ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on four families of questions that serve as an entry point into understanding how the sociology of religion addresses issues surrounding human rights. Sociologist of religion William Garrett (2001) provides an account of the origins of religious liberty and human rights and identifies secularization as the process responsible. Garrett locates the beginning of secularization in institutional differentiation during the Papal Revolution of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. In addition to its importance in the foundation of human rights, religion has also been a prominent carrier of human rights ideas and practices. The origins of numerous transnational human rights advocacy campaigns can be traced to religious voices, and religiously minded individuals and religious organizations have often sustained these movements. The human rights scholars should be sensitive to the fact that human rights ideology is contested, as is religion, precisely because it is mutable in its interpretations, especially in an era of globalization.
