Conservative Christians backed human rights to defend church and family against totalitarianism

Evidence

The Chicago School’s Frank Knight was relatively isolated in his belief that communism and the Catholic Church shared the same principles and were similarly undemocratic. The year after the UDHR was adopted, Knight suggested that the Church at least deserved credit for ‘not pretending to believe in democracy or individual liberty’. As Moyn notes, however, the position of the Church was also changing in the face of the threat that socialism and fascism represented to its autonomy and to the freedoms of conscience and worship. The drafting of the UDHR therefore attracted the attention of conservative Christians, who were similarly concerned with the re-establishment of moral standards and saw in human rights a means to protect the dignity and conscience of the human person and preserve intermediate institutions (like the Church and the family) in the face of the rise of ‘totalitarianism’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 124

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Whyte’s broader thesis about the compatibility of human rights and market order; also echoes Moyn’s revisionist account of human rights origins that the reader’s past curation has engaged. — connects to: Evangelical religious freedom defense was tied to Christian nationalism and gender conservatism — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White…, 540

Broader Connections

• Evangelical religious freedom defense was tied to Christian nationalism and gender conservatism #expands (0.80) — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 540