This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Change in British Society, given by A.H. H. Halsey, was originally broadcast in 1978.

The present relationship between Christianity and the ideals of Western liberalism is an extremely close one.

There's no great dissimilarity between secular and religious

outlooks on moral questions as there has been in the past. The ideas which now characterise

the moral seriousness of educated opinion are found faithfully reproduced in the discourse of the

churches. This is nowhere more plainly seen than in support given by institutional Christianity

to the prevalent enthusiasm for human rights.

It is indeed more than support merely that churches have come to regard human rights as something like fundamental Christianity.

There's not, of course, anything new about the involvement of Christianity with human rights doctrines.

The idea that certain immutable freedom should be reserved from the interference of government was taken over from Greek philosophy and incorporated into medieval scholastic thinking.

In St. Thomas Aquinas, a complicated hierarchy of divine and natural laws was described very

explicitly, and at the

Reformation both sides appealed to natural rights in order to justify their attempts at exterminating

each other. Recent Christian statements in support of human rights have acknowledged their

indebtedness to this earlier tradition of natural law, and the Church of England's view

summarizing two thousand years

of political speculation, is in fact extremely traditionalist in its insistence on old natural law

precepts about the limitations of government. Now, the present ideology of human rights in

Western thinking illustrates two leading difficulties with classical formulations of natural law.

First, arguments about society, government, and individual rights, based upon natural law,

assume an unimpeatable moral authority, true for all time. Yet the content of what men

...