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From religious freedom to social justice: the human rights engagement of the ecumenical movement from the 1940s to the 1970s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2018

Bastiaan Bouwman
Bastiaan Bouwman*
Affiliation:
Department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article contributes to the historiography on human rights and (religious) internationalism by tracing how the ecumenical movement in the post-war decades sought to protect the religious freedom of its co-religionists in Catholic and Muslim countries, specifically Italy, Nigeria, and Indonesia. In cooperation with local actors, the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs worked to anchor international human rights in the domestic sphere through constitutional provisions. These activities constituted a significant strand of Christian human rights engagement from the 1940s to the 1960s, which intersected with the Cold War and decolonization. The article then contrasts this with the turn to a more pluralistic and communitarian conception of human rights in the 1970s, animated by liberation theologies. As the World Council of Churches embraced a ‘revolutionary’ tradition and worked to resist military dictatorships in Latin America, racism, and global inequality, it gravitated towards Marxism-inflected and anti-colonial strands of human rights discourse.

Keywords

Commission of the Churches on International Affairshuman rightsinternationalismreligious freedomWorld Council of Churches
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , July 2018 , pp. 252 - 273
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the guest editors of this special issue, James C. Kennedy, Justin Reynolds, and Elisabeth Engel, for their valuable comments in preparing this manuscript. My work benefited greatly from the advice of Piers Ludlow, Boyd van Dijk, Nathan Kurz, and Robert Brier, and two anonymous reviewers. I also gained much from feedback on recent presentations, including at the LSE-Sciences Po Seminar in Contemporary International History, the ‘Blueprints of Hope’ research group at Utrecht University, the 29th Annual Conference of the British International History Group, and the International History Seminar of the Institute of Historical Research, as well as from participating in the Global Humanitarianism Research Academy organized by the University of Exeter and the Leibniz Institute of European History. Research for this article was generously supported by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, VSBfonds, the Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship, and the Department of International History of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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