Introduction
The World Council of Churches (WCC), provisionally founded in 1938, was officially established in Amsterdam in 1948, just a few months before the United Nations promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. According to Terence Renaud, ecumenical Christians around this time saw in human rights ‘a universalist commitment to defending individual human beings and a global institutional framework for enacting that commitment’.Footnote 1 As Pamela Slotte has noted, the ecumenical conception of individual freedom differed from a secular liberal viewpoint, in that it was embedded in a religious conception of community: ‘The freedom to which the Christian was delivered was a freedom that was envisioned within the framework and in relation to a life in a community (instituted by Jesus).’Footnote 2 Comparing Protestants to Catholics (who did not join the WCC) in this respect, Renaud has written that, in the late 1930s, ecumenists’ ‘Protestant personalism … said little about the sort of communal rights and duties that lay at the core of Catholic personalism’ and instead ‘called for a universal community of faith that would recognise no distinctions based on nation, race, or class’. American ecumenists such as John Foster Dulles and O. Frederick Nolde, empowered by the abundance of resources and influence of the American ecumenical movement, then led the way in coupling this desire for a ‘universal church’ with designs for a post-war international order, a key feature of which would be human rights.Footnote 3
Religious freedom featured as the linchpin of such an order, because without it all other rights would lose their meaning. Linde Lindkvist has recently described how Nolde, as a non-governmental consultant at the drafting of the Universal Declaration, worked with his fellow ecumenist and drafter Charles Malik, the Lebanese Ambassador to the UN and to the US, to shape the secular language of the Universal Declaration in such a way as to promote a Christian agenda. The outcome was a text that distinguished between inward freedom of conscience on the one hand and outward manifestations of religion on the other; that included an explicit freedom to change one’s religion or belief; and that focused, despite a reference to manifesting one’s religion ‘in community with others’, on individual rights. The final point ran counter to ecumenical objectives, which had envisioned greater room for corporate rights, to better protect the rights of churches. But the first two represented achievements of the ecumenists’ lobby, which was based on the concern that mere freedom of ‘worship’ would enable regimes hostile to religion to curtail religious freedom, and the specifically missionary worry that, in Islamic countries, missionary activity would be hampered by prohibitions of conversion.Footnote 4 The Universal Declaration’s Article 18 became the cornerstone of religious liberty promotion by ecumenists and others.Footnote 5
How did ecumenical human rights promotion develop from the 1940s onwards? How did the relationship between religious liberty and human rights evolve over time? And what does this tell us about the wider arc of ecumenical internationalism through the 1970s? These questions are important not only for the history of the ecumenical movement but also for the recent historiography on human rights. This historiography has sought to trace continuities and discontinuities in human rights discourse and to relate these to wider international histories.Footnote 6 The 1940s and the 1970s have received particular scrutiny as sites of supposed human rights ‘revolutions’ or ‘breakthrough’ moments. The ecumenical movement, which represented hundreds of millions of Christians in the West and increasingly worldwide, embodies an important but understudied aspect of this history.
Most literature on the ecumenical movement, and the limited amount of work that has been done on its human rights engagement, has focused on its relationship to communism in the context of the Cold War.Footnote 7 One reason for this has been the process of the WCC’s own reckoning with its position in the Cold War; another has been scholarly interest in (American) Christian anti-communism and a focus on evangelical rather than ecumenical Christians.Footnote 8 While not denying the importance of religious freedom in communist countries, the first part of this article calls attention to the two other pillars of ecumenical human rights engagement from the 1940s to the 1960s: religious liberty in Roman Catholic and Islamic countries. The Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), of which Nolde served as director from 1946 to 1968, alongside its chairman, the British layman Kenneth G. Grubb, was the central actor in this respect.Footnote 9 A small non-governmental organization with consultative status at the UN, it represented not only the WCC but also the International Missionary Council (IMC). After the adoption of the Universal Declaration, it continued its work at the UN, as recently described by Karsten Lehmann.Footnote 10 But beyond the UN, extensive contacts with Christian (mostly Protestant) organizations and religious leaders allowed the CCIA to engage on a national level. In this sphere, the universal norms elaborated at the UN had to be reconciled with local circumstances, as mediated by local actors. To investigate the relationship between religious liberty and human rights in such specific cases, the first part of this article looks at Italy, Indonesia, and Nigeria. Ecumenical activity in relation to these and other countries constituted a substantial strand of ecumenical human rights engagement from the 1940s to the 1960s.
The second, shorter, part addresses the WCC’s rethinking of its internationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, which went hand in hand with fundamental shifts in its membership and ideology. These shifts redirected the ecumenical movement’s political alignment to take account of the Non-Aligned Movement, initiatives for a New International Economic Order, and perspectives emanating from, or focusing on, what was referred to as the Third World more generally. This development culminated in the propagation of a new human rights conception in the mid 1970s, which downgraded the importance of religious liberty and elevated social, economic, and collective rights, in line with precepts derived from Latin American liberation theologies. The article engages recent interpretations of this new ecumenical approach to human rights and argues that several of its features represented important discontinuities. Whereas it had previously focused on aiding co-religionists, the WCC now framed a wide range of causes in terms of human rights. In a departure from the more institutional and legalistic approach of the 1940s and 1950s, the ecumenical movement now incorporated human rights into the core of its social ethics and sought to support grassroots struggles for emancipation, especially in the Third World.
Religious freedom in Catholic countries: Italian Protestants, human rights, and the constitution
Protestant ecumenists, seeking to safeguard freedom for their co-religionists in the post-war period, saw several threats in the Catholic world. The three most important cases in which Protestants faced religiously motivated discrimination or repression were Italy, Spain, and Colombia. Allegations of collusion with international communism were an important factor in branding tiny Protestant minorities suspect. But fundamentally, Protestantism was perceived as a threat to the moral foundations of Catholic societies, in which the church played a prominent and pervasive role. To the Roman Catholic Church at this time, ‘religious freedom’ was anathema, because ‘error has no rights’.Footnote 11
The CCIA worked with local church leaders or missionaries, using a mixture of public and private engagement to pry open greater space for religious practice and evangelization in the face of what was referred to as Catholic ‘totalitarianism’. Changes in constitutional and other legal provisions were the most important means of doing so. The 1950 WCC Central Committee meeting, which discussed a study on ‘Religious freedom in face of dominant forces’, which the CCIA had produced at its request, focused on such safeguards.Footnote 12 The example of Italy shows how the ecumenical movement could appeal to human rights as part of its efforts to advance religious freedom. Yet, it also shows how contingent resort to this tactic was. Other sources of moral and legal authority, most importantly the 1948 constitution, despite its flaws, presented more promising opportunities. Even so, the hegemony of Catholicism in Italy and other Roman Catholic countries proved hard to dent, let alone dislodge. When the situation for Protestants improved, this was mainly due to the developments surrounding the Second Vatican Council.
After the Second World War, Italian Protestants saw in the country’s draft peace treaty an opportunity to obtain guarantees for religious non-discrimination.Footnote 13 American ecumenists were their most important international allies. When Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi, the founder of the Italian Christian Democracy Party, visited the US in 1947, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America appealed to both the draft peace treaty as well as the UN Charter and its own statements on religious liberty in urging him to secure religious freedom in the new constitution.Footnote 14 But in the end the peace treaty merely protected ‘freedom of religious worship’ rather than ‘freedom of religion’. This had been the result of the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov’s personal opposition to proposals to include the latter clause, which Nolde had pressed the United States to advance.Footnote 15
In subsequent approaches, Italian Protestants continued to refer to the peace treaty, but also tried to draw on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in addition to the 1948 constitution. In May 1950, the Federal Council of the Evangelical Churches in Italy presented an open letter to the Italian government, asserting that laws favouring the Roman Catholic Church were ‘completely opposed’ to both the Italian constitution and ‘the international pledge taken by Italy (UNO’s Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 15 of the Peace Treaty)’.Footnote 16 The Waldensian Professor Mario Rollier, the chairman of the CCIA’s Italian counterpart, urged that external pressure be placed on the Italian government to make this appeal more effective. The CCIA responded with a resolution expressing its ‘approval and support of the efforts to achieve non-discriminatory constitutional, legal, and administrative safeguards for religious freedom in Italy’, and publicized the efforts of the Federal Council of the Evangelical Churches in Italy to its constituency.Footnote 17 In the same year, on the WCC’s initiative, the Conference of Protestant Churches from European Latin Countries was established, bringing together Protestants from Portugal to Wallonia. The conference issued a statement which, inter alia, expressed the hope that Italian law would be brought into accordance with the ‘principles’ of the 1948 constitution and called for the Catholic Church to clarify its position on Article 18 of the Universal Declaration.Footnote 18
Yet by the mid 1950s, appeals to the constitution were no longer accompanied by human rights language. On the occasion of the Italian prime minister Mario Scelba’s 1955 visit to the US, the Federal Council of the Evangelical Churches in Italy drew up a memorandum which was transmitted to the CCIA, which then liaised with the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (formerly the Federal Council). Human rights language did not play any direct role in either the Italian memorandum or the American one based on it, which was conveyed to Scelba on the occasion of his visit (the Council had attempted to arrange a meeting with Scelba but was rebuffed).Footnote 19 The recent American move away from international human rights, under pressure from the Bricker Amendment campaign, may have dimmed hopes for an appeal to human rights. Thus, the Italian memorandum focused on the 1948 constitution and asserted that ‘respect for the rights of minorities of any kind is the test of any true democracy. If this test should fail under the pressure of any sort of totalitarianism – manifest or disguised, political or confessional – the foundations of all liberties would be in danger.’Footnote 20 The Council thus attempted to burnish its perceived loyalty to the Italian state and place itself alongside the Catholic Church in the fight against totalitarianism. Rather than human rights, it invoked minority rights.
This emphasis on an established tradition of minority rights could also be seen in the work of Giorgio Peyrot, the head of the Legal Office of the Federal Council of Evangelical Churches in Italy, who highlighted the fact that the Italian constitution on the one hand contained provisions on the regulation of state-church relations, and on the other hand contained provisions for specific liberties.Footnote 21 The American memorandum, signed by Eugene Carson Blake, the future general secretary of the WCC, likewise referred to the constitution and appealed to the international standing of Italy in the context of ‘the struggle in which we are all engaged, against the menace of atheism and materialism, and, in the positive sense, for justice, freedom and peace’.Footnote 22 Yet all these entreaties were fruitless: in the wake of Scelba’s visit, American willingness to press Italy on religious freedom declined.Footnote 23
Italian Christians viewed the 1948 constitution as an effective tool to promote religious freedom. Rather than demanding change in the constitution, they insisted on its implementation. Indeed, a January 1959 memorandum of the Legal Office of the Federal Council of Evangelical Churches in Italy, submitted for the consideration of the WCC’s July 1959 Executive Committee meeting, noted that the constitution’s provisions on the ‘individual’ and the ‘general and collective plane’ were in fact ‘satisfactory’. But on the ‘institutional plane’, the formal equality between religious denominations, the constitution was seen as sorely lacking. Through its Article 7, the constitution was bound by the 1929 Lateran Pacts with the Holy See, which included a concordat that made Catholicism the de facto state church of Italy.Footnote 24
The long-awaited establishment of Italy’s Constitutional Court in 1956 raised hopes among Italian Protestants.Footnote 25 Indeed, it led to improvements in the legal protection of Italian Protestants, not least through the abolition of Fascist-era laws restricting church activity and the recognition of the right of non-Catholic denominations to open their churches to the public without prior government approval.Footnote 26 Yet the court’s rulings did not immediately challenge the legitimacy of the Lateran Pacts, and it would take many years for a decisive breakthrough to occur. Constitutional Court rulings in 1971 and 1982 forced the establishment of a new concordat between the Vatican and the Italian state, which cleared the way for the signing of long-desired church–state agreements that recognized a number of minority religions; the Waldensian Church was the first of these, in 1984.Footnote 27
Meanwhile, however, the Vatican moved towards a much more tolerant attitude, which reduced the incidence of religious discrimination in Italy and elsewhere. The encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) signalled a new Catholic attitude to the concept of human rights. When the Second Vatican Council adopted its declaration on religious liberty in 1965, Dignitatis Humanae, the WCC’s authority on the subject, the Spanish former Jesuit and theologian Dr A. F. Carillo de Albornoz, voiced disappointment over such omissions as the freedom to change one’s religion or belief ‘without consequent social, economic, and political disabilities’, as recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and reiterated at the New Delhi Assembly of 1961, and noted that the declaration allowed leeway for the state to repress efforts at proselytizing. Carillo also criticized the Vatican’s declaration for emphasizing certain corporate rights while omitting reference to individual rights, in contrast to the Amsterdam statement. But all in all, he welcomed the declaration as a manifestation of Christianity putting its house in order and furthering its ‘moral leadership’.Footnote 28 The Catholic Church’s turn marked the beginning of the end of Carillo’s work at the WCC. The Joint Working Group of the Roman Catholic Church and the WCC concluded in May 1967 that ‘though the theological justification may still differ from one church to the other, there is basic agreement on what the principle of Religious Liberty requires in practice’, and in the same year the Secretariat on Religious Liberty was disbanded.Footnote 29 The visit of Pope Paul VI to the WCC headquarters two years later illustrated how much Protestant–Catholic relations had improved. While the position of Protestants in Catholic countries remained unequal or tenuous in many places, the issue of religious freedom in these societies was no longer the priority it had been.
Bracing for independence: postcolonial constitutions and Muslim–Christian relations
Within the ecumenical movement, missionaries were often the first to seek to distance themselves from the imperial structures that had enabled much of their work in the first place. During the interwar period many ecumenists had come to see imperialism as arising from nationalism, which the universal church was meant to restrain.Footnote 30 The First World War had shaken their confidence in Europe’s moral standing, and the Second World War delivered another crushing blow. To restore Europe’s Christian character, ecumenists like Malik and the WCC’s general secretary W. A. Visser ’t Hooft thought that Christianity would have to extricate itself both from nationalism at home and from imperialism abroad.Footnote 31 Moreover, the confrontation with communism and its real and perceived appeal to colonized peoples forced ecumenical Christians to come to terms with their ties to empire. If communism represented a threat because of its materialism, its promise of universal equality also forced Protestants to scrutinize their own connections to the racialized hierarchies inherent in imperial rule.Footnote 32 For missionaries, the imperative to dissociate themselves from empire became stronger as prospects for independence drew closer. If they were to have any hope of continuing their work in postcolonial societies they would have to redeem themselves from the affiliation with colonialism.Footnote 33 According to the missionary historian Adrian Hastings, the IMC and the WCC, as well as the Catholic Congregation de Propaganda Fide, were the most important bodies worldwide in cultivating a turn away from ‘missionary nationalism’.Footnote 34
At the same time, the ecumenical movement as a whole was slow to endorse self-determination as a principle, let alone as a right. At a 1956 discussion of the CCIA Executive Committee, which intended to clarify the concept of self-determination, the participants distinguished between self-determination as a ‘principle’ and as a ‘concrete right’ that came into being under ‘certain conditions’ but failed to enunciate these to a significant degree. Nolde had to admit in retrospect that, because of disagreement among the WCC’s constituency on ‘the proper tempo and scope of the decolonisation process’, the CCIA took ‘a rather cautious, quite possibly an over-cautious approach to most of the colonial issues’.Footnote 35 Indeed, the CCIA and the churches it represented shared much of the paternalistic outlook of colonial governments, which legitimated continued colonial rule by reference to nebulous criteria of the ‘fitness’ or ‘preparedness’ of the colonized for even limited forms of self-government. The CCIA insisted on obtaining the ‘voluntary’ cooperation of colonial powers rather than risk ‘alienating’ them, ‘having in mind the objective of a voluntary rather than a coerced acceptance by all nations of their responsibilities for the well-being of dependent peoples’.Footnote 36
Meanwhile, the missionary movement sought to use human rights language to safeguard their position in newly independent countries. Missionaries had described religious liberty as a ‘human right’ as early as the 1928 Jerusalem conference of the IMC – though they had then paired it with a second ‘human right’, ‘the maintenance by each nation of law and order for all within its bounds’. At the 1938 Tambaram conference, influenced by the Oxford conference of the preceding year, the IMC addressed the tension between these two rights by putting forward religious freedom as a condition for the legitimacy of states: ‘an essential element in a better international order is freedom of religion’.Footnote 37 In the post-war period, during which processes of decolonization accelerated, the CCIA would assist numerous constituents in lobbying for constitutional provisions in line with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration and ecumenical statements on religious freedom. The CCIA distributed two documents widely to church leaders, one providing advice on how to lobby for religious freedom in constitutions and the other giving an overview of recently adopted provisions.Footnote 38 In a 1961 article on religious liberty, Nolde argued that human rights could be most effectively protected through ‘the mind and will of the people as reflected in constitutions, law, courts, and practice. It follows that action to promote the observance of human rights, if it is to be meaningful, must be domestic.’ He saw international action as complementary to this, especially ‘the very knowledge that the eyes of the world are upon the local scene and that world public opinion is increasingly ready to condemn or to commend’.Footnote 39
In practice, the CCIA’s activity straddled the domestic and the international spheres. Through its activity in influencing constitutions, the ecumenical movement sought to inject its ideals directly into the groundwater of the domestic sphere. A key area of ecumenical concern for religious freedom was in majority Muslim societies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.Footnote 40 The following sections discuss two key cases in which ecumenical human rights discourse played a role in negotiating the future relationship between Muslims and Protestants in majority Muslim countries: Indonesia and Nigeria. Each represented a large Muslim population (in Indonesia’s case, the world’s largest). While in Indonesia, ecumenists’ initial success soon faced setbacks, the protections of religious freedom applied in Nigeria were emulated in numerous other countries emerging from British colonialism.Footnote 41
Religious freedom and the Indonesian Revolution
In late August 1945, the newly proclaimed Republican government in Jakarta adopted a constitution that had been drafted before the Japanese surrender, by the Japanese-established Preparatory Committee for Indonesian Independence. The constitution was ‘short and skeletal … more like notes for a constitution than a comprehensive basis for a new state’.Footnote 42 The committee had initially envisioned an obligation in the constitution’s preamble for Muslims to abide by Islamic law (part of the so-called Jakarta Charter), as well as the requirement that the head of state should be a Muslim. According to M. C. Ricklefs, a warning from the Japanese Navy ‘that Christian Indonesians in its area would disapprove of any special role for Islam’ led nationalist leaders to abandon these proposals, though they would come back to haunt the government in the late 1950s.Footnote 43 In Article 29, the constitution established the religious foundation of the state in language acceptable to both Christians and Muslims, and set out a provision for freedom of religion: ‘The State is based on the belief in the Divine Omnipotence. … The State guarantees the freedom of every resident to profess his own religion and to worship according to his religion and belief.’Footnote 44
Facing the prospect of independence, Christians in Indonesia were apprehensive about their future as a small – and, in many places, tiny – religious minority. At an August 1946 meeting on the future of mission in Indonesia, the sociologist and missionary pastor C. L. van Doorn argued that Dutch Christians should avoid taking a defensive posture. This would require them not to cloister themselves or to adopt an air of superiority, but instead to join Indonesians ‘“in the establishment of an Indonesian state, governed by the rule of law”, guided by the gospel’.Footnote 45 However, the second speaker, the missionary consul J. C. Hoekendijk, focused on the issue of religious freedom, on the basis of a memorandum drafted on his initiative by the ecumenical Contact Commissie Kerk en Zending (Contact Commission Church and Mission). This memorandum expressed worries about the possibility of Islamic pressure outside the main islands of Java and Sumatra. In his accompanying address, Hoekendijk cited historical examples from the Middle East, in which Christians were relegated to second-class citizenship, and gave an overview of ecumenical discussions on the issue of religious freedom.Footnote 46
The memorandum was sent to Lieutenant-Governor General H. J. van Mook, the head of the Dutch East Indies government. The churches and missionaries quoted as their point of departure the 1944 San Francisco statement of the American Joint Committee on Religious Liberty (JCRL), a precursor to Article 18 of the Universal Declaration. They explicitly rejected the possibility of safeguarding religious freedom through a system of minority rights, because history had shown ‘that the maintenance of the rights of a minority in fact never rises above permitting the status quo to be maintained’, whereas religion contained a ‘dynamic element’, as revealed through its ‘missionary-expansionary character’.Footnote 47 The letter then went on to invoke the UN Charter’s provisions for religious freedom, which the letter asserted went beyond freedom of worship to include observance, organization, and (missionary) activities, within the boundaries of the law. The Charter in fact merely mentioned religion in its non-discrimination clauses, but the UN’s involvement in the Dutch–Indonesian conflict after January 1946 made it a salient point of reference. The authors also distinguished between a set of six rights that the church was due as a religious body, from the establishment of its own liturgy to the freedom to carry out philanthropic work, and five rights of individual believers, including the rights to change one’s religion and to spread one’s faith through witness and education (stopping short of an explicit right to propagate or evangelize). The call to recognize the corporate rights of the church reflected the legacy of pre-war ecumenical statements on religious freedom, coming ahead of the Amsterdam Assembly’s greater emphasis on the individual believer in its ‘Declaration on religious liberty’.
From 1 to 12 October 1946, the Dutch East Indies government held a conference at which it solicited the views of minorities on their future in a federal Indonesia. The Dutch theologian J. Verkuyl made an appeal not only to religious freedom, but also to ‘human rights’, while referring to the UN Charter and the JCRL’s statement.Footnote 48 According to Hoekendijk, as a result of Verkuyl’s efforts ‘the short Statement on Religious Liberty was officially adopted as a general directive’.Footnote 49 In November, Verkuyl and Hoekendijk’s replacement, U. H. van Beyma, again petitioned the Dutch East Indies government, this time more specifically to safeguard religious freedom in the future Indonesian constitution.Footnote 50
The efforts by Dutch missionaries seem to have turned from the Dutch to the Indonesians since, in the November 1946 Linggadjati Agreement, it was agreed that drafting the provisional constitution would be up to the Indonesians.Footnote 51 Hoekendijk recollected that, after an address on religious liberty that he had given at a missionary conference in Batavia in August 1946, a number of ‘the Indonesians present took this address with them to Eastern Indonesia [with its substantial Christian populations] and accepted the statement with our interpretation’. He also wrote that ‘the memoranda prepared by our group found there [sic] way through under ground [sic] channels to Djokja [Yogyakarta]’, the Republican capital. Hoekendijk recounted with pride that he and his colleagues, including Verkuyl, had successfully introduced the JCRL’s statement on religious liberty ‘into one of the recommendations of an [unspecified] official political meeting’, a fact which they had then referenced to build further support. He also noted the particular utility of having an ecumenical statement to which they could refer: ‘We never gave it in Dutch and always pointed to the fact that this was not a Western, but an ecumenical principle.’Footnote 52
Between 1947 and 1949, the Netherlands undertook two major military offensives to quash the Republic of Indonesia, severely damaging the prospects of future bilateral relations and prompting international outrage. Dutch missionaries were more critical of these developments than the vast majority of churches in the Netherlands, leading to conflict with those who refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Indonesians’ desire for full-fledged independence. At the same time, they continued their efforts to promote religious freedom in the federal constitution. In a 1949 memorandum, the ecumenical Raad voor de Zending (Missionary Council) quoted Searle Bates’ Study of religious liberty (1945), which stated that Indonesia’s Muslims ‘are less fanatical than the more intense people of the Near East’.Footnote 53 Yet, while the Dutch missionaries agreed, they held that ‘throughout all of Islam there [is] visible a certain inclination, tendency, with regard to the way in which the community of Christ is approached’.Footnote 54 Protestants saw a desire to enable government restriction of missionary activity in attempts by the Indonesian Muslim Party to preserve a legal provision known as Article 177, which required the governor general to give missionaries permission to operate in a given area.Footnote 55 Another indicator was a recent parliamentary session in the Negara Indonesia Timur, the Dutch-established ‘State of East Indonesia’, in which Muslims, joined by Bali Hindus, had passed a law that allowed the interdiction of missionary activity if it threatened ‘public order’.Footnote 56 For the missionaries, abandoning evangelization was not an option, because ‘this would mean the death of the church…. So this freedom will have to be fought for continuously.’Footnote 57
The arsenal from which missionaries drew the weapons to fight for their conception of religious freedom was, as in 1946, largely provided by the ecumenical movement’s work on religious liberty, now expanded with the Amsterdam Assembly’s 1948 declaration, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and a WCC document about ‘The Marxist conception of religious liberty’ (the inclusion of this cautionary assessment reflected concerns that communism might become a major force in Indonesian politics). Most importantly, the Raad indicated its support for the religious freedom provisions suggested for the future Indonesian constitution by Verkuyl in his 1948 dissertation.Footnote 58 The memorandum claimed that Verkuyl’s proposal ‘certainly was a source of inspiration in [the constitution of the] N[egara].I[ndonesia].T[imur]’, the provisions of which were also provided in full. Verkuyl’s proposal included the freedom to evangelize and the right to change one’s religion. According to the Raad it was a ‘maximum elaboration of the the [sic] definition of San Francisco’. While its full adoption was considered unlikely, it was considered the ideal outcome for which to strive.Footnote 59
At the July 1949 Inter-Indonesian Conference in Yogyakarta and Batavia, the Republican and Federalist factions among the Indonesians worked out a provisional constitution, in which they decided to include the full text of Article 18 of the Universal Declaration.Footnote 60 The Dutch accepted this draft without significant change at the Round Table Conference in October.Footnote 61 Nolde observed that the 1949 constitution’s provisions on human rights were ‘encouraging’.Footnote 62 This constitution lasted only a few months, as the federal state was overturned in favour of a unitary one, but it was the basis on which the 1950 provisional constitution was drafted.Footnote 63
Yet, while both the 1949 and 1950 constitutions included human rights provisions based on the Universal Declaration, the 1950 constitution was far less explicit regarding freedom of religion. Where the 1949 constitution had copied Article 18 of the Universal Declaration, the 1950 constitution truncated the language to focus only on ‘inner’ freedom: ‘Everyone is entitled to freedom of religion, conscience, and thought.’ A separate provision, Article 43, maintained language from the 1949 constitution on the religious nature of the state and religious freedom. The government claimed that the two articles together sufficiently covered ‘the intention of’ Article 18, in allowing for evangelization, the right to change one’s religion, and parental choice in religious education.Footnote 64 Ecumenical Christians worried, however, that the freedom to ‘profess’ one’s religion, and the only implicit recognition of the right to change one’s religion, constituted a substantial reduction in the scope of the freedom to manifest religion in Indonesian society. Questioned in parliament, Prime Minister Mohammed Hatta explained that the article had been shortened because the previous formulation ‘could be interpreted as a kind of recommendation to change one’s religion’, as a church periodical reported; it added the supposition that Muslim pressure probably explained the change.Footnote 65
Religious freedom remained contested through the 1950s.Footnote 66 Even before the constitutional change, Dutch ecumenists saw the newly established Ministry of Religion as ‘nothing but a Ministry for Moslem Interests’.Footnote 67 When the process of formulating a permanent constitution began in the late 1950s, Indonesian Christian representatives, both Protestant and Catholic, pushed for the insertion of the Universal Declaration’s Article 18.Footnote 68 Indonesian Christian leaders such as Rev. W. J. Rumambi and J. C. T. Simorangkir, who were also leaders of the Indonesian Council of Churches (founded in 1950), participated in the debates and called for the secular nature of the state to be maintained.Footnote 69 These debates became deadlocked, because Islamic representatives attempted to insert the Jakarta Charter’s phrase on Islamic law, while others resisted this.Footnote 70 Meanwhile, President Sukarno proposed the establishment of a governmental system termed ‘guided democracy’, and in 1957 he effectively suspended the constitution. On 5 July 1959 Sukarno reinstated the 1945 constitution by decree and stated that the Jakarta Charter did not form a legal part of the constitution, thus ensuring the secular character of the state.Footnote 71 Yet the return to the 1945 constitution meant a further reduction in the constitutional protection of religious freedom and a blow to ecumenical aspirations (as well as a general slide into authoritarianism).
Kenneth Grubb and religious freedom in Northern Nigeria
Nigeria, and especially Northern Nigeria, was an important focus of the CCIA’s work in the 1950s, because of the missionary and Christian minority interests there. While the country as a whole was characterized by significant religious diversity, including large Christian populations, the north was almost two-thirds Muslim, with most others ‘following their tribal beliefs and a small Christian minority’.Footnote 72 The CCIA had a long-established connection with the churches through the Christian Council in Nigeria (founded in 1930). This section focuses on the role of the ecumenical movement in bringing about Nigeria’s 1959 bill of rights, which included provisions on religious liberty in line with ecumenical desiderata. Once the constitution had enshrined religious freedom, ecumenical leaders in independent Nigeria saw in these provisions a key instrument to preserve ‘the right to propagate our faith’ (at least until the military coup in 1966, which is beyond the scope of this article).Footnote 73
While constitution-making in Nigeria had a long history, with respect to human rights it entered a new phase in the 1950s. In 1953, the Methodist Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the leader of the Action Group, which represented Nigeria’s Western Region, had taken the initiative in crafting a bill of rights for Nigeria. A London-trained lawyer, as well as a teacher and trade union leader, Awolowo enlisted the support of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, which controlled the Eastern Region, led by Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe. Their joint proposal drew inspiration from the Indian constitution (which had in turn drawn inspiration from the United States) and included provisions on the freedom of religion. However, the Northern Region opposed the idea of a bill of rights, and the British Colonial Office’s view at the time was that bills of rights were ineffective or even dangerous. According to Stanley De Smith, the Secretary of State for the Colonies responded to the proposal of a bill of rights ‘by laughing the idea out of the conference room’.Footnote 74 By 1955, however, as described by Charles Parkinson, the Secretary of State for the Colonies and the Governor General of Nigeria had both been replaced by officials more sympathetic to bills of rights. The new governor general, Sir James Robertson, also convinced the Northern People’s Congress that a bill of rights could protect the population of the Northern Region from discrimination by the southern regions. Thus, the alignment of forces had shifted and the notion of a bill of rights started gaining traction. At this time, the Christian Council of Churches in Nigeria and the CCIA, especially its chairman, Kenneth Grubb – who was also the President of the Anglican Church Missionary Society – began to push for the inclusion of religious freedom, which would result in its inclusion in the 1959 bill of rights.Footnote 75
Ecumenical efforts to include Article 18 of the Universal Declaration in Nigerian constitutional provisions got underway in 1955, as the records of a meeting between Grubb, Nigerian church and missionary representatives, and the regional government of the North illustrate.Footnote 76 It seems likely that such representations were what the Northern Region’s governor referred to when he notified the Colonial Office, in August 1955, that ‘people were nervous about the prospect of early self-government and the absence, so far, of a Northern “Declaration of Human Rights” with particular regard for religious freedom’.Footnote 77 Parkinson credits this missive with setting in motion the Colonial Office’s acceptance of the need for constitutional protection of religious freedom, though it did not yet want a bill of rights. Subsequently, Grubb had lunch with Tom Williamson, the lead on Nigerian affairs in the Colonial Office’s West Africa Department, who showed him the draft proposal for a constitution for Northern Nigeria. Grubb made two points regarding religious liberty, namely the need to secure freedom to change one’s religion, and the right of parents to choose their children’s religious instruction, both of which were favourably received. However, reporting on the approach, Grubb noted an important reservation made by Williamson, who had said that he and his colleagues ‘did not like to proceed “by reference to the Declaration of Human Rights” but preferred an approach by reference to constitutional provisions which may be obtainable in other colonial constitutions’. Specifically, he had in mind the Sudan Self-Government Statute. Williamson ‘attributed this attitude to a general dislike both among parliamentarians and higher officials at the Colonial Office to the activities of the United Nations in regard to dependent peoples’, an attitude that reflected a dislike of international scrutiny and an attachment to established colonial legislation. Nevertheless, Grubb pressed Williamson to promise that he would ‘study Article 18 and other relevant articles in the Declaration’.Footnote 78
Article 18 did make its way into Colonial Office policy, after a church and missionary delegation met with John Hare, the minister of state (standing in for the secretary of state), on 16 July 1956. The delegation was led by representatives of the British Council of Churches and the IMC, but also included Grubb, the Rev. Canon C. A. Forster, secretary of the Christian Council in Nigeria, and the heads of the Overseas Council of the Church of England and the Free Church Federal Council. Though the CCIA archives do not include minutes of the meeting, a document prepared by the British Council of Churches – an important constituent of the WCC – setting out its requests, opened with a call to include Articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration in the constitutions being prepared for Nigeria, with special reference to the North, because of its government’s ‘substantial Muslim majority’. A line at the end noted that while the CCIA ‘has been kept informed … [it] seemed more convenient to make the present approach through the British Council of Churches’.Footnote 79 The meeting prompted the Colonial Office to add the Universal Declaration’s rights to change one’s religion and to propagate it to the religious freedom provision of the Sudan Self-Government Statute. Pressure from the three Nigerian regions at the 1957 constitutional conference then contributed to the expansion of this minimalist commitment into a full-fledged bill of rights, a departure from long-established British policy.Footnote 80
The following year, Grubb spent almost a month in Nigeria. In his report on religious liberty he wrote that Nigeria was ‘the key area in Christian/Moslem confrontation in Africa’. He worried that in the North, with its majority Muslim population, unlike in the East or the West, ‘the new nationalism’ might ‘turn against the missionary from overseas’. Meeting with Ahmadu Bello, the premier of Northern Nigeria, Grubb asked him to confirm the right to change one’s religion, to which Bello ‘emphatically’ assented while voicing a qualification with respect to ‘law and order’. Grubb felt that Bello’s expressed support for rights and freedoms was ‘probably only words’. At a subsequent meeting, the acting governor of Northern Nigeria indicated that he shared Grubb’s scepticism.Footnote 81
In Lagos, Grubb met with the newly established Minorities Commission, headed by Henry Willink, which had been tasked with addressing calls for minority protections. The otherwise pressured and overburdened body indicated that it was eager to receive a memorandum from the Christian Council in Nigeria. With Grubb’s assistance in drafting, the Council sent a memorandum to the Commission in December 1957, expressing its desire that ‘the Federal and Regional constitutions of our country should contain satisfactory guarantees of human rights and freedoms’, in the interests of ‘the peaceful development of the country and the religious interests of all’, given its nature as a ‘multi-communal state’. It echoed ecumenical wording in asserting that, in such a society, ‘no religion should claim or possess rights, privileges, or freedoms which are denied to any other religion’. The appeal listed seven specific religious rights, including the freedom to change one’s religion, the freedom of parents to choose their children’s religious education, and the freedom ‘to establish and operate institutions for religious and charitable purposes’, all long-standing priorities of the CCIA. The Christian Council followed up these religious rights with a set of four more general human rights, most importantly non-discrimination: ‘the equality of all before the law, regardless of race, tribe, religion, or sex’. The document clearly showed the influence of the CCIA, through the focus on particular religious rights and the actual wording, as well as through their connection to human rights in general.Footnote 82
The intervention by Grubb and his Nigerian-based colleagues dovetailed with the interests of the Minorities Commission and the Colonial Office. The report of the Commission made repeated reference to the ‘Christian bodies’ that had made representations on ‘certain fundamental rights’, which it singled out for positive comment, as opposed to ‘almost all the witnesses’, who ‘were insistent that nothing but a separate state could meet their problems’. These ‘Christian bodies’ were in fact only Grubb and the Christian Council in Nigeria, since no other group had called for a bill of rights as a means of protecting minorities.Footnote 83 The Commission’s report adhered closely to the desiderata put forward in the Council’s memorandum. The drafters of the proposed bill of rights had not taken the Universal Declaration as a source, but instead (in the absence of a British bill of rights) had drawn on the European Convention on Human Rights. However, since the latter’s Article 9 was virtually identical to the Universal Declaration’s provision, this mattered little with respect to religious freedom. The Minorities Commission also included two clauses on religious education borrowed from the Pakistani constitution. Strikingly, the report even went on to list six religious rights that it recommended be specifically taken up in drafting the constitution, a list apparently lifted almost directly from the Council’s memorandum.Footnote 84 While the Colonial Office refused to take up these latter rights, for fear of incurring Muslim outrage, the remaining protections fulfilled ecumenical hopes.Footnote 85 The Nigerian bill of rights then served as a model for many other British overseas territories obtaining independence: Sierra Leone, Jamaica, Uganda, Kenya, Malta, British Guiana, Aden, and Nyasaland (of Commonwealth countries, only Ghana and Tanganyika did not enact ‘justiciable bills of rights’).Footnote 86 Thus, the activities of the CCIA and the Council of Christian Churches in Nigeria had achieved a major coup in securing religious freedom provisions in decolonizing countries.
Human rights as social justice: the ‘revolutionary’ recasting of ecumenical internationalism
Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the nature of the ecumenical movement changed fundamentally, as it became both ‘globalized’ and ‘politicized’. Its membership became less Western, and the churches adopted more forthright political stances on an increasing number of issues, with an emphasis on questions facing the ‘Third World’.Footnote 87 What Justin Reynolds has termed a ‘revolutionary’ tradition in ecumenical thought that had simmered below the surface since the 1940s, primarily in the World Student Christian Federation, came to the fore.Footnote 88 This was showcased by the 1966 Geneva Conference on Church and Society, presided over by the Indian theologian M. M. Thomas. Nearly half the delegates were from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, eight observers from the Roman Catholic Church attended, and the majority of those present were laypeople (experts on economics, law, sociology, but also technical and natural sciences).
On the one hand, the conference considered concerns of the recently decolonized countries, notably ‘the social consequences of decolonisation, such as urbanisation and industrialisation’; on the other, it also discussed secularization and societal changes in Europe, particularly increases in the role of technology, diversity, and individualization. Visser ’t Hooft, who would retire the same month, spoke about the need to expand the concept of the responsible society to that of a ‘responsible world society’. This conception echoed efforts since the late 1930s to articulate a universal ‘international ethos’. Yet this now encountered resistance from delegates from the Third World and those in favour of ‘a contextual ethics’, who responded along cultural-relativist lines: Visser ’t Hooft’s ‘Western-Democratic’ concept was not universally valid, and what ‘Third World’ countries needed was systemic change and development aid. Delegates from Latin America, notably the Colombian theologian Gonzalo Castillo Cárdenas and the American missionary and theologian Richard Shaull, promoted the theological notion of ‘revolution’.Footnote 89
The rise of the revolutionary tradition sat uneasily with the established ecumenical approach to human rights. Representatives of the former were responding to the severe challenges facing many recently independent countries, which led them to concentrate on socio-economic questions, both globally and locally. But, notwithstanding Nolde and his colleagues’ commitment to the development of UN human rights instruments, the CCIA’s human rights agenda remained focused on religious liberty, even as the ground supporting this agenda shifted. For example, significant advances at the UN were made during this time in relation to race, an area which would soon become a focal point for the WCC’s international engagement, yet the CCIA’s reports do not suggest specific interventions, in contrast to its focused work on religious liberty.Footnote 90 As an internal overview of its work acknowledged, ‘Racial and ethnic tensions have not figured very much in the C.C.I.A. business during the first two decades’.Footnote 91 Though the 1966 Geneva conference and the 1968 Uppsala Assembly signalled some of the changes to come, the predominance of the CCIA’s conception of human rights would only gradually be challenged, a process encouraged by the WCC’s new general secretary, Eugene Carson Blake, who sought to make the WCC more globally representative.Footnote 92
It was over the course of the early 1970s that the WCC and CCIA undertook to reconcile human rights with the ‘revolutionary’ tradition. The catalyst was provided by ecumenical engagement with Latin America, including the rise of military dictatorships, the language of resistance articulated by liberation theologians, and interaction with international human rights campaigns. As Patrick William Kelly has also shown, the Chilean coup in 1973 spurred the WCC first to set up a massive humanitarian relief effort that moved roughly 10,000 political refugees out of the country, an effort rivalling that of the UN in size. But once that crisis had abated, in 1974, the WCC’s support transitioned into backing for human rights activism. The WCC provided the vital funding for the ecumenical Pro Peace Committee (later the Vicariate of Solidarity) and worked side by side with Amnesty International to support it.Footnote 93
Unlike Amnesty, which had a rigidly circumscribed ‘mandate’, the WCC’s connections with Latin American church leaders led it to embrace a wider agenda than civil and political rights. This included efforts at grassroots empowerment and social and economic programmes, conceived of as both mitigating the military regime and resisting it. In a meeting with the WCC on 31 May 1974, the Committee’s leading lawyer, José Zalaquett (who would upon his exile go on to become the head of Amnesty’s International Executive Committee), argued that the churches were uniquely well placed to take a two-pronged approach to delegitimizing the Chilean regime: they should expose ‘the sham and the myth behind’ not only the ‘legality’ of the junta, but also its ‘economic justice’, in terms of jobs, inflation, and availability of goods and services. Zalaquett argued that the government had ‘in effect isolated itself’, alienating even the Christian Democratic Party, ‘which was behind the overthrow of the Allende government’; ‘even the right wing “gremios” – or professional associations – are affected by the economic oppression’.Footnote 94 Meanwhile Harper cast Chilean issues not only in individual but also, and increasingly, in collective terms. For instance, he argued that human rights violations in Chile were ‘a mass, and massive problem … [which] must be treated, therefore, as a mass problem, and not – as in the past – as a [sic] individual problem, by the churches’. He wrote that the churches ought to be ‘the defender of the oppressed – not in terms, primarily, of the individual but in terms of groups of people’.Footnote 95 One way of conceiving of such groups, as in a later report by the Human Rights Resources Office for Latin America, was that of a ‘repressed majority’ pitted against a ‘rich and powerful minority elite’, but more specific groups could also be identified, such as the indigenous peoples of Brazil.Footnote 96 Under the ostensibly apolitical umbrella of human rights, then, the WCC supported much more wide-ranging, religiously inspired and communitarian goals of social justice. Such an approach also characterized the new conception of human rights that it developed in the early 1970s.
As Annegreth Schilling has described, many exiled Latin Americans came to work for the WCC, including the new head of its international representation, the Argentinian-Estonian lawyer Leopoldo Niilus, the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, and the Uruguayan liberation theologian Julio de Santa Ana.Footnote 97 As also described by Christian Albers, Niilus and his study secretary, the American Rev. Dwain C. Epps, oversaw a reworking of the ecumenical conception of human rights over the course of several meetings, culminating in a 1974 consultation on ‘Human rights and Christian responsibility’.Footnote 98 This meeting foregrounded African, Asian, and especially Latin American perspectives. The outcome of the meeting was then endorsed by the 1975 Nairobi Assembly, which indicated a break with previous ecumenical human rights engagement in emphatically including collective rights, such as ‘the rights to self-determination and to cultural identity’.Footnote 99 Religious freedom was demoted to one right among others; as the WCC’s Executive Committee would put it in 1979, ‘if it speaks in universal terms, the church cannot isolate for priority consideration the question of its own religious freedom. Conversely, a church which struggles for all rights for all people has, often with surprise, rediscovered something of its essential evangelical mission.’Footnote 100
The Nairobi Assembly connected ecumenical concerns in areas such as racism, sexism, and development to this capacious conception of human rights. Central to the WCC’s new approach was an analysis, clearly inflected by Marxist and anti-colonial modes of thinking, of the ‘root causes’ of human rights violations, which took the form of ‘unjust social structures, expressed through, e.g., economic exploitation, political manipulation, military power, class domination, psychological conditioning’, which ‘create the conditions under which human rights are denied’. The Assembly reiterated that each human being was ‘created in God’s image’, but also stated that to work for human rights meant ‘to work at the most basic level towards a society without unjust structures’.Footnote 101 The WCC thus fused appeals to the dignity of the individual human being with a contentious interpretation of socio-political questions.
Different interpretations have been offered as to how to understand the WCC’s recasting of human rights.Footnote 102 Lehmann has argued that these years saw a process of ‘mainstreaming’ the concept of human rights within the WCC, whereby human rights were adopted as a ‘common denominator’ of WCC activities.Footnote 103 Indeed, different departments and commissions of the WCC could (partly) reframe their work in terms of human rights. Albers has emphasized how the process of redefining human rights served to bring ecumenists from the North and South to ‘see eye to eye’ by speaking a shared language.Footnote 104 Though not in relation to human rights specifically, Schilling has argued that the WCC’s interaction with Christians from Latin America served to create an intermediary ‘third space … where theological and cultural differences were articulated and negotiated’.Footnote 105
These analyses point to a key feature of the human rights debate within the ecumenical movement at this time: to the ascendant representatives of the ‘revolutionary’ tradition, process mattered more than the achievement of a consensus outcome.Footnote 106 Rather than attempting to identify issues from a neutral or universal standpoint, priority was given to understanding opposing viewpoints. This was not only seen as a precondition for meaningful practical engagement but was also necessary as the basis for any true ecumenical fellowship. Shifting notions of ecumenical unity and mission over time enabled this reorientation: unity could be manifested in diversity, at least in theory, and mission should be conceived of as global rather than directed from the West to ‘Third World’ mission fields. As the WCC’s general secretary, Philip Potter, from the British-associated Caribbean state of Dominica, quoted the 1973 Bangkok World Mission Conference: ‘the diversity of responses to Christ is essential precisely because they are related to particular situations and are thus relevant and complementary’.Footnote 107
Thus, even though a text like the Nairobi Assembly’s report on ‘Structures of injustice and struggles for liberation’ suggested agreement, it straddled irreconcilable positions. This lack of a unified agenda went hand in hand with a diffusion of agency away from the CCIA and towards other WCC bodies, as well as towards ecclesiastical organizations at the national and local level.Footnote 108 In the increasingly polycentric ecumenical landscape of the 1970s, such diffusion was embraced and even encouraged by the CCIA, which – in the spirit of Nairobi’s emphasis on ‘participation’ – stimulated the agency of local actors and acted as a global coordinator and clearing house, for instance by co-organizing regional consultations on human rights.Footnote 109 In practice, then, and in a fundamental reorientation from the CCIA’s earlier efforts to universalize its definition of religious freedom, the new ecumenical approach invited the ‘vernacularizing’ (to adopt a term from Mark Philip Bradley) of human rights as circumstances required.Footnote 110 As a wide range of ecumenical conferences and documents from the 1970s show, this reorientation meant that, whereas previously human rights had served as a primarily legal language, at this time it became a theologically laden concept in its own right, and a core element of ecumenical social ethics.Footnote 111
Conclusions
The account of ecumenical human rights advocacy from the 1940s to the 1970s given here shows that a significant strand of Christian human rights engagement existed over the course of this period. Further research on the extent to which the language of human rights ‘trickled down’ from the work of the CCIA and the WCC is needed, but the extensive contacts with church leaders and missionaries suggest that human rights discourse spread far and wide, if perhaps not always deep. It is important, in this respect, to keep in mind the distinction between ecumenical leaders and their constituencies.
What is most important about this story is how the meaning of human rights changed over time. Initially, the CCIA’s advocacy of religious freedom showed how a distinctly Christian understanding of this concept could be married with the secularized human rights of the UN. While the UN’s formulation of human rights was universal, the ecumenical movement’s primary concern in the post-war decades was with its co-religionists, whereas political Catholicism and Islam were each seen as potentially ‘totalitarian’ threats. The CCIA’s activity in decolonizing Muslim countries illustrates how the missionary movement’s interest in the freedom of evangelization, as well as concern for the position of Christian minorities, was a major factor in its turn to human rights. The case of Italy, in contrast, highlights the limits of the appeal of human rights, as efforts to implement and reform the constitution relied mostly on other means. All three cases show how the CCIA and its contacts at the national level strategically mixed human rights language with appeals tailored to specific national contexts.
The CCIA’s focus on establishing constitutional religious freedom provisions testifies to the priority it accorded to the domestic sphere, where international human rights instruments were only seen to play a corrective role. This complicates the distinction often made in the historiography of human rights between international and domestic rights language. The CCIA’s approach can best be understood as a religious variant of what Roland Burke, echoing Samuel Moyn, has recently described as the distinctively ‘nationalist species of internationalism’ that dominated UN-centred human rights advocacy from the 1940s onwards, which ‘marked the final renovation of a liberal nationalist tradition and a renewed confidence in the potential for the sovereign state, were it to be properly constituted’.Footnote 112
The understanding of human rights developed by the WCC in the early 1970s, however, was capacious and pluralistic, as opposed to focused and universalizing. It rejected the notion of an international ethos for a contextual one, and framed liberation in communitarian terms. Whereas the emphasis since 1948 had been on individual rights, conceived of as universal and pursued through the international institutions of the post-war order, the new approach saw human rights as an open-ended concept that could be reshaped and deployed to further a plurality of emancipatory projects. Even though the WCC still saw the UN and nascent regional human rights regimes as fora through which change could be achieved, it now conceived of human rights as primarily a moral rather than a legal concept. This theological embrace of human rights represented a paradoxical return to a religious conception of rights, which had declined in the 1940s.
The emphasis on transnational cooperation that characterized the WCC’s new approach mirrored the contemporaneous rise of grassroots human rights organizations. Yet its explicitly religious nature set it apart from more secular forms of activism, and its communitarian frame distinguished it from the individualistic focus of ascendant liberal organizations such as Amnesty International, which focused on individual cases of imprisonment, with minimal attention to political context.Footnote 113 The WCC, by contrast, turned towards an approach shaped by liberation theologies that aimed at both spiritual and social transformation and thus emphatically called attention to the roots of human rights violations. Furthermore, the emphasis on the churches’ engagement in their own societies contrasted sharply with Amnesty, which banned its members from working on their own country, to preserve their ‘impartiality’. Burke has written that in the 1970s there were ‘two poles’ in human rights advocacy, one of which was exemplified by Amnesty, the other by the ‘New Internationalism’, exemplified by calls for a ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO). In Burke’s view, the latter ‘drifted to grand impersonal structures and high abstractions, all of which were to enhance sovereign power to “do good” (a questionable proposition, given the authoritarianism of its chief proponents) and to create the conditions under which human rights would be realized’.Footnote 114 The WCC can be understood as charting a course between these two poles: it sought to address the structural causes of injustice while steering clear of the NIEO’s authoritarian tendencies. The history of its engagement thus highlights the diversity of human rights discourse in the 1970s.Footnote 115
Bastiaan Bouwman is a PhD student in the Department of International History of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he is writing his dissertation on the human rights engagement of the World Council of Churches from the 1940s to the 1970s. He is presently a doctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz and serves as a managing editor of the journal Cold War History.
