The United States is an imperial nation. From its origins as a settler colony to its status today as a dominant economic and political power armed with the largest military force on earth, it has established and extended its power over others—taking land, extracting resources, exploiting labor, and ensuring unequal relationships that benefit its interests. Despite its founding declaration, the U.S. has never recognized the self-evident equality of all men, and its conceptions of rights have never been universal or inalienable. As its history shows, the United States has continually created categories of nonhuman and not-quite-human subjects disqualified from the inalienable rights that could shield them from its exercises of imperial power. Put differently, the extension of U.S. imperial power has required denying rights to those swept under its influence and control. The United States is at once a self-pronounced paragon of rights, among other liberal democratic values, and a violator of rights, especially for those who most need to draw on its protections. This paradox is fundamental to the United States, regardless of its proclamations to be a defender of rights at home and across the world.

Over the course of the twentieth century, American conceptions of rights became more global. This development—usually described as a move from “civil rights” to “human rights”—was especially acute in American Christian communities. The role of Christianity deserves our attention because of the religion's important role in the conceptualization, popularization, and practice of human rights in the United States and, thanks to Christians’ overseas networks, to every corner of the world.1 The increasingly global understanding of rights, however, did not lead to the liberalization of rights for American Christians. True, human rights talk contributed to important milestones in religious pluralism and the Civil Rights movement, and often served as a gateway to democratic liberalism for some groups resistant to the American liberal tradition. Human rights, however, were not only a liberal project. Conservatives also embraced human rights but in starkly different ways. The divergent interpretations of human rights were not merely a reflection of the growing political divide in the second half of the twentieth century. Christian activists’ adoption of human rights helped forge new alliances and exacerbated the divide between liberal and conservative Christianity, and between political liberalism and political conservatism.

Some years ago, writing as the embers of the Great Recession still burned, Marxist geographer and social theorist David Harvey penned an essay in New Left Review titled “The Right to the City.” In it, Harvey, the primary exponent of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre's “right to the city” thesis (initially published as Le Droit à la ville in 1968), argued that “the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.”1

Firearms and ballistics are at the center of public debate in the United States today. They are technologies that are associated both with danger (in the form of gun violence) and safety (in the form of claims that firearms offer personal protection). This essay explores our understanding of the role of gun rights in American society through history: an issue which recent Supreme Court rulings have moved to the forefront of political debates in the face of efforts to regulate firearms and stem the tide of gun violence in the United States.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court handed down a decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which dismantled a fundamental right to choose abortion. A line of Supreme Court decisions dating back to the 1920s recognized unenumerated liberties related to parenting, marriage, and contraception tied to the constitutional right to privacy. Almost half a century ago, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court declared that this constitutional right to privacy was broad enough to encompass the right to terminate a pregnancy. The Dobbs decision reversed Roe and disparaged the right to abortion in the strongest terms: the decision recognizing it was “egregiously wrong” and “on a collision course with the Constitution.”

In May 1990, in the first case of its kind, the National Gay Rights Advocates (NGRA) secured a California court judgment prohibiting an insurance company from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Great Republic Insurance Company had been using a supplemental questionnaire to screen out “occupations that do not require physical exertion … such as florists, interior decorators, and fashion designers,” as well as to use applicants’ marital status, “living arrangements,” and medical history to assess the likely risk of their exposure to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) when denying health care coverage.1 That same year, Moblization for Youth (MFY) Legal Services in New York filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of women living with HIV who had been denied access to Social Security benefits because the government did not recognize their HIV-related conditions as qualifying for state health care coverage under the Medicaid program.2 In one sense, the cases were starkly different: one sought to protect the privately insured from discriminatory scrutiny on the basis of their sexuality while the other attempted to bring a protected class of people into public view to make a claim to health care. Yet both reveal an important truth about the concept of rights in an American context. The structure of the U.S. health care system, one based on private insurance for most and a threadbare, convoluted system of categorical assistance and public insurance for children, the disabled, and the elderly, has shaped Americans’ experience of their own sexuality and bodily autonomy in ways arguably unique to the United States. The public/private hybrid in health care has dramatically curtailed the capacity of those outside the heteronormative family structure to realize their demands for full equality in the wake of the rights revolutions. Efforts to secure a right to sexual or gender identity have foundered on the rocks of the health care system when faced, for example, with a public health crisis like HIV or a lack of health insurance plans willing to fund gender-affirming health care.