Where Do Human Rights Come from, Senator?

Author: John Stonestreet

Last week, democratic Senator Tim Kaine made this bold statement during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing:

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling. 

It’s one thing when a progressive media figure says something like this. For example, back in 2024, Politico’s Heidi Przybyla warned that believing human rights “don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God,” makes one a Christian nationalist! Even so, it’s another thing altogether when a sitting U.S. Senator and former vice-presidential candidate claims that this fundamental Christian belief is indistinguishable from Islamic fundamentalists.  

Kaine’s comments were quickly condemned by fellow Senators and religious commentators for, among other things, rejecting the words of the Declaration of Independence. The Senator also failed to realize that his own belief, that rights come from government, is what every communist, fascist, and totalitarian regime in history believed. Still, the first part of the Senator’s claim is not fully wrong.  

The Mullahs in Iran, like all committed Muslims, believe that human rights come from God. So do Christians. But that is where the similarities end. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has lived in cultures rooted in both Islamic and Christian notions of human rights, says in the new film Truth Rising, “You don’t have to imagine how life would be under Islam. ... All you have to do is go to any of these places that Western Civilization has barely touched, and the education you’ll get is much better than Harvard.” 

In fact, though Muslims and Christians agree that our rights come from God, they hold widely diverging views about what those rights are, how those rights should be understood, and how the government should recognize and enforce human rights. That’s because Muslims and Christians hold fundamentally different and conflicting ideas about who God is and who humans are. 

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali also points out in Truth Rising, the God of Islam reveals only His will and demands our submission to it. The true God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ and offers freedom. The Christian God created humans in His own image. He “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, [so] that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” Not only does God want to be known, He made humans in such a way as to know Him. Islam refers to God as love but then reveals him to be vindictive and cruel.  

According to Islam, humans have not fallen. According to Christianity, humans are sinful, having inherited a fallen nature from our first parents. If humans are inherently ordered toward sin and evil, then a government run by humans will be prone to abuse its citizens. Thus, it must be ordered toward preserving those rights which God has ordained. In an Islamic society, humans are not seen as bearing God’s image and need only be forced into submission by the state, which is inseparable from the religion.

And so, in practice, Islam looks far more like the totalitarian governments that think of human rights like Senator Kaine does. If humans do not have intrinsic dignity as individuals, individuals must be, at times, sacrificed on the altar of the state or the collective. In just the twentieth century alone, Josef Stalin oversaw the executions of 800,000 perceived political opponents in the Soviet Union, and many put the overall death toll of his policies at 20 million. In China under Mao Zedong, 15 to 45 million people were slaughtered. Cambodia under Pol Pot and Germany must also be put on this same list. Whenever and wherever human rights are attributed to the government, they are trampled. As Chuck Colson often said, “If government thinks they can grant rights, then they can also take them away.”  

The very idea that humans have rights that transcend class and sex, tribe and nation, to the very individual, has had a singular source in history. In his book, A Brief History of Thought, the atheist French philosopher Luc Ferry identified that source:  

“Christianity was to introduce the notion that humans were equal in dignity, an unprecedented idea at the time and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.”