It is a privilege to contribute this essay in honor of John Witte, Jr. I distinctly remember my first conversation with John. I was then a relatively new member of the academy who had grown weary of an intellectual landscape that seemed dominated by liberal technocratic theories that aimed to provide morally and religiously neutral solutions to enduring social justice issues. Although critical race theory (CRT) offered deeper and more candid engagement with the nature of enduring social justice issues, in the end, critical theory’s postmodern, deconstructive approach to truth undermined the moral truths needed to ground social justice claims. In other words, in its skepticism of objective truth and in its tendency to reduce law to power and interests, critical theory appeared unable to persuasively explain why its own claims should be accepted as true and just. In contrast to both liberal and critical race theories, the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and the African American Christian tradition that undergirded the King-led wing of the Black freedom movement engaged the deep and complex nature of racial injustice while retaining a focus on truth. But despite Christianity’s role in the Black freedom movement and the religion’s ability to offer deep critical engagement without surrendering truth claims, the legal academy, with its predominantly secular outlook, with rare exceptions appeared largely unaware of or even indifferent to the African American Christian tradition. Put bluntly, in my judgment, both liberal scholarship and CRT seemed largely at best apathetic and at worst hostile toward Christianity. I perceived a calling to help bring the resources of the Christian tradition to bear on race and law scholarship. But for a young, untenured professor, this was not an easy calling to follow. It was clear that several senior colleagues did not see the value or point of scholarship at the nexus of Christianity, race, and law.
In this context, coming to know John was a great source of encouragement. A prolific Christian scholar with an impressive body of work, including over 40 books, 280 articles, and the editorship of 17 journal symposia, he held the directorship of Emory’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion. The center has sponsored a magnificent body of Christian legal scholarship that has
In our first conversation, John spoke of Christian scholars not hiding their light under a bushel and encouraged my calling. In the years since, he has been far more than a source of encouragement. Expressing confidence in my work at the intersection of race, law, and Christianity, he welcomed me as a McDonald Distinguished Fellow at the Emory center. More recently, he entrusted me to lead a funded symposium project on the topic of “Christianity, Law and Racial Justice: Shaping the Future.” (I invited John’s former student and fellow McDonald Distinguished Fellow and Senior Lecturer, Terri Montague, to join as project co-lead). Because of John’s vision and support and Terri’s efforts as project co-lead, fourteen scholars, including Terri and me, gathered at Emory to discuss papers on race, law, and Christianity. Underscoring the significance of the meeting, the Rev. Dr. Bernice King—one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughters—and Dr. Cornel West offered rich remarks highlighting the importance of bringing the Christian tradition to bear on race and law. The conference proceedings will culminate in the publication of a collaborative symposium edition of the Journal of Law and Religion and Political Theology. Thanks to John’s support, we will soon see a significant step toward the aim of creating a robust scholarly discourse on Christianity, race, and law.
In celebration of John’s work, this chapter seeks to show that beyond the concrete support he has given to developing the field of Christianity, race, and law, John’s scholarship— especially his conception of rights—navigates between contextual and objective conceptions of law while maintaining a steadfast commitment to moral truth appropriate to Christian scholarship at the intersection of race and law. In particular, the chapter argues that John’s capacious understanding of law and religion and his mapping of the interaction between the two, as well as his arguing for the positive contribution that religious values can make to the development of rights and law, align with critical race theory’s historical approach to law and its emphasis on incorporating the perspectives of people of color. However, unlike CRT’s skepticism of the existence of objective truth, John’s historical, contextual approach to rights as middle axioms of political discourse envisions grounding rights in moral truths. The chapter argues that this conception of rights can enable scholarship at the intersection of Christianity, race, and law to continue CRT’s emphasis on the historical, contextual nature of rights while being faithful to Christianity’s commitment to the existence of moral truth.
1 An Expansive View of Law and Religion and the Inevitable Interaction of the Two
As this first section explains, John offers a capacious understanding of both “law” and “religion” that captures their interaction as an inevitable feature of collective life. Moreover, under this broad understanding of law and religion, incorporating religious values into law and lawmaking helps to better align law with the fundamental beliefs that animate actual people and communities.
John has advocated against narrow understandings of “law” and “religion” that render the two mutually unintelligible.1 Under the narrow view, “law” is limited and identified with the rules and statutes that govern a society, while religion is understood as “a body of doctrines and exercises designed to guide private conscience and the voluntary religious society.”2 In contrast, on
Building on the foregoing broad understanding of “law” and “religion,” John has noted a variety of ways in which law and religion are related. They are conceptually related; for example, they employ analogous concepts, such as redemption and rehabilitation, sin and crime, covenant and contract, and righteousness and justice).6 They have developed analogous hermeneutical methods, employing, among other things, logical, ethical, evidentiary, and rhetorical methods that bear a family resemblance.7 Church-state relations institutionally link law and religion vis-à-vis the centuries-long dialectic among jurists, theologians, and philosophers that form our approach to the relationship between church and state.8 Moreover, among other things, lawyers and clergy both mediate conflicts and serve society, thus professionally linking law and religion.9
The above links and interactions between law and religion render the two dependent upon and even “dimensions” of one another.10 As a permanent feature of human life, religion will inevitably shape law and rights, as these latter receive their content and their enforcement from more fundamental beliefs, including religious beliefs as values.11
Building upon the idea that law and religion inevitably interact, John has argued for including religious values in legal scholarship and lawmaking. In addition, rather than intervening in disciplines, such as critical race theory and critical legal studies, that reject the Enlightenment ideal of law as objective and neutral, John has made the case for including religious values in fields, such as human rights, where some see comprehensive views like religion as incompatible with certain liberal ideals, including the idea that legal reasoning and argument should be presented in terms that all reasonable people
2 Religious Values and the Still-Emerging Field of Christianity, Race, and Law
The greater discursive space that religion enjoys today made my own work of analyzing the marginalization of the African American Christian tradition in critical race theory (CRT) implicitly easier than it might have been at the height of the secularization thesis.14 In this respect, historical conditions have converged to enable modes of scholarly work at the intersection of Christianity, law, and race in a way that may not have been possible in the not-too-distant past. Moreover, John’s own work and the immense body of Christian scholarship produced during his leadership of Emory’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion has helped to legitimate legal scholarship that takes religion
Perhaps most significantly, CRT rejects the “Enlightenment ideal of law … as an autonomous, ahistorical phenomenon capable of and appropriately understood by objective, rational, and neutral analysis” in favor of the view that law is historical and contingent.16 CRT’s understanding of the historical, contingent nature of law enables it to expose how unequal racial power and white supremacy structure law and legal institutions and thereby inscribe and perpetuate racial subordination. Moreover, rather than aspiring toward what it takes to be the unobtainable ideals of objectivity and neutral analysis, CRT emphasizes the necessity of understanding law and racial subordination through the perspectives of people of color.17 Put differently, insisting that issues of race and law are shaped by the political and cultural forces at work in broader social life, as a means of addressing racial subordination, CRT argues that law and legal analyses ought to incorporate the perspectives of people of color.
In light of CRT’s commitment to developing work based upon the perspectives of Black people, in prior work I sought to understand why “religiously grounded normative arguments” played a marginal role in CRT “despite the prominence of the Black church in the civil rights movement, the still central role of faith for many African Americans, and CRT’s commitment to addressing racial subordination from the perspectives of Black people.”18 I also note the African American Christian tradition’s absence from a list of intellectual movements, “including liberalism, law and society, feminism, Marxism, poststructuralism, critical legal theory, pragmatism, and nationalism,” that prominent CRT scholars credit as shaping CRT.19 Despite the marginal role of the African American Christian in CRT, I argue that developing a body of scholarship “grounded in the normative resources of the African American Christian tradition” is consistent with “CRT’s emphasis on the importance of developing
3 Rights and Truth in Law and Religion and CRT
Rejection of the ideal of law as autonomous and objective and developing wholly according to internal resources, in favor of a view of law as porous and influenced by the fundamental beliefs, such as religious values, that prevail in a society raises questions about the significance and nature of rights. In particular, if, as John Witte argues, law inevitably incorporates religious values or, as CRT argues, ought to include the perspectives of people of color, rights should not be understood as the objective products of legal reason alone.
For some, the conclusion that extralegal values and forces shape law and rights calls the very value of rights into question. Indeed, John and CRT have defended rights against, respectively, fellow Christian thinkers—such as Stanley Hauerwas, Patrick Parkinson, and Helen Alvaré—and the rights-trashing of CRT’s ideological ally, Critical Legal Studies (CLS). Against Hauerwas’s worry that rights discourse threatens to distract from and cheapen the deeper moral claims required to adequately address injustice and fulfill the Christian vision of life, Parkinson’s worry that accepting human rights may mean adopting liberal values, and Alvaré’s worry that equality-based rights claims threaten religious liberty, John asserts that “rights and their vindication help the law achieve” the civil use of securing peace and order, the theological use of fostering self and community improvement, and “the educational use of teaching everyone the good works of morality and love that please God, however imperfect and transient that achievement inevitably will be in the present age.”21 Similarly, CRT defends rights against CLS’s claim that rights discourse “legitimate[s] an illegitimate perception of law” by concealing the law’s status as a “legitimating tool of underlying hierarchy.”22 In contrast, CRT argues that CLS’s critique of rights neglects the important role that “rights play[] in the struggle against racial subordination.”23
human rights are “middle axioms” of political discourse. They are a means to the ends of justice and the common good. But, the norms that rights instantiate depend upon the visions and values of human communities for their content and coherence—or, what the Catholic philosopher
Jacques Maritain described as “the scale of values governing [their] exercise and concrete manifestation.”28
Accordingly, because religious values inevitably inform the “visions and values of human communities” that provide the content and coherence of the norms that rights seek to make real, religion and religious values aid in the development of rights and their implementation as means of securing justice and the common good.29
As middle axioms of political discourse, rights are best understood as contextual and time-bound constructs that rest on more fundamental norms, including religious values that may be universal, even if they come to be known through the unfolding of history. Understanding rights as contextual and time-bound is thus to understand law and lawmaking as embedded, situated, and influenced by the forces and values of the society that a legal regime governs. But as John understands it, this historical, contextual approach does not deny that law and rights should be rooted in moral truth and transcendent values. To the contrary, he writes positively of moral truth and moral and metaphysical knowledge.30
In contrast to a vision of rights as middle axioms of political discourse that ought to approximate and be grounded in more fundamental beliefs and moral truths, critical race theorists tend to deploy a postmodern, deconstructive methodology that is skeptical of mind-independent truth claims.31 Moreover, as seen in Derrick Bell’s highly influential interest-convergence thesis, in which racial progress and regress occur insofar as they align with white interests, CRT frequently portrays law as predicated upon (even perhaps reducible to) power and interests rather than moral or ethical ideals.32 However, while CRT correctly claims that disparate racial power is essential to understanding American law, CRT flounders to the extent that it expresses skepticism toward
4 Rights, Power, and Truth in the Emerging Discipline of Christianity, Race, and Law
A key question for the emerging field of Christianity, race, and law concerns the relationships among rights, power, and truth. This part offers three interrelated approaches to this question. First, it attempts to rapidly capture why scholarship examining race and law from the perspective of the Christian tradition should generally reject CRT’s skepticism of truth itself while also embracing CRT’s insights into how power and interests shape American law and the law’s role in racial subordination. Second, the section argues that John Witte’s conception of human rights as middle axioms of political discourse offers a promising avenue for how scholarship at the intersection of Christianity, race, and law can understand the impact of power on rights while nonetheless seeking to ground rights on moral truths. Finally, the section evaluates how John’s and CRT’s understandings of their foci on, respectively, grounding rights in truth and justice and ending racial subordination sharpens a challenge facing race and law scholarship that draws on the Christian tradition: how to remain faithful to the Christian commitment to moral truth while adequately grappling with CRT’s insight that racial power profoundly shapes and even drives issues of race and law.
4.1 Rejecting Epistemic Relativism
Although understandings about the nature of truth and how human beings apprehend moral and theological truths vary across Christian traditions, such variations do not need to be addressed here. For purposes of this discussion, the key point is that, notwithstanding such complexity, Christianity generally rejects CRT’s tendency toward epistemic relativism. In fact, even the most cursory review of Christian scriptures strongly and unambiguously aligns Christianity with the existence of truth.34 Indeed, passages too numerous to list
Christianity is not just confident in the existence of truth; it identifies truth with God himself and with the highest Christian virtue, love.40 Thus, in general, race and law scholarship anchored in the Christian tradition will retain a commitment to truth. Yet, as noted above, it is also clear that power profoundly shapes how American law treats questions of race and law. The emerging field of Christianity, race, and law therefore faces the challenge of maintaining CRT’s careful attention to the impact of racial power on American law and legal institutions, while simultaneously upholding an unambiguous commitment to the existence of truth.
4.2 Rights: Integrating Truth and Political Discourse
John’s conception of rights as middle axioms of political discourse is, I believe, capable of accommodating CRT’s habit of identifying rights and law with the sphere of politics and power relations while avoiding the philosophical skepticism into which CRT often falls. As the very phrase “middle axioms of political discourse” implies, rights are something more than mere politics, but they are not themselves fundamental moral truths, though they may be based on such truths.41 Thus understood, we can (with CRT) remain attentive to the impact
Although understanding rights as middle axioms would enable the discipline of Christianity, race, and law to give focus to both power and truth, as mentioned above, understandings of the complicated nature of truth and its apprehension vary across the Christian tradition. A practical implication, then, is that Christian scholars taking up questions of race and law may offer different approaches to the grounding of rights in fundamental truths. We leave the task of developing what these approaches might be to scholars writing from the particular Christian traditions from which such varied views can be developed, and instead we turn to John’s work and CRT for lessons that can inform future work. As we now see, John emphasizes a robust, inclusive discourse as the ordinary means of securing truth and justice, whereas, reflecting the influence of standpoint theory, CRT emphasizes listening (and even deference) to the perspectives of people of color.42
4.3 Robust Inclusive Debate versus Standpoint Theory
It is helpful to recall that John’s defense of the place of religious values in law and legal scholarship is primarily a reaction against liberal theories that wish to bracket religious values and exclude them from the public square. In John’s view, incorporating religious values makes law and rights more efficacious by better aligning law with the fundamental beliefs of the citizenry. In contrast, CRT is focused on showing how—contrary to the liberal, Enlightenment ideal of law as neutral and objective—law is in fact shaped by broader power relations that facilitate and further racial subordination. CRT asserts that by rejecting neutrality and objectivity and looking to the perspectives of people of color, law can better address racial injustice. With these different agendas in mind, I now briefly describe how John and CRT propose to pursue their respective visions.
Perhaps reflecting the importance of “discourse” in the phrase “middle axioms of political discourse,” John endorses philosopher Lenn E. Goodman’s view that morality and justice are discerned through a “historical process —an actual debate among actual people who have actual lives and actual beliefs,
In contrast, CRT is skeptical that a robust, inclusive discourse will secure racial justice. In particular, given the unequal distribution of power among groups and their unequal influence over our society’s institutions, discourse alone is unlikely to secure justice. Perhaps more important, at least with respect to race, law and legal institutions do not reflect ideals of justice so much as they do racial interests. Hence, as discussed above, Derrick Bell’s interest-convergence thesis posits that law facilitates racial progress when perceived white self-interests align with Black interests.46 In addition, rather than positing that a robust, interracial dialogue is the best means of identifying the nature of racial subordination or its solution, CRT emphasizes looking to the bottom and privileging the perspectives of people of color. Specifically, according to “standpoint epistemologies” that have influenced CRT, people of color and others at the bottom have “access to understanding about oppression that others cannot have.”47 CRT thus suggests that on matters of racial justice, deference should be given to the perspectives of people of color.
Setting aside the epistemological asymmetry that standpoint theory entails, CRT’s skepticism of truth itself raises questions about why the perspectives of people of color should be considered true. Moreover, even if we ignore the question of truth, it is unclear why deference would be given to minority voices, given CRT’s claim that power and interests rather than moral considerations drive issues of race and law. Notwithstanding the foregoing questions,
While the status of truth in CRT arguably undermines any argument that could be made on behalf of deference to perspectives of color, for reasons alluded to above, CRT casts doubt on the notion that robust debate will secure moral truth on questions of race and law. Specifically, given the unequal distribution of power among groups and their unequal influence over our society’s institutions, even if we assume the view that rational analysis (and therefore debate) enables us to better approximate truth, CRT’s claim that interests and power rather than truth and justice drive law may prove correct. In other words, it may be that in our society, the interests of the powerful tend to eclipse truth and justice and therefore the specific requirements of racial justice. However, as the next part argues, even if in our society interests tend to prevail over justice, the Christian tradition and the thought of Martin Luther King Jr. suggest that the solution to the reduction of law to power and interests is the elevation of truth, not the embrace of a philosophical outlook that abandons truth and thereby undermines the foundations of justice claims.
5 Overcoming Reductionism: Preserving Truth through Agape Love
This final part tentatively suggests that taken together, John’s work and CRT indicate that scholarship at the intersection of race, law, and Christianity should take seriously Martin Luther King Jr.’s understanding that fostering a society and legal system capable of being faithful to truth entails a turn to the Christian virtue of agape love and the corresponding capacity to rise above the racial interests that CRT sees as driving issues of race and law. As a result, it may be possible to escape the reduction of race and law issues to power and politics.
It is fitting to begin this brief discussion with a statement about King’s fundamental outlook on moral truth and epistemic skepticism. As King scholar and Black church historian David V. Lewis notes, “[f]or King, any ‘relative attitude’ toward truth or ‘right and wrong’ constituted a revolt ‘against the very laws of God himself.’”48 Moreover, “[w]hen King spoke of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, he also had in mind the long arc of truth, for
In addition, consistent with a historicized, contextual vision of rights that are nonetheless grounded in moral truths, King rejected a “static” conception of truth in favor of truth as an “unfolding process.”53 This dynamic, historical conception of truth allowed for “new truths” or discovery and learning.54 Indeed, for King, this historical, dynamic approach to truth accords with his understanding of revelation. Specifically, God is truth, and God is continuously working and revealing Himself in history; truth is therefore progressively revealed in history.55
For King, love, which is bound up with truth, is the ultimate key to reality. It is, in the language of philosophy, the highest good.56 With Gandhi, King believed that commitment to truth entails a commitment to love and, therefore, nonviolence.57 As important, truth, love, and nonviolence are not mere propositions or principles of discourse. They constitute a way of life in which a person stands and comes into a more complete, fuller sense of truth, love, and nonviolence.58 Moreover, in contrast to embracing the sufficiency of an analysis focused on power relations and interests, King believed that an ethic of interests was the greatest threat to lives lived according to truth.59 He held
If CRT is correct that the perceived self-interests of white Americans drive issues of race and law, it goes without saying that actors who work to implement such interests have not put agape love at the center of their lives, for love seeks the good of others. On the other hand, CRT’s embrace of postmodern philosophy and its destabilization of moral truth claims violates one of King’s cardinal principles—that the end is preexistent in the means.61 Applied in the context of democratic deliberation and legal scholarship, King’s view that means and ends are inseparable entails that the moral truth of ending racial subordination will not be achieved by the means of abandoning moral truth itself. To the contrary, following King, the means of denying objective truth in favor of reducing law and rights to interests prefigures the end that, on issues of race, law and rights will continue in the morally impoverished condition that CRT describes.
Although for King truth and love are ultimately to be achieved as a way of life and therefore require a moral transformation of individuals and ultimately collective life,62 King values reason as a way of apprehending truth.63 Moreover, because he identifies truth with the “whole,” it is clear that King would welcome John’s vision of an inclusive, robust debate among different moral communities. On the other hand, King does not limit the identification of truth to discursive reason but identifies with Gandhi’s notion that truth is also obtained through practical experimentation, including the belief that experience demonstrates that violent means have failed to produce a better world.64
However, it is important to note that historically, rights and moral insight have sometimes occurred in the wake of bitter, even violent struggle, as John’s work attests.65 Although rights have sometimes developed or even expanded in the wake of violence, one can question whether violence was necessary. One can even examine the degree to which newly articulated or granted rights have been honored. But here we can set these questions aside. To the extent that we are engaged in democratic deliberation and legal scholarship, we are ostensibly engaged in achieving change through persuasive rather than military power. But as King’s work as a minister and human rights activist
6 Conclusion
This chapter has argued that John Witte, Jr.’s capacious vision of the field of law and religion, his defense of welcoming religious values in lawmaking and legal scholarship, and his understanding of rights as middle axioms of political discourse can inform the theoretical foundation of the emerging field of Christianity, race, and law. In particular, John’s work has helped to create discursive space for religious values in legal scholarship and articulates a historicized, contextual conception of rights that can incorporate CRT’s teachings on the importance of power and interest to issues of race and law, while simultaneously preserving the commitment to moral truth that is essential to mainstream Christian thought. The chapter has also argued that, in light of CRT’s work showing that race and law issues are more frequently shaped by power and interests than by rational analysis, Martin Luther King Jr.’s understanding that truth is apprehended through a way of life and not discourse alone is a helpful complement to relying on robust debate among different moral communities as a means of securing truth and justice.
John Witte, Jr., “Law, Religion, and Human Rights,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review 28, no. 1 (19s96): 1–31, at 3.
Ibid., 3.
Ibid., 3–4.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 6–7.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 2, 30.
In a coauthored paper with Justin Latterrell, John asserts that “[p]luralism now outshines strict secularism as a discursive ideal for modern democracies.” See John Witte, Jr. and Justin J. Latterell, “Christianity and Human Rights: Past Contributions and Future Challenges,” Journal of Law and Religion 30 (2015): 353–85, at 383. It is unclear, however, if John and his coauthor mean to include the United States among the democracies in which pluralism has eclipsed strict secularism. Although the United States Supreme Court has moved away from strict secularism’s corollary, strict separationism, and toward accommodation of religion, as far as I can tell, American life remains divided between those who would include religious values in lawmaking processes and those who favor strict secularism. See Christian Joppke, “Beyond the Wall of Separation: Religion and the American State in Comparative Perspective,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 14 (2016): 984–1008, at 1004; Gregory A. Smith, “In U.S., Far More Support Than Oppose Separation of Church and State,” Pew Research Center, Oct. 28, 2021), 12, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/10/28/in-u-s-far-more-support-than-oppose-separation-of-church-and-state/.
Witte and Latterell, “Christianity and Human Rights,” 383.
Brandon Paradise, “How Critical Race Theory Marginalizes the African American Christian Tradition,” Michigan Journal of Race & Law 20 (2014): 117–211.
Ibid., 117–211.
Ibid., 156–57.
Ibid., 120.
Ibid., 120.
Ibid., 122–23, quoting Mari Matsuda et al., Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 6.
Ibid., 124 (footnotes omitted).
John Witte, Jr., The Blessings of Liberty: Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 292–93, 298.
Paradise, “How Critical Race Theory Marginalizes the African American Christian Tradition,” 155.
Ibid., 156.
Witte, The Blessing of Liberty, 301. Devon W. Carbado and Cheryl I. Harris, “Intersectionality at 30: Mapping the Margins of Anti-Essentialism, Intersectionality, and Dominance Theory,” Harvard Law Review 132 (2019): 2193–239, at 2212.
See Darren Lenard Hutchinson, “Critical Race Histories: In and Out,” American University Law Review 53 (2004): 1187–1215, at 1189–90 for a discussion rejecting criticisms that CRT is nihilistic but acknowledging that in adopting postmodern deconstructionism while making positive claims of racial justice, “Critical Race Theorists inhabit an admittedly contradictory space.” See Kenneth B. Nunn, “‘Essentially Black’: Legal Theory and the Morality of Conscious Racial Identity,” Nebraska Law Review 97 (2018): 287–333, at 305–06, for a discussion of postmodern skepticism in CRT.
Witte, The Blessings of Liberty, 300–01.
For purposes of this chapter, I assume that John’s understanding of the interaction of law and religion renders enacted, positive rights permeable and subject to and the product of political forces and thus, like human rights, a form of political discourse. However, it bears noting that John analogizes human rights to the ius gentium (the international common law), which in the West historically sat between natural law (laws of reason and conscience) and civil law (enacted positive law of a particular community), thus distinguishing human rights and positive law. See John Witte, Jr., “A Dickensian Era of Religious Rights: An Update on Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective,” William & Mary Law Review 42 (2001): 707–70, at 722–23. It is also worth noting that in calling human rights “middle axioms of our discourse,” John implies that higher (natural law) and lower (civil law) axioms constitute a part of a single, perhaps somewhat continuous political discourse. Ibid. 722–23.
Witte, The Blessings of Liberty, 399, quoting Jacques Maritain, introduction to UNESCO, Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949). See also Witte, “A Dickensian Era of Religious Rights, 722–23.
See, generally, Witte, The Blessings of Liberty for a detailed historical discussion of the contribution of religious values in the development of rights. See Witte, “Law, Religion, and Human Rights,” 3–8, 30 for a discussion of the inevitable interaction between law and religion.
See Witte, The Blessings of Liberty, 298–300.
Nunn, “‘Essentially Black,’” 305–06.
Derrick Bell, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 518–33, at 523.
For fuller discussion, see Paradise, “How Critical Race Theory Marginalizes the African American Christian Tradition,” 157n171.
It bears noting that the postmodern philosophy underlying CRT’s skepticism of truth has also influenced some contemporary Christian theologians. However, for reasons I cannot explain here, postmodern Christian theology may not be a coherent project. As Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has implied, postmodern theology may entail a contradiction in terms: “the project of constructing a post-metaphysical theology is somewhat preposterous.… [It’s] like post-atmospheric air.” See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPN7aG522YM.
John 14:6 (The New Jerusalem Bible [NJB]).
John 16:13 (NJB).
John 8:32 (NJB).
John 18:37 (NJB).
John 18:38. (New International Version [NIV]).
See and compare John 14:6 and 1 Cor. 13:6 (NJB).
In the context of human rights, John has stated that “rights lie halfway between the local civil laws of a particular political community and the higher laws maintained by religious or philosophical communities.” See John Witte, Jr., “Freedom and Order: Christianity, Human Rights, and Culture: A Chinese Conversation with John Witte, Emory University (August 9, 2019), https://www.johnwittejr.com/uploads/9/0/1/4/90145433/witte_interview_christinaty_human_rights_and_culture_r_.pdf. Although this statement implies that John may distinguish human rights from civil rights in local political communities, at least on questions of racial justice, for reasons I cannot offer here, I believe human rights and civil rights closely overlap and in some cases should or do entirely converge. For additional, related discussion see note 27 above.
Randall L. Kennedy, “Racial Critiques of Legal Academia,” Harvard Law Review 102 (1989): 1745–1819.
Witte, The Blessings of Liberty, 301.
Ibid., 301–02.
Ibid., 302.
See note 32 above.
Robert S. Chang, “Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space,” California Law Review 81, no. 5 (1993): 1243–1323, at 1280. Reflecting the importance of standpoint epistemology, Athena Mutua includes as a tenet of CRT “recognition of both the experiential knowledge and critical consciousness of people of color in understanding law and society.” Athena D. Mutua, “The Rise, Development and Future Directions of Critical Race Theory and Related Scholarship,” Denver Law Review 84 (2006): 329–94, at 354.
Lewis V. Baldwin, The Arc of Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., Kindle edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022), 67, quoting Clayborne Carson, Peter Holloran, and Ralph E. Luker, eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992–2014), 2:252.
Baldwin, The Arc of Truth, XVIII.
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 69, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper, 1958), 101.
Ibid., 70.
Ibid., 69.
Ibid., 69.
Baldwin, The Arc of Truth, 80, quoting Carson, Holloran, and Luker, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6:78, 118.
Baldwin, The Arc of Truth, 89.
Ibid., 89.
Ibid., 10, 48, 89.
Ibid., 89–91.
Ibid., 91.
King, “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” in A Testament of Hope, 45.
Baldwin, The Arc of Truth, 1.
Ibid., 89.
Paradise, “How Critical Race Theory Marginalizes the African American Christian Tradition,” 202.
Witte, The Blessings of Liberty, 76–104.