Human Rights

In a passionate passage, Farrow enumerates the ways that the church is assaulted for evils that it did more than any other institution to correct – for being misogynist when it “has produced a civilization in which women have enjoyed unprecedented freedom” or for slavery when “for two millennia it has been the primary force of resistance to slaver.”

Behind all this is an extraordinary cultural-political coup: “it is not a small thing when the very idea of human rights becomes a cover for violence against the church and against the weak and vulnerable, the enemy rather than the friend of justice – an enemy that does not stop short, in the name of so-called ‘reproductive rights,’ of murder on a massive scale. How did this happen?”

He briefly summarizes some parts of the answer – the shift from objective to subjective rights, the rise of “a perverse idea of freedom,” the revolt against created order that necessarily follows on a revolt against God. Ultimately, the answer is that they cannot escape the gospel: “The proponents of this new faith go beyond the sins of pagans who have not learned the gospel, simply because they are not and cannot be pagans any more. Their thinking is informed by the gospel they have rejected; therefore both their ambition and their despair are necessarily greater.”