In its fullest and most robust sense, religion is the human person’s being in right relation to the divine. All of us have a duty, in conscience, to seek the truth and to honor the freedom of all men and women everywhere to do the same.
When the US Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act
in 1998, it recognized that religious liberty and the freedom of
conscience are in the front rank of the essential human rights whose
protection, in every country, merits the solicitude of the United States
in its foreign policy. Therefore, the United States Commission on
International Religious Freedom, of which I became chair yesterday, was
created by the act to monitor the state of these precious rights around
the world.
But why is religious freedom so essential? Why does it merit such
heightened concern by citizens and policymakers alike? In order to
answer those questions, we should begin with a still more basic
question. What is religion?
Religion as Right Relation to the Divine
In its fullest and most robust sense, religion is the human person’s
being in right relation to the divine—the more-than-merely-human source
or sources, if there be such, of meaning and value. In the perfect
realization of the good of religion, one would achieve the relationship
that the divine—say God himself, assuming for a moment the truth of
monotheism—wishes us to have with Him.
Of course, different traditions of faith have different views of what
constitutes religion in its fullest and most robust sense. There are
different doctrines, different scriptures, different ideas of what is
true about spiritual things and what it means to be in proper
relationship to the more-than-merely-human source or sources of meaning
and value that different traditions understand as divinity.
For my part, I believe that reason has a very large role to play for
each of us in deciding where spiritual truth most robustly is to be
found. And by reason here, I mean not only our capacity for practical
reasoning and moral judgment, but also our capacities for understanding
and evaluating claims of all sorts: logical, historical, scientific, and
so forth. But one need not agree with me about this in order to affirm
with me that there is a distinct human good of religion—a good that
uniquely shapes one’s pursuit of and participation in all the aspects of
our flourishing as human beings—and that one begins to realize and
participate in this good from the moment one begins the quest to
understand the more-than-merely-human sources of meaning and value and
to live authentically by ordering one’s life in line with one’s best
judgments of the truth in religious matters.
If I am right, then the existential raising of religious questions,
the honest identification of answers, and the fulfilling of what one
sincerely believes to be one’s duties in the light of those answers are
all parts of the human good of religion. But if that is true, then
respect for a person’s well-being, or more simply respect for the
person, demands respect for his or her flourishing as a seeker of
religious truth and as one who lives in line with his or her best
judgments of what is true in spiritual matters. And that, in turn,
requires respect for everyone’s liberty in the religious quest—the quest
to understand religious truth and order one’s life in line with it.
Because faith of any type, including religious faith, cannot be authentic—it cannot be faith—unless
it is free, respect for the person—that is to say, respect for his or
her dignity as a free and rational creature—requires respect for his or
her religious liberty. That is why it makes sense, from the point of
view of reason, and not merely from the point of view of the revealed
teaching of a particular faith—though many faiths proclaim the right to
religious freedom on theological and not merely philosophical grounds—to
understand religious freedom as a fundamental human right.
Since its establishment by Congress, the US Commission on
International Religious Freedom has stood for religious freedom in its
most robust sense. It has recognized that the right to religious freedom
is far more than a mere “right to worship.” It is a right that pertains
not only to what the believer does in the synagogue, church, or mosque,
or in the home at mealtimes or before bed; it is the right to express
one’s faith in the public as well as private sphere and to act on one’s
religiously informed convictions about justice and the common good in
carrying out the duties of citizenship. Moreover, the right to religious
freedom by its very nature includes the right to leave a religious
community whose convictions one no longer shares and the right to join a
different community of faith, if that is where one’s conscience leads.
And respect for the right strictly excludes the use of civil authority
to punish or impose civic disabilities on those who leave a faith or
change faiths.
From the perspective of any believer, the further away one gets from
the truth of faith in all its dimensions, the less fulfillment is
available. But that does not mean that even a primitive and
superstition-laden faith is utterly devoid of value, or that there is no
right to religious liberty for people who practice such a faith. Nor
does it mean that atheists have no right to religious freedom. Respect
for the good of religion requires that civil authority respect and
nurture conditions in which people can engage in the sincere religious
quest and live lives of authenticity reflecting their best judgments as
to the truth of spiritual matters. To compel an atheist to perform acts
that are premised on theistic beliefs that he cannot, in good
conscience, share, is to deny him the fundamental bit of the good of
religion that is his, namely, living with honesty and integrity in line
with his best judgments about ultimate reality. Coercing him to perform
religious acts does him no good, since faith really must be free, and
coercion dishonors his dignity as a free and rational person.
Just Limits on the Freedom of Religion
Of course, there are limits to the freedom that must be respected for
the sake of the good of religion and the dignity of the human person as
a being whose integral fulfillment includes the spiritual quest and the
ordering of one’s life in line with one’s best judgment as to what
spiritual truth requires. Grave injustice can be committed by sincere
people for the sake of religion. The presumption in favor of respecting
liberty must be powerful and broad. But it is not unlimited.
Even the great end of getting right with God cannot justify a morally
bad means, even for the sincere believer. I don’t doubt the sincerity
of the Aztecs in practicing human sacrifice, or the sincerity of those
in the history of various traditions of faith who used coercion and even
torture in the cause of what they believed was religiously required.
But these things are deeply wrong, and should not be tolerated in the
name of religious freedom. To suppose otherwise is to back oneself into
the awkward position of supposing that violations of religious freedom
(and other injustices of equal gravity) must be respected for the sake
of religious freedom.
Still, to overcome the powerful and broad presumption in favor of
religious liberty, to be justified in requiring the believer to do
something contrary to his faith or forbidding the believer to do
something his conscience requires, political authority must meet a heavy
burden.
What Is Conscience?
But conscience has burdens proper to itself as well. To understand
the nature of conscience and the ground of its claim to freedom, we do
well to turn to John Henry Newman, the great nineteenth-century English
intellectual. Newman understood human beings as free and rational
creatures—creatures whose freedom and rationality reflects their having
been made in the very image and likeness of God.
Newman’s dedication to the rights of conscience is well known. Even
long after his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, he famously
toasted “the Pope, yes, but conscience first,” as he put it in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk
(1875). Our obligation to follow conscience was, he insisted, in a
profound sense primary and even overriding. Is there a duty to follow
the teachings of the pope? Yes, to be sure. As a Catholic, he would
affirm that with all his heart. If, however, a conflict were to arise,
such that conscience (formed as best as one could form it) forbade one’s
following the pope, well, it is the obligation of conscience that must
prevail.
Many of our contemporaries will be tempted to see in this their own
view of conscience—as an interior, self-liberating referral of grave
moral questions to our “feelings” or untutored intuitions as
“autonomous” beings. But Newman, the most powerful defender of freedom
of conscience, held a view of conscience and freedom that could not be
more deeply at odds with such a view. Let Newman himself state the
difference:
Conscience has rights because it has
duties; but in this age, with a large portion of the public, it is the
very right and freedom of conscience to dispense with conscience.
Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century it has been
superseded by a counterfeit, which the eighteen centuries prior to it
never heard of, and could not have mistaken for it if they had. It is
the right of self-will.
Conscience, as Newman understood it, is the very opposite of
“autonomy” in the modern sense. It is not a writer of permission slips.
It is not in the business of licensing us to do as we please or
conferring on us “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of
meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Rather,
conscience is one’s last best judgment specifying the bearing of moral
principles one grasps, yet in no way makes up for oneself, on concrete
proposals for action. Conscience identifies our duties under a
moral law that we do not ourselves make. It speaks of what one must do
and what one must not do. Understood in this way, conscience is, indeed,
what Newman said it is: a stern monitor.
Contrast this understanding of conscience with what Newman condemns
as its counterfeit. Conscience as “self-will” is a matter of feeling or
emotion, not reason. It is concerned not so much with the identification
of what one has a duty to do or not do, one’s feelings and desires to
the contrary notwithstanding, but rather, and precisely, with sorting
out one’s feelings. Conscience as self-will identifies permissions, not
obligations. It licenses behavior by establishing that one doesn’t feel
bad about doing it, or, at least, one doesn’t feel so bad about doing it
that one prefers the alternative of not doing it.
I’m with Newman. His key distinction is between conscience,
authentically understood, and self-will—conscience as the permissions
department. His core insight is that conscience has rights because it has duties.
The right to follow one’s conscience, and the obligation to respect
conscience—especially in matters of faith, where the right of conscience
takes the form of religious liberty of individuals and communities of
faith—obtain not because people as autonomous agents should be able to
do as they please; they obtain, and are stringent and sometimes
overriding, because people have duties and the obligation to fulfill
them. The duty to follow conscience is a duty to do things or refrain
from doing things not because one wants to follow one’s duty, but even if one strongly does not want to follow it.
The right of conscience is a right to do what one judges oneself to be
under an obligation to do, whether one welcomes the obligation or must
overcome strong aversion in order to fulfill it. If there is a form of
words that sums up the antithesis of Newman’s view of conscience as a
stern monitor, it is the imbecilic slogan that will forever stand as a
verbal monument to the “Me-generation”: “If it feels good, do it.”
Freedom, Justice, and Duty
Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., responded in his Letter from Birmingham Jail to those who criticized his program of civil disobedience as mere willful law-breaking:
I would be the first to advocate obeying
just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey
just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust
laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at
all."
King turned not inward to his own feelings of being aggrieved by the
law, not to the intuitions of his autonomous self, and not even to a
claim of his own rights. Instead he turned to “moral responsibility”—to
obligation, to duty. He, like Newman, understood this as a duty
to principles of justice we did not create, but to which we must
respond. As the Declaration of Independence teaches us, prior to any
laws made by men are the immutable standards of justice—standards by
which we judge whether the laws are just and can rightfully command our
obedience.
These standards, of the equal dignity of all human persons, of their
equal freedom, and of the accountability of government to the people,
apply not just to our own laws but to those of other nations as well. As
the United Nations recognized in its 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, religious freedom is an essential principle of justice, in
all nations and in all ages. Our Congress said the same in the
International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. All of us have a duty, in
conscience, to work for the religious freedom of all men and women
everywhere.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and
Director of the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the
new chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious
Freedom. This essay, adapted from his new book Conscience and Its Enemies, represents his own opinions. He is not speaking on behalf of the USCIRF.
