trump Administration.
The ADF supplies grants to lawyers who
wish to preserve ‘traditional’ definitions of marriage; they funded litigation based
on the now defunct Defense of Marriage Act in the US, which confined the right
to marry only to opposite sex couples, and funded amicus briefs in support of
the same Act when it was challenged and ultimately struck down under the
scrutiny of the US Supreme Court.[1]
Internationally, using the non-binding UDHR Art. 16’s “men and women” language as
interpretive authority, the ADF has used the binding “freedom of thought, conscience,
and religion” rights – codified in the European Convention on Human Rights,
Article 9, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article
18 – to defend organizations that suppress LGBT rights by excluding members of
the LGBT community.
Moreover, using the International
Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (“ICESCR”) Article 13’s “right
to education” and the right of parents “to choose for their children schools,
other than those established by public authority,” the ADF has successfully
argued cases that both suppress the rights of children by empowering parents to
choose how their children will be educated, and protected in some cases the
right to indoctrinate children with anti-LGBT ideas.[2]
Indeed, ICESCR Art. 15, which enshrines a given public’s right to “culture”,
has been similarly deployed.[3]
Case
2: US Federal
Research, Pell Grant, and ‘development’ funding have also enabled evangelical civil
society organizations to transcend state and international governments to spread
conservative Christian goals. The most egregious example is the World Congress
of Families, which promotes anti-LGBT laws internationally on the basis of UDHR
Article 16, using human rights law to fuel anti-gay movements in Russia, the
Czech Republic, and other European states.
UDHR Article 16 states that “Men and
women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion,
have the right to marry and to found a family.”[4]
Employing interpretive methods that are common to western lawyers, and that are
internationally codified in Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of
Treaties, both the ‘plain meaning’ and the ‘object and purpose’ of Article 16
in light of the entire UDHR text can be reasonably (if controversially) read to
support the conclusion that the UDHR protects only the right of opposite sex
couples to marry.[5] Indeed,
several of the other most basic rights enshrined in the UDHR – e.g., the right
to life – use the language “everyone has the right” to delineate once and for
all the innate rights of humanity, which supports an intentionalist
interpretation that the phrase “men and women” describes the relationship
between the genders and not the collectivist interpretation which would favor
‘both men and women’. (‘Intentionalism’ describes a mode of interpretation that
seeks to read treaty texts to mean what the original authors intended them to
mean, rather than reading the text in light of contemporary understandings of
the words.)
Similarly, the fact that the Article
specifies how the right will not be limited (not due to “race, nationality or
religion”), and the fact that this list does not include “gender”, could be
read as a deliberate exclusion, so long as one adopts an interpretation of the Art.
16 list as exhaustive rather than indicative.
Therefore, even if such arguments are not
entirely convincing given the emphasis on equality in the Preamble of the UDHR,
which is the most common reference point for international lawyers determining
‘object and purpose’ of any treaty, the fact that such interpretive methods are
widely accepted in the practice of international law renders the World Congress
of Families’ position a reasonable (even if repulsive) use of the UDHR,
speaking strictly from the perspective of an international lawyer.
Accordingly, these uses of
international human rights law lend credibility to the World Congress of Families’
anti-LGBT activities abroad – even if only in the eyes of their supporters – because
such interpretations of treaty-based rights are difficult for international
lawyers to categorically reject:
Case
3: Shifting from
international human rights to international development discourse, two other
prominent US evangelical NGOs – Samaritan’s Purse and World Vision – receive USAID
funding and regularly bid on UN development contracts but have the authority to
impose conditions on communities that receive benefits from those funds and contracts.
Both organizations were founded by evangelical
minister Bob Pierce (who believed Christianity was the cure for Communism),[6]
both focus on ‘international development’, and both receive substantial
‘development’ and various ‘humanitarian aid’ contracts. World Vision has
consultative status with UNESCO and partnerships with a number of intergovernmental
organizations and evangelical groups around the world. With a stronger
missionary focus, Samaritan’s Purse specializes in emergency relief and
infrastructural projects related to water, sanitation, nutrition, medical care,
and public health.[7] It
receives USAID funding and works closely with UN development initiatives around
the globe.[8]
Any conditions imposed by religious
organizations on communities receiving government aid should be suspect to
scrutiny, but the prohibition on ‘proselytism’ keeps many of the most obvious
abuses at bay. As a result, religious conditions on aid are rarely if ever
explicit, but Samaritan’s Purse has come under fire for blurring the lines
between church and state, most notably when members of its staff required
victims of the El Salvador Earthquake to sit through a half-hour prayer
meeting before receiving assistance in 2001.
Perhaps more blatantly, World Vision’s
mission statement declares that it will “serv[e] as a witness to the gospel of
Jesus Christ” – the word ‘witness’ being common evangelical-speak for
‘proselytize’. As the 36th largest recipient of US government funds for
international ‘development’,[9]
World Vision boasts a long and varied history of conditioning development aid or
disaster relief upon various forms of proselytism, from requiring children in
disaster areas to listen to short religious speeches before USAID-funded meals,
to allowing Christian ‘sponsors’ of poor children to write letters laden with
religious messages to those children, to working with organizations such as the
Joshua Project to identify “unreached people groups” – evangelical slang for
“people with the least exposure to evangelical Christianity” – where World
Vision can increase its presence.
Ideological
suppression
It is not my aim to label any of these
uses ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but simply to call attention to them; these are some uses
of human rights and development law that are motivated by suppressive or
coercive goals.
These cases and many others reveal the
degree to which the state, through the auspices of civil society, has engaged human
rights and development law for ideological promotion through the proxy of evangelical
civil society organizations. In this way, we might consider the US human rights
/ development agenda and Christian civil society organizations as two
expressions of the same faith: that certain rights are static, intrinsic to
humanity, and universal – that the validity of these rights for anyone depends upon their validity for everyone.
There are many non-religious
development-based NGOs that are engaged in related forms of ideological
suppression through less obvious means, for example, the glorification and
global proliferation of capitalist and neoliberal goals. Indeed, these examples
should also be cause to examine the justification for leftist ideological
suppression of the right, and perhaps to question whether ideology can ever be
viewed as something separate from law in the first place.
Indeed, it could be that such examples reveal
more to us about the nature of law itself as an expression of belief than they
do about the legal regimes of development or human rights, or about the groups
that use them.
The first page of the Bandung Communiqué.
Notes
[1] United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. Docket No. 12-307 (2013).
[2] For a list of global
involvement in these cases, see the ADF International
website.
[3] Id.
[4] Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, art. 16.
[5] See VCLT, arts.
31-32. See also ICJ Statute, art. 38.
[6] Information derived
from the websites of these organizations, available at https://www.samaritanspurse.org, and at http://www.wvi.org, respectively.
[7] Information on the
organization available at https://www.samaritanspurse.org.
[8] See e.g. Kamari
Clarke, Fictions of Justice (CUP
2009).
[9] A list of the top 40
recipients is available on USAID’s website.
How to cite:
Crow K.(2018) How US evangelical organizations deploy ‘human rights’ and ‘development’ Open Democracy / ISA RC-47: Open Movements, 18 June. https://opendemocracy.net/kevin-crow/how-us-evangelical-organizations-deploy-human-rights-and-development
;