Rights Worth Defending

THIS SPRING I sat with former President Jimmy Carter and 150 others to talk about human rights.

Women and men from Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Palestine, DR Congo, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Russia, Ukraine, the U.S., and other nations attended the Carter Center’s #FreedomfromFear Human Rights Defenders Forum in Atlanta in the midst of a year marked by increased attacks on human rights and on the people who defend them.

Yuri Dzhibladze, president of the Moscow-based Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, shared what he had learned about authoritarian leaders by defending human rights in Putin’s Russia. “For authoritarian leaders to take power,” Dzhibladze said, “they must propagate the belief that they are the protectors of their countries. They must cast multiple actors as imminent threats.”

Donald Trump’s campaign declaration rang in my ears: “I alone can fix it,” Trump said at the GOP national convention. Inside the Beltway those words sounded insane, but, according to Dzhibladze, Trump was simply reading from the authoritarian leaders’ handbook 101. “In authoritarian regimes,” Dzhibladze said, “propaganda dehumanizes scapegoats. Meanwhile, devious enemies are always plotting against us.”

Flashbacks of Trump’s opening campaign salvo haunted me: “When Mexico sends its people,” he roared, “they’re not sending their best ... They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And Trump drew from the authoritarian handbook when he attempted to subvert the FBI’s investigation into connections with Russia.

FOUR DAYS OF rich communion with men and women who have suffered beatings, rapes, detention, and near death still could not dislodge me from my Facebook feed. A conversation was raging among some evangelical friends. One question prompted 75 responses in two days: “Is health care a product, or a right?” Some argued it is a product and a service. Surrounded by human rights defenders, I added, “It is a human right. It falls under the same category as the right to live.”

The comments of a young black man on the thread demonstrated the dissonance created when Christian theology interweaves with conservative ideology: He wanted to believe health care was a right, but hesitated because he couldn’t assent that government had a role to play. In the back and forth, the god-like status of the market for U.S. evangelicals was illuminated.

At the Carter Center conference, Maina Kiai, former U.N. special rapporteur and founder of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, put it this way: The nearly 40-year hegemony of “market fundamentalism has created a situation where eight men own more than half the world.” What is the core belief in this kind of a world? Money is God. It determines fates. The fate it chooses for individuals and groups is good, right, and just. Those who cannot survive in this world should not survive.

It is not a far step from the tyranny of money to the tyranny of despots. Perhaps that’s how we got here.

What would it take for evangelicals—and all of us—to forsake this tyranny? I am convinced that we must discover God again. God’s image does not dwell on dollar bills, nor in the boastful pronouncements of despots. God’s image lives behind the eyes of all humanity, from the greatest to the least. There we will find inherent dignity and rights worth defending.