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Abstract
Much of the scholarship on how marginalised groups deploy human rights discourse focuses on how these groups translate human rights norms into the group’s vernacular. The marginalised are not alone in this respect. The American Christian Right employs the power of rights claims – which they have previously rejected – to preserve Christian privilege at the expense of greater religious inclusion. This paper demonstrates that even the ‘powerful’ need to vernacularise rights norms and ideals when the group has no meaningful history of engaging with rights and the law. This shared process of vernacularisation highlights the plasticity of rights, and how they can be bent to serve the relatively powerful or the relatively powerless.
Acknowledgments
Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, as well as at the University of Connecticut’s Human Rights Institute. I would like to thank all who commented and offered suggestions on both of these presentations. I would also like to thank Jamie Huff and Alex Reger for reading earlier drafts, and Sarah Hampson for reading multiple versions of this draft and offering helpful revisions at every step. I would be remiss if I did not thank the editors, Louiza Odysseos and Anna Selmeczi, for their insights and hard work putting everything together. Finally, I want to thank Corinne and Alex for supporting me completely.
Notes
1. I invoke power in a relational sense. Power, especially social power, involves political representation and voice in the political process, the social acceptability of one’s positions and views, and having well-structured organisations geared towards coordinating activism. These elements do not involve an overall ‘possession’ of power so much as they speak to comparative social positions and the ability to effect political change. In this sense my use of power is quasi-Foucaldian, focusing on shifting relational aspects more than just on being in positions of political power or being able to coerce others into doing what they otherwise would not. See Foucault, The Foucault Reader.
2. Moen, “From Revolution to Evolution”; and Tagliarina, “Power, Privilege, and Prayer.”
3. For example, Alliance Defending Freedom, “ADF Attorneys Help.”
4. Copp, “The Right to an Adequate Standard of Living”; and Donnelly, Universal Human Rights.
5. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights; and Osiatyński, Human Rights and their Limits.
6. Benhabib, “Claiming Rights across Borders”; Gregg, “Translating Human Rights”; Madhok, Five Notions of Haq; Madhok, Rethinking Agency; Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; and Nilsen, “Adivasi Mobilization.”
7. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights; Nussbaum, “Capabilities and Human Rights”; Sen, Development as Freedom; and Shue, Basic Rights.
8. Benhabib, “Claiming Rights across Borders,” 696. See also Madhok, Five Notions of Haq; and Madhok, Rethinking Agency.
9. See Engel and Munger, Rights of Inclusion; Madhok, Rethinking Agency; and Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence.
10. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence, 221. See also Madhok, Five Notions of Haq; and Madhok, Rethinking Agency.
11. Madhok, Five Notions of Haq, 3–5.
12. Benhabib, “Claiming Rights across Borders”; and Madhok, Rethinking Agency.
13. See, for example, McCammon et al., “Movement Framing”; and Snow and Benford, “Ideology.”
14. Madhok, Rethinking Agency; Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence; and Nilsen, “Adivasi Mobilization.”
15. Dudas, The Cultivation of Resentment, 5.
16. For example, Balbus, “Commodity Form and Legal Form”; Crenshaw, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment”; and Hunt, Explorations in Law and Society.
17. See, for example, Dudas, Cultivation of Resentment; Goldberg-Hiller and Milner, “Rights as Excess”; and Haltom and McCann, Distorting the Law.
18. See Dudas, Cultivation of Resentment; and Goldberg-Hiller and Milner, “Rights as Excess.”
19. Ramet, “‘Fighting for the Christian Nation’,” 431, 433; and Watson, The Christian Coalition, 11.
20. See Tagliarina, “Power, Privilege, and Prayer.”
21. Binder, Contentious Curricula; and Tagliarina, “Power, Privilege, and Prayer.”
22. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart; Greenhouse et al., Law and Community; and Haltom and McCann, Distorting the Law.
23. See Engel and Munger, Rights of Inclusion; and Passavant, No Escape.
24. Jacobs and Theiss-Morse, “Belonging in a ‘Christian Nation’.”
25. Spakovsky, “The Candy-cane Cops.”
26. Luciano, “White Evangelicals”; and Noble, “The Evangelical Persecution Complex.”
27. See Binder, Contentious Curricula.
28. Tagliarina, “Power, Privilege, and Prayer.”
29. Binder, Contentious Curricula; and Zimmerman, Whose America?
30. Noble, “The Evangelical Persecution Complex.”
31. See Glendon, Rights Talk; and Greenhouse et al., Law and Community.
32. Tackett, “What’s a Christian Worldview?”
33. Family Research Council, “Biblical Basis,” 2.
34. Ibid.
35. See Noebel, “The Worldviews of Destruction.”
36. Tackett, “What’s a Christian Worldview?”
37. See also Diamond, Spiritual Warfare, 138; and Martin, With God on Our Side, 353.
38. Lassiter, “Inventing Family Values,” 14.
39. Capps, The New Religious Right; and Lassiter, “Inventing Family Values,” 14.
40. DelFattore, The Fourth R, 299; and Zimmerman, Whose America?, 161.
41. Boyer, “The Evangelical Resurgence,” 36; and Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 247.
42. Kazin, The Populist Persuasion, 256.
43. Morone, Hellfire Nation; and Hunter, Culture Wars.
44. Boyer, “The Evangelical Resurgence”; and Capps, The New Religious Right.
45. Boyer, “The Evangelical Resurgence,” 34–35; Hadden and Swan, Prime Time Preachers, 160; and Zimmerman, Whose America?, 176–178. Falwell’s (in)famous sermon “Ministers and Marches” contains his critique of politically active preachers and offers what many have taken to be a defence of segregation. This sermon was delivered in 1964, and thus is not the impetus for King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In this letter King responds to a published statement jointly authored by eight clergymen from Alabama of varying faiths in response to the direct action campaigns in Alabama that occurred as part of the Civil Rights Movement. Falwell was not one of these eight clergymen, but his remarks are similar to those of the clergymen to which King responded. King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
46. Quoted in Hadden and Swan, Prime Time Preachers, 160.
47. Feld et al., “Christian Right as Civil Right.”
48. Boyer, “The Evangelical Resurgence,” 34–35; Lassiter, “Inventing Family Values,” 22–24; and Zimmerman, Whose America?, 176–178.
49. Moen, “From Revolution to Evolution,” 348.
50. Boyer, “The Evangelical Resurgence,” 29.
51. See Tagliarina, “Power, Privilege, and Prayer.”
52. Blackwell and Klukowski, “Restoring Proper Constitutional Protection.”
53. Feld et al., “Christian Right as Civil Right,” 175. See also Zimmerman, Whose America?, 180.
54. Blackwell and Klukowski, “Restoring Proper Constitutional Protection.”
55. See Firma, “Tales of Roman Emperors.”
56. Tagliarina, “Power, Privilege, and Prayer.”
57. ADF Senior Legal Counsel Kevin Theriot, quoted in Alliance Defending Freedom, “ADF Attorneys Help.”
58. Binder, Contentious Curricula.
59. See Pew Research Religion & Public Life Project, “‘Nones’ on the Rise.”
60. Noble, “The Evangelical Persecution Complex”; and Tagliarina, “Power, Privilege, and Prayer.”
61. See Madhok, Five Notions of Haq; and Madhok, Rethinking Agency.
62. Waldron, ‘Nonsense upon Stilts’.
63. Donnelly, “Human Rights as Natural Rights”; Donnelly, Universal Human Rights; Donnelly, “The Relative Universality”; Nussbaum, “Capabilities and Human Rights;” Sen, Development as Freedom; and Shue, Basic Rights.
64. Benhabib, “Claiming Rights cross Borders.”
65. Ibid; Madhok, Rethinking Agency; and Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence.
66. See Donnelly, Universal Human Rights.
67. See Richardson, “Contending Liberalisms.”