Religion, Law, and the Human Condition

Abstract

The central aim ofthis exercise in historical sociology is to develop an explanatory theory to account for the emergence of the notion of god-given rights, a religio-political-legal construct ofoverriding significance for the formation ofthe American polity. Three traditions are examined for their contribution to the framing of the notion of god-given human rights. The first was the Papal Revolution which resulted in the codification of Canon law and the subsequent transformation of the Church into a corporation. The second tradition encompasses the emergence ofthe secular natural law school from Gerson to Grotius, amt then to its Enlightenment representatives in Rousseau and Locke. The final tradition which gave rise to the human rights position includes Roger Willliams, the Levellers, andfinally Isaac Backus. The first two traditions are interpreted as preparatory, while the last school of thought is credited with the introduction of those novel religio-political ideas relative to human rights which subsequently achieved institutionalization in the American polity.Over the last half-century, the sociology of religion and the sociology of law have developed in relative isolation to one another. Their limited interchange is somewhat anomalous, given the seminal contributions to both subdisciplines which have derived from the classical theoretical traditions of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Moreover, both the sociology of religion and the sociology of law share a substantive concern for understanding those processes by which normative standards for ordering social life are created and institutionalized. For this reason, both subdisciplines are intimately related to that telic dimension of human existence which Parsons (1978) recently brought back into the mainstream of sociological discourse under the rubric of "the human condition. "The lack of articulation between the sociology of religion and its lesser developed sister subdiscipline, the sociology of law, inadequately reflects the lively and reticular interaction between religion and law which has obtained in the ongoing social processes of Western historical experience. The societal consequences redounding from the sometimes coopera-