This is an enlightening book about the role that Christian understandings of the dignity of the individual have had in the modern push for human rights. In four chapters, it offers vignettes about pioneers in the human rights movement(s), and showcases the role of the distinctively Christian element in their arguments. As such, the book provides a valuable historical offset to some recent attempts to set the notion of rights over against Christian commitments, and presents a clearer view of the playing ground than some other treatments might give.

I referred above to the “individual,” but Moyn intentionally steers clear of that term, preferring instead to speak of the “person” as something borne of neither individualist nor communitarian notions. Here a little more explanation on his part would have been helpful, especially as the question of the “person’s” status vis-à-vis the community is the most obvious issue defining the “playing ground” that I mentioned above. Moyn’s use of “person” is intended in service to the thinking of “personalism,” a notion “linked quickly to spiritualism and humanism and not infrequently to European identity,” and which functioned to dispute the opening moves of “liberalism and communism” (p. 69). This use of “person” only made me wish all the more for a detailed map of Moyn’s operating concepts. (The “individual” is something that can be “depersonalized,” as it was [Moyn says] in the French Revolution [p. 37].)

It is important to note that Moyn places the dawn of Christian human rights in the wake of World War II, with some attention to events shortly before that. (The book lacks a subtitle, which could have made this limitation in scope clear.) Moyn says little about the role of Christian thinking in the so-called “invention” of the individual, often attributed to the Enlightenment. Instead, his chapters discuss figures that cash out this individualism (or personalism) in the service of common decency—figures like Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, Éamon de Valera, Jacques Maritain, and Gerhard Ritter (the “first historian of human rights”). Most of this history, of course, is not Anglo-American, and many of the names will probably be new for most readers.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in ethics, or in modern history. It is also helpful for thinking through philosophical anthropology, although it is the need for the perspective this book offers (rather than the depth of its treatment) that makes it valuable on this score.

Reviewed by John C. Poirier

Publisher’s page: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/1716.html

Her death didn’t grab headlines like Coretta Scott King’s did. But Elsie Mason and her late husband captured heaven’s attention.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Last week, just one day before Coretta Scott King’s funeral was aired from an Atlanta megachurch, a lesser-known black woman named Elsie Louise Washington Mason was buried quietly in Memphis. She was the widow of Bishop C.H. Mason, founder of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the nation’s largest Pentecostal denomination.

Mrs. Mason’s funeral was not aired on CNN. No U.S. presidents attended. Her body was not displayed in any government rotundas. Oprah did not walk past her casket.

But Elsie Mason’s life deserved national recognition.

She died at Memphis’ Methodist University Hospital on Jan. 31 at the age of 98. Although her memory had begun to fade, she was still a living scrapbook of the civil rights era—and of the Christian spirituality that undergirded it.

When she was born, Teddy Roosevelt was president, women wore floor-length skirts and only rich people had telephones. Blacks could not vote, and rarely were they allowed to worship with whites.

The radical message that Elsie and her husband preached would change that.

C.H. Mason helped dismantle institutionalized racism long before Martin Luther King Jr. preached his first sermon. Mason did this not by staging nonviolent protests or by organizing political rallies. Instead he invited blacks and whites to gather at the foot of the cross, where he believed all human beings found equality.

A Baptist at first, Mason visited the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1906, became a Pentecostal and began to spread the message of the Holy Spirit’s power throughout the South. His black Baptist colleagues rejected his message, which included a belief in speaking in tongues, healing and miracles.

After Mason organized COGIC in 1907, both blacks and whites attended his meetings—sometimes sparking race riots. Mason’s influence grew to the point that he ordained dozens of white Pentecostal ministers at a time when all other Christian denominations were separated by race.

During an interview with Charisma in 1996, at age 88, Elsie recalled the early days of Pentecostal revivals in black communities in the South. In Texas, she said, Mason would attract huge crowds.

“Crutches were lined up against the walls because the people didn’t need them anymore,” she said. “In Memphis, a lady took sick during our convocation, and at that time doctors weren’t as prevalent as they are today, and there were hardly any hospitals for Negroes. So they sent for Bishop Mason, and he prayed until the Lord raised her.”

During her younger years, Elsie edited COGIC’s newspaper The Whole Truth and worked as a secretary in the denomination’s missions department. She even served as a missionary in Haiti and founded an orphanage.