The conclusions discuss the significance of the WCC’s evolving agenda, emphasizing above all the distinctly Christian meaning the ecumenical movement sought to imbue human rights with. Against accounts that exaggerate the scope of the WCC’s commitment to human rights in the 1940s, the book shows the organization’s focus on religious freedom. Contrary to narratives that cast the WCC’s articulation of religious freedom as essentially universalizing and cosmopolitan, the book emphasizes how its advocacy was part of wider ideological contests against specific adversaries. The conclusions discuss the ramifications for our understanding of religious freedom today. With regard to the 1970s, the book demonstrates the significance of Protestantism to progressive Christianity and liberation theology. It also illuminates the difficulties liberation theology faced, and has continued to face. Scholars today debate the utility of human rights in the face of material inequality, exacerbated by neoliberalism. The WCC’s attempt to “radicalize” human rights shows the promise as well as the perils inherent in expanding our current understandings of human rights beyond liberal premises.

During the mid-century wave of decolonization, the ecumenical movement sought to dissociate Christianity from its role – real and perceived – as a handmaiden of empire. At the same time, the WCC and IMC sought to anchor Christianity in the constitutions of postcolonial states, in order to secure the religious freedom of missionaries and Christian minorities, especially in majority-Muslim countries. Ecumenical advocacy thus sought to enshrine the international norm they had shaped in the Universal Declaration’s Article 18 in domestic law. After discussing the wider trajectory of the ecumenical movement in relation to empire, this chapter turns to two important cases: Indonesia and (Northern) Nigeria. In each case, the ecumenical movement successfully influenced the drafting of postcolonial constitutions, using the language of human rights to claim impartiality while enhancing Christianity’s position vis-à-vis Islam. In doing so, ecumenists drew on their ties to departing colonial powers, the influence of those missionaries and Christian minorities that remained, and postcolonial leaders’ desire to establish essentially secular states.

This chapter shows how, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the WCC sought to spread the liberationist form of human rights activism developed in response to authoritarianism in Latin America to other world regions. In Asia and Africa, the ecumenical movement sought to apply lessons derived from the Latin American context while at the same time developing approaches suited to the particular contexts at play. South Korea’s minjung theology, which played a prominent role in resistance to the country’s military dictatorship as well as its deep economic inequality, was a widely influential example of Asian liberation theology that mixed with human rights advocacy. In sub-Saharan Africa, the All-Africa Conference of Churches encouraged churches to resist their political leaders’ efforts to deflect criticism of their own human rights records, though the struggle against apartheid and skepticism of human rights as essentially Western hampered such efforts. For Christians in Western Europe and North America, meanwhile, taking up a liberationist human rights agenda meant applying a critical lens to Western societies, but especially finding ways to act in solidarity with the Third World.

It was Latin America that provided the main impetus behind the WCC’s articulation of liberationist human rights. Through its Human Rights Resources Office for Latin America, the WCC helped to facilitate activism across the region and galvanized support in the West. In Chile, after the 1973 coup by Pinochet, and in other countries under military dictatorship, the WCC collaborated with the Catholic Church to both remedy immediate suffering and resist repression. It also facilitated regional ecumenism and the dissemination of liberation theology. Contrary to contemporary critics and later accounts that suggest there were only two ways to respond to the rise of military rule, namely pursuing armed “revolution” or “minimalist” liberal rights activism, the chapter shows that some Protestants and Catholics sought to establish a space between these alternatives. The WCC helped to keep the flame of liberationist human rights activism going, supporting both local forms of “conscientization” (a term coined by the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire, who spent the 1970s in exile as an associate of the WCC) and generating pressure via its member churches in the West.

With regard to communism, the WCC placed its faith in dialogue. Despite the onset of the Cold War, the WCC’s first General Secretary, Visser ’t Hooft, concertedly pursued ecumenical fellowship across the Iron Curtain. While this effort came to fruition with the 1961 integration of the Russian Orthodox Church and several other Eastern bloc churches, it locked in a pattern whereby – given that it was ultimately a body composed of member churches, not individual believers – the WCC collaborated with Russian Orthodox delegates who were under pressure or control by Soviet authorities. This strategy’s inherent tensions were exacerbated by the 1970s rise of the Soviet dissident movement, which included Christian dissidents, and the simultaneous leftward shift of the WCC, which came to view Western campaigning for religious freedom in the Eastern bloc as self-righteous and counterproductive. The downfall of communism around 1989 would allow religious freedom to become more universal than it had ever been, but despite having been the leading voice for the principle’s articulation in the 1940s, the ecumenical movement could claim little credit.

This introduction to Part I explains how the World Council of Churches (WCC) arrived at its 1948 embrace of human rights, based on its interwar “antisecularism,” the appeal of “personalism,” and the need to resist “totalitarian” state power. Protestant activism on behalf of missionaries and churches predated the turn to human rights, and as did ecumenists’ emphasis on the need to enable Christianity to “leaven” society and international affairs. The emergence of human rights as an foundational principle of the postwar order invited a reframing of these concerns in terms of human rights, even if concern for the corporate rights of churches remained part of the WCC’s approach to religious freedom. Representatives of the ecumenical movement, especially O. Frederick Nolde and Charles Malik, helped to enshrine the ecumenical conception of human rights in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The WCC, the International Missionary Council (IMC), and the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA) advocated for this conception against what they identified as their three main opponents: Islam, “political” Roman-Catholicism, and Communism.

Against “political” Roman Catholicism, the WCC’s legal lobbying ultimately proved less important than ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. Though the ecumenical network shared legal tactics with representatives of the small Protestant Churches in Spain, in the face of Franco’s “National-Catholicism,” legal activism was at best an uphill battle, subject to the vagaries of Franco’s desire for international respectability and the Western bloc’s willingness to criticize a staunch anti-communist ally. Discrimination against Protestants in Spain ultimately rested on the Catholic hierarchy’s rejection of religious liberty in predominantly Catholic states – a position sanctioned by the Vatican under Pope Pius XII. It was, consequently, the ecumenical movement’s contribution to the Catholic Church’s embrace of religious freedom and ecumenism, via the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), that made possible religious (and political) liberalization in Spain. Working through personal contacts with Catholic leaders, especially Bishop Johan Willebrands and Cardinal Augustin Bea, the WCC contributed to the extension of religious freedom to Spain and across the Catholic world.

The need to challenge the political-economic “root causes” of human rights violations led the WCC to campaign for international economic restructuring. This chapter first shows how the WCC articulated its new human rights agenda, at the 1974 St. Pölten consultation on “Human Rights and Christian Responsibility” and its 1975 Nairobi Assembly. These conferences coincided with the international campaign for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) at the United Nations, led by the Non-Aligned Movement. Seeing in the NIEO a generational opportunity to change international inequality, the WCC supported its thrust, while seeking to act as a corrective to the NIEO’s lack of concern for individual rights. The NIEO’s state-centric nature contributed to its demise by the end of the decade, however, and while the WCC continued to pursue international redistribution over the course of the 1980s, the Third World sovereign debt crisis, the end of the Cold War, and the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights further set back its hopes for a more egalitarian world order.

This introduction opens with the World Council’s foundation in 1948 in Amsterdam, where the organization embraced human rights as a pillar of the postwar international order. Its focus, however, was on safeguarding religious freedom, especially that of coreligionists and missionaries. Going beyond ecumenical lobbying at the United Nations as well as a traditional focus on communist countries, the book’s Part I focuses on the global advocacy of the ecumenical movement. Part II traces how, in the 1970s, the WCC self-consciously rejected liberalism, reoriented itself toward the Third World, and articulated a “liberationist” approach to human rights. Rooted in liberation theology and drawing first and foremost on the experience of Latin American Christians, this approach called attention to the political-economic “root causes” of human rights violations, called for the recognition of collective rights claims, and emphasized the agency of the “poor” and the “oppressed.” It also generated blinders with regard to postcolonial and socialist repression, however, which undermined the WCC’s legitimacy as a global voice for human rights.

This introduction to Part II explains why the WCC shifted toward a “liberationist” human rights agenda in the late 1960s and 1970s. One key factor was Cold War détente, which opened up space for criticism of the Cold War deadlock and the superpower interventionism it supposedly justified. Another was decolonization, which contributed to a global reconfiguration of Christianity. These enabled the rise of the New Left, which favored grassroots activism over bureaucratic structures and projected hopes for political renewal onto the Third World. While often overlooked because of the simultaneous process of secularization, especially in Western Europe, religion played an important role in the ferment of the 1960s. Liberation theology, emanating above all from Latin America, inspired much of the WCC’s new agenda, which was defined by its overtly political positioning against liberalism and alignment with socialism and especially anti-imperialism. The WCC’s course contrasted with the liberal rights agenda of Amnesty, the statist agenda espoused by postcolonial leaders promoting a New International Economic Order, and the anticommunism of more conservative actors, like US evangelicals.

Through its Programme to Combat Racism (PCR), the WCC supported Southern African liberation movements. The PCR constituted a remarkable act of solidarity with those engaged in the struggle against apartheid, garnering the WCC heightened credibility in the Third World. But the PCR’s solidarity with the armed struggle waged by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1970s led it to downplay human rights, a concept it – like the ANC – associated with liberal humanitarianism. This stance effectively subordinated individual rights to the cause of liberation, leading the WCC to turn a blind eye to the internal repression practiced by liberation movements. Having been a feature of the ANC’s agenda in the 1950s, human rights only returned to prominence in the 1980s, as the end of apartheid came into sight. Meanwhile, however, it was South Africa’s black ecumenical leaders, especially Desmond Tutu and Allan Boesak, who worked to reconcile human rights and liberation. Their prominent role in South Africa’s domestic anti-apartheid movement ultimately facilitated the integration of a capacious conception of human rights into South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution.

The choice to confront racial injustice was available to the whole charitable humanitarian sector. In 1969, the World Council of Churches launched the Programme to Combat Racism. This attempted to mobilise the Churches against all forms of racism and was accompanied by a Special Fund to support those who ‘combat racism, rather than welfare organisations that alleviate the effects of racism.’ As an offshoot of the Council, Christian Aid was well placed to take up the cause. However, it and the other agencies did not do so during the 1970s, preferring to divert their radical energies towards liberation theology and the conscientisation movement emanating from Latin America rather than the Black Consciousness Movement in Southern Africa. Fearful of the regulations of the Charity Commissioners and the effects on fundraising among their more conservative supporters, the charities remained largely silent on race until the 1980s. Instead, they embraced the ‘basic needs’ agenda of the non-aligned movement and the New International Economic Order. It took the agencies beyond charity, but it also brought it closer to the agendas of the official development industry such as the World Bank.

Chapter 3 reconstruct how the (collective) emotions, the political and economic practices, and the geopolitical and societal circumstances of the war times guided Western Europe to a path of deeper international and regional cooperation focused on free trade and valuta convertibility. During exile and occupation, European governments fleshed out plans and schemes for post-war cooperation, primordially in the domains of socio-economic and the financial-economic planning, in greater (practical) detail. These exercises were emotionally charged and driven by the lessons of the war against the Nazis and the post-war period after the First World War—a learning from history in which the churches played a leading role and co-prepared the political ground for the popularity of a new and hugely influential conservative political family in Western Europe: Christian Democracy.

Chapter three analyzes how non-party or state actors countered official environmental claims, developed alternative narratives, and challenged authority. In the GDR, Church-based environmentalism evolved on the fringes of society and in a transnational context. Environmental engagement, its impetuses, and its forms led to a critique with theological underpinnings as well as practical frustration about degradation. Church-based activists fostered contacts with independent actors to the east and west, establishing networks across central Europe. In the FRG, the environmental movement became formalized in the Green Party, which underscored the SED’s inability to adapt. In the Soviet bloc, Poland modeled a less repressive attitude toward society that opened opportunities for independent actors, especially Solidarność, which the SED feared would undermine the entire bloc’s security. The SED increasingly distrusted neighboring countries and the potential impact of their reforms at home. The GDR’s position as hinge between east and west became a liability for domestic stability.

This chapter offers a brief history of how religious freedom has been conceptualized in international human rights law and politics after 1945, starting with the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) Article 18 on the freedom of conscience, religion or belief, and ending with the aborted attempts in the 1960s to craft an international treaty on religious intolerance and discrimination. The chapter highlights how religious freedom over time became linked to a wider human rights discourse centered on combating different forms of structural injustice. It concludes with a set of critical reflections on recent attempts, including by the Donald J. Trump administration in the United States, to return to the “moral landscape” of the 1940s in order to salvage an allegedly natural right to religious freedom from the more comprehensive framework of human rights.

In 1974 the Norwegian physicist and co-author of Limits to Growth (1972) coined the phrase “a sustainable society.” It was meant to capture his vision for a viable environmental future, while also open a new endless frontier for science with the larger goal of mobilizing Christian religion and respect for the almighty. It was an ecumenical hope in the coming of the Golden Age and the Kingdom of God that framed early understandings of environmental sustainability. In Norway, Randers directed the Resource Policy Group, an influential think tank that provided policy papers to the Labor Party and beyond. The notion of a “sustainable development” was adapted from them by the Norwegian politician Gro Harlem Brundtland, who chaired the World Commission on Environment and Development leading up to the Our Common Future report from 1987.