ABSTRACT
The idea that human rights are Christianity’s bequest to global law is attractive for many reasons but difficult to verify, this chapter argues. It is not merely that so many claims on Christian origins for so many things have been made, but that the notion that human rights derive from Christianity itself has a complex history. As global law—once hoped to be in the process of materializing—now seems farther away than ever, this chapter proposes seizing the moment in order to review when and why people began to claim that Christianity in various stages of its history gave birth to human rights. Along the way, the chapter reviews the history and historiography of points of alleged origin from the founders to high Scholasticism, from the Protestant Reformation to the nineteenth-century liberalization of Christianity, and from the Cold War mobilization of the faith to the post-Cold War spike in human-rights consciousness, discourse, and law.
