Ben Bayer on the Secular Concept of Individual Rights

Prominent authors Tom Holland and Ayaan Hirsi Ali argue that secular values such as freedom of conscience, free speech, and the free market are rooted in Christianity. But Ben Bayer disagrees. As he argues in his OCON 2024 talk, “The Revolutionary, Secular Concept of Individual Rights,” the principle of individual rights, the idea behind those values, was “developed by individuals who happened to be Christians, but it did not derive from Christianity itself.”

To prove his case, Bayer challenges the historical evidence Holland and Ali rely on. They claim that the development of canon law during the Middle Ages is the direct precedent from which the idea of individual rights would spring a few centuries later. But as Bayer explains, they fail to grasp the uniqueness of the Enlightenment concept of rights which sanctions the individual’s sovereign use of his mind as a positive good. No such notion could be conceived by monks and canonists committed to a Christian worldview, as “a religion that upholds faith over reason and self-sacrifice over self-interest is not in a good position to uphold individual rights.”

If we want to understand the ideal of liberty that inspired the American experiment, we have to study Enlightenment thinkers, most notably John Locke. Bayer explains that Locke’s revolutionary theory of rights ultimately flows not from his “extremely diluted” Christian beliefs but from the secular elements of his philosophy: his valorization of reason grounded on experience, of man’s self-ownership, and of the industriousness and private property that allows him to live as an individual.

In the Q&A period, Bayer addresses such topics as:

• Whether the American Revolution was fundamentally religious;
• How to think about ends and means in ethics;
• Holland and Ali’s failure to take secularism seriously;
• Gregory of Nyssa’s alleged anti-slavery views.