Politics & Power Quote by Hans Kung

Kung is doing something sly here: he flatters modern secular morality while warning it could hollow itself out. By suggesting religions "merely repeat" the UN Human Rights Declaration, he grants the Declaration enormous moral authority. Then he turns the screw. If religion is reduced to a humanitarian echo, it loses its distinctive force, and the Declaration itself starts to look like a slogan sheet - admirable, but thin, floating without a thicker account of why humans owe one another anything beyond mutual noninterference.

The subtext is a critique of late-20th-century moral minimalism. Rights language is designed to draw bright lines: what must not be done to a person, what a person may demand from institutions. That architecture is politically brilliant and historically necessary, especially after the catastrophes that produced the UN system. Kung isn't dismissing it; he's pointing to its limits. Rights can restrain cruelty, but they don't automatically generate solidarity, sacrifice, forgiveness, or responsibility - the older moral verbs religion tends to claim.

Context matters: Kung spent his career arguing for a "global ethic" rooted in interreligious consensus, not sectarian dominance. His jab lands on two audiences at once. To religious leaders, it's a warning against becoming NGOs with hymns. To secular liberals, it's a reminder that human rights rhetoric often borrows unacknowledged capital from moral traditions it likes to outgrow. "An ethic is more than rights" is less a rejection than a demand: if you want universal dignity to endure, you need a story, a discipline, and a community robust enough to make rights more than paper.