Many contributors to openGlobalRights, including Achieng Maureen Akena and Karoline Kamel, have argued strongly that religion and human rights should not be mixed. These two authors in particular agree that the only appropriate approach for human rights promotion is a purely secular one. But this angle is based on picking out only fundamentalist examples to support their point of view, which is misleading and harmful to the entire discourse on religion and human rights.
In many African communities, human rights make their strongest showing as constitutional and legal standards with which most ordinary citizens are only vaguely familiar. While the law might deter some would-be violators, it is not able to explain or inspire ethical behavior that respects human rights on a daily basis. The law is even less effective when it is perceived as sinful, unethical or the imposition of an alien culture. Religion may not be the only avenue for a richer human rights and ethical discourse in Africa, but in a region with high levels of religiosity, it is certainly an important one.
Akena and Kamel’s arguments that human rights suffer when mixed with religion is partially supported by empirical data, some of which are pointed out in their articles. The problem with this position, however, is that it depends on an essentialized version of religion that does not portray what religious discourse on human rights actually looks and sounds like. In order to argue that religious discourse is harmful, both authors take fundamentalist expressions as the only legitimate expression of religion.
