Freedom of Conscience: Among the Blessings of our Christian Nation

Some people, not knowing that mortal nature disintegrates in death, torture themselves in conscience (syneidesis) with evil deeds performed during their lifetime. (Democritus, Fragment 297)

… the word ‘conscience’ (or syneidesis…) is a Western and almost exclusively Christian word. (Edward Andrew, Conscience and its Critics, p. 12)

I hope to advance two notions in the following post: (1) that “freedom of conscience” is conceptual gibberish in any setting other than (protestant) Christian theology; and (2) that “freedom of conscience” is an American theological innovation (in the same sense that hamburgers and french fries are American despite being invented elsewhere), for which we today can be grateful, as we live in a society architected by men who understood the American Christian theology of freedom.

To my first point, that “freedom of conscience” is gibberish outside of Christianity, how can that be? After all, Wikipedia helpfully redirects us from freedom of conscience to freedom of thought, so there isn't really anything special going on here, is there? Ah, but there is.

Consider, first, the postmodern view, e.g. that of Freud, a post-Christian writer who, given his chosen field of analysis, ought to have a thing or two to say of freedom of conscience, if there is anything for a post-Christian to say. Alas, we have to translate our query into Freud's terminology, but having done so, we can Google “freedom of superego” to confirm that there is nothing there. Freud shares the pre-Christian view (e.g. that of Democritus, quoted above) that conscience is not something that can be free, but rather something that stands in the way of freedom: to be free, the ego must (among other things) overcome the superego (i.e. the will must overcome the conscience). The superego is not an agent of freedom, it is an obstacle to freedom, an artifact of our conditioning acting to rein us in.

Similarly, in the traditional medieval philosophical view, the conscience stands in conflict with the will when the will wants what is wrong. The advice of the conscience (conscientia antecedens) can be ignored by the will, in which case the conscience remains to condemn the act (conscientia subsequens), or else the free person can choose to conform his will to his conscience. The person experiencing conflict between his will and his conscience cannot choose to conform his conscience to his will: the will is free, the conscience is not. There is no “freedom of conscience” in traditional philosophy, the expression is incoherent.

So how is the Christian view different from this, if at all? First, many Christian philosophers (e.g. Locke) have held the philosophical view, rather than the Christian view, of conscience. Locke went so far as to take, regarding conscience and its origins, the Freudian view long before Freud did (that conscience is a result of conditioning, holding us back). But apart from Christian philosophers, Christian theologians have has always wrestled with the problem of errors of conscience. The conscience has, in Christian theology, been viewed both as capable of learning on the one hand, and of wandering into error on the other. This is a far cry from the capriciousness of the free will, but it is still indicative of freedom of a sort for the conscience, and unfortunately it has also always formed the basis for Christian persecution: what is free can be influenced, and coercion is just the influential cousin of persuasion.

Aquinas, for instance, taught that (1) an erring conscience must be obeyed; but (2) man has sufficient innate knowledge of the Word of God to recognize moral truth if it is shown to him. It is sinful on the one hand to act in opposition to your conscience, but sinful on the other hand for your conscience to reject correction when it is provided on the basis of scripture or other authoritative teaching. In other words, the conscience is capable of error, and even of choosing to persist in error. This is not yet encouraging for the development of Christian freedom of conscience, but our story gets there eventually.

In launching the Reformation (not his intent, but his effect), Luther published an influential tract on Christian freedom. Building on Thomistic ideas of conscience, (and also curiously anticipating Freud's concept of the id in his analysis of the role of desire interacting with reason and conscience), Luther argued that an intact conscience agrees with the Word of God, but a conscience that falls away from the Word is no longer a conscience at all. This is a refinement on the Thomistic view that a conscience can recognize the Word when taught it; for Luther a conscience ceases to be a conscience except in the Word, and can only be revived with reinstitution of the Word. The significance of this for freedom is that a fallen conscience cannot be coerced, because there is no conscience there to respond to the coercion. One can do no more for a fallen conscience than provide the Word in every way, in preaching and example. This doctrine didn't lead to our modern freedom of conscience either, as it justified (indeed implicitly called for) mandatory religious education, which in practice meant mandatory membership in the regionally dominant church. Freedom of conscience, as we now understand it, had a tough time finding support in either scholastic or Reformation thought (full disclosure: I am Lutheran).

Roger Williams, the renegade hero of American religious liberty, hit upon a different perspective on the problem of coercion of conscience: he believed that coercion was possible, unfortunately, but that it was not soterially effective. Williams was a believer in individual covenants, thus distinguishing himself from the mainstream of Puritan New England with their tradition of collective covenants. For Winthrop and others of the Massachusetts Bay colony, the sovereignty to covenant with God resided in the community, just as in previous times God covenanted with Israel, rather than with individual Hebrews. For Williams (and other separatists, and later Baptists and Methodists etc.), the sovereignty to covenant resided with each individual, and congregations were simply voluntary associations of like-minded believers. The consummation of such an individual covenant was regeneration (the Puritan term for being “born again”), a conversion experience to which Williams and others imputed intrinsic significance beyond its instrumental value in bringing about conformance of conscience to the Word.

Williams, like others wrestling with Anabaptist ideas, believed that it was possible to bring a person into conformance with Christian teachings and beliefs (e.g. by raising them in Christianity from childhood, as was done in Anglican and other established churches) without thereby bringing them to an effective conversion experience and regeneration. By stressing the importance of the conversion experience and regeneration over any version of learned or coerced orthodoxy or orthopraxy (however sincerely held), Williams was denying the effectiveness of coercion at effecting salvation, even if it was effective at changing beliefs, because a person could sincerely believe everything that Christianity required, yet still not have the transformational experience that makes it all soterially effective.

In this, Williams finally had a tight answer to the dilemma of Christian freedom: how do you affirm that the conscience is free, yet deny that it can or should be coerced? Williams' slippery answer is to say that while it may very well be that conscience truly can be coerced, nonetheless coercing conscience doesn't get you the only outcome that would justify the coercion in the first place, namely salvation, because it only achieves belief without fostering the conversion experience. By contrast, other Christian and humanist defenders of religious toleration either argued that in fact the conscience simply cannot be coerced, a claim which was in plain contradiction to scholastic teaching, to the experience of previous generations of inquisitors, and even to the teaching of philosophers such as Locke (for whom conscience is a product of conditioning, itself a form of coercion); or else they argued that truth in matters of religious dispute was not known, and the risk of coercion on the side of error was too great to take the chance, an argument that had no traction among those certain of their correctness.

It is important to understand that Williams was not a tolerant Christian; far from it. He was ultimately kicked out of the Bay colony over the issue of communion with Anglicans in Britain. The Bay colony Puritans were for communion with their mother church, believing that their mission in America was to shine like a “city on a hill”, to show the proper way to God to their lost brethren overseas. Williams was opposed to transatlantic communion fellowship with Anglicans, arguing that the Anglican church was impure and anti-Christian. Because the Puritans of Bay colony remained in communion with Anglicans, Williams cut off communion fellowship of his own congregation with the Puritans. The Puritan civil authorities tried to bring the intolerant Williams back into the larger community, and Williams began to preach against the jurisdiction of civil authority in matters of religion. Williams taught religious freedom in defense of his own religious intolerance.

As interesting as all of this might be, (or not), what has it to do with events a century later, when the civil institutions of a new independent nation were being formed? The answer is that these issues of freedom of conscience, conditioning in established churches, and evangelization of nominal Christians, which were a sideshow curiosity in Winthrop and Williams' era (Williams looms more significant to us in hindsight than he appeared to his contemporaries – Rhode Island had a population of only 7181 as late as 1708, its first census), grew and came to the front of national debate in the fullness of time. One of the important scandals of the pre-revolutionary generation was the licensing of preachers by the various states with their established churches, and deregulation of evangelization was an important objective of those who framed the first amendment to the Constitution. Just as Williams was more concerned to convert nominal Christians who were nonetheless unregenerate than to convert the Indians, so the Baptists and revivalists of later generations were concerned to preach in the public square, and they often found their way barred by civil authority. Separation of church and state was not intended to keep religion out of the public square, but rather to open the floodgates, releasing an inundation of religion into the public square. The check on promulgation of religious beliefs was not meant to be secularization of civil authority but respect for freedom of conscience, an American Christian theological principle that established a condition necessary for effective evangelization, a condition that civil authorities were charged with protecting. This is important to remember whenever we see the expression “rights of conscience” in the founders’ writings. This is a Christian civil principle, not a secular enlightenment principle, and the founders (who often praise generic “Christian principles” without enumerating them) knew it.

Was freedom of conscience intended to be limited to Christians? Of course not. For instance Williams, in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, explicitly makes the point that freedom of conscience is necessary for conversion of the Jews. Our civil doctrine of freedom of conscience was motivated by, and intended to fulfill, Christian principles of evangelization both of Christians and of non-Christians. Freedom of conscience is a uniquely Christian concept, incomprehensible outside of a Christian context, and advanced specifically by the most intolerant Christians of America in their day, those who looked upon their nominally Christian brethren and said “I’m concerned that you may not be saved, not yet anyway”.

If you have made it this far through my post, you probably think me daft, bereft of reason, ignorant of the facts, or all three (and more). But the casual counterarguments that I know of don’t impress me. For instance, the Constitution and Federalist papers don’t explain any of our civil institutions as being required by any theological principle. How do I answer that?

By wondering why anyone would think, in an American context, that they should.

By an American context I have in mind the distinction between the bottom-up approach of the establishment of American civil institutions (where the people describe and limit the powers that they grant to institutions) and the top-down approach of, e.g., divine-right monarchy, socialism, the UN, etc., where institutions enumerate their own prerogatives, and perhaps also some freedoms granted to the people or to subordinate institutions. In the latter case it is easy to see how reference might be made to religious principles, while in the former case it is equally easy to see why God, Jesus, and the Bible are not mentioned in the Constitution, or its defense in the Federalist papers, as requiring certain forms for our civil institutions: those institutions are explicitly fallible human creations, not divine designs. To claim that our fallible human creations are designed by God would be blasphemy. And yes, the founders were very aware that they were establishing fallible human institutions, hence their healthy respect for checks and balances.

To take another try, many founders quoted Locke and claimed his influence upon the founding. To be sure, they also often cited general “Christian principles”, but still, mustn’t we give Locke (and others) his due? In short, my answer is “no”. The founders were proven historical revisionists, rewriting American history to weave Locke in, ex post facto, where he didn’t belong, e.g. JQ Adams giving a Lockean twist to the pre-Lockean “Mayflower compact” (i.e. Mayflower covenant) thus: “the first example in modern times of a social compact or system of government instituted by voluntary agreement conformable to the laws of nature, by men of equal rights and about to establish their community in a new country.” Given such willingness to interpret pre-Lockean events in Lockean terms, the founders’ enthusiasm for Locke should be seen as rationalization, not explanation.

To the common claim that the founders weren’t, by and large, Christian, because they were Unitarians, or whatever, my reply is to defend big-tent interpretations of Christianity, at least when we are acting as students of history, rather than engaging in sectarian squabbles. To the historian, the criteria that delimit Christianity must, of course, be different in detail than the criteria that delimit Buddhism, or Marxism, but they should be similarly loose and inclusive. Just as all Marxists are Marxists to anyone but a devout Marxist, so also anyone who attributes historical singularity to Christ (whether as redeemer of mankind, son of a unitary God, one person of a triune God, a member of the divine troika, seal of the prophets, resurrected worker of miracles, etc.) should be acknowledged, by any historian thinking in his capacity as a historian, to be a Christian, even if the historian happens also to be a strict sectarian Christian who denies the true Christianity of competing sects. By this standard, historically speaking, (whatever I think as an orthodox Lutheran), Arians, Nestorians, Mormons, etc., are all Christians for scholarly purposes of historical analysis.

To the obvious claim that the founders weren’t in agreement on the relationship between Christianity and republican democracy, and therefore could not have had any consensus on whether America should be founded as a Christian nation, I would reply that the principal division among the founders was on priority between Christianity and republican democracy, but as Tocqueville rightly observed, there was broad consensus on combination of the two. In other words, the founders disagreed on whether America is a republican democracy, and therefore should be a Christian nation, or whether instead America is a Christian nation, and therefore should be a republican democracy. Note in particular the former position: that America can be a republican democracy first and unconditionally, but that it then must therefore be a Christian nation as well, despite the unconditional nature of the founding of republican democratic institutions. This is an interpretation that fits “left-wing” founders well, and bypasses all objections of the sort that we cannot be a Christian nation because our institutions were founded without determining them from Christian principles (even though, as I argue above, freedom of conscience is an American Christian principle).