Judeo-Christian faith and religious speech are increasingly excluded from the public square and from equal treatment compared to other belief systems. Challenges directed at religious faith and speech include arguments that speech relying on them should be excluded from the public square, that religious speech should not be protected by government, that religious speech should not be treated the same as other speech, and that instead it may be subjected to special restrictions. Similar challenges are increasingly aimed at freedom of speech generally. Yet Judeo-Christian faith and associated speech have given many valuable legacies to the world. The most acknowledged ones are much of freedom of religious exercise and other human rights, great art and architecture, great music and literature, hospitals and charities, and education and science. However, it is not widely acknowledged that Judeo-Christian faith and religious speech growing out of it were major forces behind at least six other expansions of human rights or freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedoms of accused criminals, higher education, abolition of slavery, and the modern civil rights movement. These legacies came from various segments of Judeo-Christian faith: Puritans and Levellers, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, and Liberal Protestants and African-American Churches.

In response to several contemporary scholars who criticize human rights paradigms as inadequate or incompatible with Christian faith and practice, these reflections argue that rights should remain a part of Christian moral, legal, and political discourse, and that Christians should remain a part of pluralistic public debates about the appropriate scope and substance of human rights and religious freedom protections.