Protection or proscription? Cultural practices against the background of religious pluralism

Abstract

Behind the substance of human rights are strong convictions that do not always convert into positive forces towards implementation. Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza, for example, saw freedom of religion as a very bad idea “because it means that everyone should be left to go to hell in his own way.”

Yet, religious rights are “traditionally established as a comprehensive concept”, Kirsten Ketscher assures us in her chapter in this book. What is probably meant here is that in established international human rights law as well as in its supervisory mechanisms, freedom of worship –to use Roosevelt’s terminology of the four freedoms- has strong foundations while the same applies to its associated entitlements (such as registration of religious communities) and liberties (such as apostasy). In practice, however, this is a field in which cultural relativism abounds, precisely because convictions behind religious practices that conflict with universal human rights standards, tend to be taken as transcending secular human rights. Indeed, this is a highly intricate area of competing truths and claims to universality with corresponding claims to the relativity of other truths.

In the context of contemporary religious pluralism the current chapter will focus on the highly complicated interface between human rights and cultural practices. We are dealing here with phenomena that impinge on people’s religious or anti-religious feelings, either directly or in the way they consider ‘their’ society to be affected. In his Three Questions for America , Dworkin discusses the following illustrative issues in this connection: the teaching of alternatives to evolution in schools, the pledge of allegiance, and gay marriage.