ABSTRACT
Before getting started, it is worth recording the signifi cant role played by diverse Christian infl uences before and during the 1940s as the institution of the United Nations was being created and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) drafted. Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians contributed enormously to the events that led up to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As early as the 1930s, ecumenical movements such as the World Alliance for the Promotion of International Friendship through the Churches provided networks of international allies in the fi ght against totalitarian ideology and were among the fi rst to respond to condemn the violence against Jews (Barnett 1995 ). At the 1933 World YMCA conference in Sofi a, Bulgaria, pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned of the “growing persecution of minorities” under the Nazi regime. In the 1940s, organizations such as the US Federal Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches brought the thinking of the churches to bear in the corridors of power at crucial stages in the drafting process. Individuals such as the Dutch clergyman Visser t’Hooft and activist in the ecumenical movement Frederick Nolde contributed key ideas to the freedom of religion section of the UDHR (Nurser 2005 , esp. ch. 5). The Roman Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), whose infl uential book Human Rights and Natural Law (1943) held that the natural law entailed an account of human rights, was involved actively in drafting the UDHR.
