Skip to main content
Contribution to Book
International Law as Evangelism
Law as Religion, Religion as Law (2022)
  • Kevin Crow
Abstract
Beginning in the immediate post-WWII moment and carrying on to the present, international law’s Human Rights and Development missions mirror the US Evangelical ethos that emerged and gained traction at a similar pace. Making no causal claims, this Chapter focuses less on the UDHR’s expressions of monotheistic beliefs and more on the actors and ethos that informed those expressions. Specifically, it explores how legal communicative strategies and ideas used by human rights and development champions parallel those deployed at the same time by dominant US Evangelical leaders. The communicative strategies, inter alia, recall the desperate straits of the ‘unsaved’ other, present information as good news (gospel) and as truth, appeal to Messianic notions of history, and offer salvationist promises to transform afflicted lives. And the parallels form some of the many rationalizing forces that can be viewed as an expression of quasi-religious faith in American approaches to social and economic governance, and a call for those approaches to be internationalized. Like the Kingdom of God, this faith must be true for everyone to be true for anyone, and truth knows no borders. In other words, it is international law as evangelism.

Publication Date
2022
Editor
David C. Flatto & Benjamin Porat
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Citation Information
Kevin Crow. "International Law as Evangelism" Law as Religion, Religion as Law (2022)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kevin_crow/30/