Tjalve, Vibeke Schou --- "Rights, Religion, Security: A Christian Realist Perspective" [2012] ELECD 288; in Porsdam, Helle (ed), "Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations

Editor(s): Porsdam, Helle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781000519

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: Rights, Religion, Security: A Christian Realist Perspective

Author(s): Tjalve, Vibeke Schou

Number of pages: 24

Extract:

5. Rights, religion, security: a Christian
Realist perspective
Vibeke Schou Tjalve

The church would do more for the cause of reconciliation if, instead of produc-
ing moral idealists who think that they can establish justice, it would create
religious and Christian realists who know that justice will require that some men
shall contend against them ... this kind of Christian realism would understand
the perennial necessity of political relationships in society, no matter how ethical
ideals rise.1


INTRODUCTION

Can a civil religion of human rights be forged and turned into a vehicle of
global peace? Ultimately, that is the question of the present volume. This
chapter attempts an answer from the perspective of what I shall develop as
the tradition of Christian Realism: a largely American tradition, funda-
mentally at odds with the moral universalism implicit to the human rights
narrative, yet dedicated both to the global advance of human justice and to
justice as a practice dependent upon a religious ­ spiritual, utopian,
transcendent ­ dimension to civil life.2 Through most of American history,

1
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Charles Scribner's Sons
1952).
2
As Americanist and historian Mark Edwards has recently argued in Diplo-
matic History, Christian Realism `as a label, has a complicated and contested
history. For several years, it was forgotten in lieu of its equally broad European
counterpart, "neo-orthodoxy". Most scholars today use it exclusively in reference to
the career of Reinhold Niebuhr. Edwards, Mark, `God Has Chosen U.S.':
Re- ...