Michael McClymond summarizes Jonathan Edwards’s theology of conscience. Edwards concedes that everyone has a conscience. Everyone’s “natural conscience” can perceive right and wrong, but only the converted conscience can fully apprehend God’s moral excellence and beauty. Further, the conscience operates on the principle of “reversibility”: the empathetic orientation of one’s actions considering their effects on others. However, the person with the converted conscience is constantly aware of his propensity to sin and that God’s moral demands are forever correct. Conscience gets stronger and more refined the more it is heeded; conversely, it gets duller the more it is resisted. The faith of true believers removes the stain of a guilty conscience. Even if not redeemed, however, that self-same natural conscience will agree entirely with the justness of God’s righteous punishment for him at the Last Judgment.

By mixing conceptual clarification and semantic probes, we seek to underscore the problematic nature of characterizing law as a universal concept. We intend to show that law, in the sense by which it is globally understood today, is the outcome of a contingent experience whose extension to other historical and cultural contexts has been achieved at a huge price: heuristic weakness, analytical vacuity, grammatical incoherence, pluralist dogmatism. First, we examine works dealing with “legal pluralism” and “legalism” to identify the reasons why the term “law,” its conceptual extension, and the attribution of its predicative quality are problematic and badly reflect the gap that can exist between a “legalistic way of thinking” about the world and the existence of law in its contemporary meaning. Second, we specifically address works dealing with “Islamic law” and law in Muslim contexts to try to see what law can be at the margin but also what people make it into, often abusively. Third, we seek to outline the contours of a conceptual inquiry, delimiting its relevance, specifying its limits, taking advantage of its analytical razor, clearing the mist, opening the domain of grammar.

Christians have wrestled with conscience from Christianity’s beginning to the present. Does it exist? Do religious and nonreligious people have it? Is conscience a subjective or objective reality? Christians have asked if it is God’s voice, human beings’ own voice, or the voice of the community. Is conscience found in natural law? Is it a combination of the mind, will, heart, and/or the soul? Is it a divine judgment or a self-evaluation? What are the consequences of following an erroneous conscience? Lately, questions have arisen about conscience in a pluralistic society. What ought to be the relationship between conscience and law? Commentators also struggle with questions about accommodating institutions’ conscience claims. Which institutions might qualify and why? Lawmakers also contend over conscience claims made by individuals concerning military service, or over state laws about family matters increasingly at odds with Christian commitments. This book explores sources having lasting influence upon questions about conscience, including the New Testament, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Roger Williams, US federal and state constitutions, and Pope Benedict XVI, among many others.

Cajetan Cuddy looks at conscience through the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Conscience is an act of ordering knowledge – some universal and some particular – to an act, whether past, present, or future. Conscience directs future acts, and regarding past acts, can accuse or excuse. Aquinas compares conscience and synderesis – the person’s inclination shaping her understanding. Synderesis turns human nature to good and objects to evil. It gives awareness of the principles of morality to be applied to actions. Synderesis concerns knowing the principles applicable to all actions, and conscience applies knowledge to a specific act. Thus, conscience comes from synderesis. But conscience has limits and can be wrong and need correction. A mistaken conscience does not stop a person’s orientation to the truth, and error can be fixed. Conscience and God’s law both bind for Aquinas, not because conscience is perfect or reason is independent of the law, but because conscience mediates God’s norms to humans doing a particular action. This is done through the application of synderesis, which is always ordered to moral truth, meaning to God.

Nathan Chapman considers the link between free exercise and freedom of conscience in the US Constitution and legislation. Some theorists emphasize the similarity between religion and other moral or philosophical commitments and insist there is no reason to privilege the former over the latter. However, for the founding generation, freedom of conscience meant religious freedom, exercised as a response to one’s duty to God. Courts and legislatures often negotiate different relationships between freedom of religion and of conscience. Speech, press, and association rights have been employed to protect conscience. And some state and federal statutes accommodate religion and other commitments under the label of conscience. However, the Free Exercise, Establishment, and Equal Protection Clauses have not been interpreted to prioritize nonreligious conscience. The Supreme Court has interpreted the law about conscientious objection to military service to include non-theistic beliefs. Some statutes accommodating religion also protect nonreligious beliefs or practices, for example, statutes governing abortion, physician-aided suicide and capital punishment.

Peter Casarella presents the themes in Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s reflection on conscience. An important part of Benedict’s theory is his theology of culture. Current ideas about conscience and culture minimize truth. Benedict posits that conscience is a law on the heart and is not merely consciousness. He submits that culture points to the unveiling of a Redeemer. He proposes “interculturality,” the meeting of cultures in which their hope for Advent is kept. Regarding truth and conscience, Benedict works with Newman and Socrates. He concludes that conscience is the voice of truth in the subject. Benedict’s theory of conscience hews the Thomistic line between synderesis and conscience as an act of judging upon a good. Benedict guards against relativism by suggesting that synderesis can be known by the Platonic idea of anamnesis: memory of the true and good. This is tied to Benedict’s anthropology, namely humans’ reliance upon God and capacity for dialogue with Him. Though social circumstances can be sources of moral knowledge, the person should consult God’s will. Consciences are formed through Scripture, the Holy Spirit, the magisterium, beauty, and identification with Christ.

Christopher Tollefsen addresses institutions’ conscience rights. The Supreme Court’s description in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby of the rights of religious corporations affects that question. Institutional conscience attracts more skepticism than individual conscience. Skeptics wonder if an institution can have a conscience or make others respect it. Some medical institutions, looking to exercise conscience, ask if they should be forced to offer patients all services the law allows, including abortion, sterilization, physician-aided suicide and gender transition. If they don’t, others fear unwanted costs to clients and employees. Hobby Lobby involved a closely-held corporation’s refusal to obey a law mandating the purchase of health insurance covering drugs and devices that could destroy an embryo. In other institutional conscience cases, religion could be exercised by the group-subject’s doing or abstaining from acts, as a group and for religious reasons. As in Hobby Lobby, shielding group conscience claims, through corporations, vindicates humans’ rights to achieve certain ends: business efficiencies and the goods of working as a family and as co-believers.

If one accepts that there is a remarkable continuity in the human propensity to formalize and categorize the world, it is necessary at the same time to note the no less obvious differences in the methods of conceiving and implementing this process of efficacious formalization, but also in the finalities associated with it. In this respect one could speak of legal revolutions just as one speaks of scientific revolutions. The idea of legal revolution suggests two things: one, substantial, is that there have been break points in how the world has been categorized in the legal sense; the other, of a more methodological nature, is that it would no doubt be useful to make good use, in the history of law, of what the philosophy and history of science and technology have continued to accumulate over several decades.

David Little presents Roger Williams as a seventeenth-century champion of conscience. Williams was expelled from Massachusetts Bay that ostensibly prized free exercise, but in fact recognized it only within narrow bands of orthodoxy. Williams thereafter prized freedom of conscience in the charter for the Providence Plantations and Rhode Island. A central principle for Williams is the distinction between the “inward” and “external” fora. The “inward forum” is the conscience, a “spiritual power” changeable by reason and persuasion. The “external forum” is “outward behavior,” meaning actions that can be coerced by the governing authority through force, in order to protect life, property, and other interests. Williams provocatively labeled coercive acts against conscience as “soul rape” and “piracy,” indicating how deeply and intimately these violated the person. Williams maintained a fruitful relationship with the Narangansett Indians, having shown them great respect, as the people who provided him refuge when he was expelled from Massachusetts Bay. He didn’t co-opt their government, and fully respected their ability to choose religion (or not), in the quiet of their own internal fora.

Michael DeBoer identifies five periods in US state constitutions’ protections of religious conscience. The first and second periods, from roughly 1776 to the 1830s, saw state constitutions grant solicitude to religious conscience and free exercise. The end of the second period saw all states abolish church establishments. The third period, from the 1830s to the 1920s, saw many new states in the Union, and their constitutions were largely protective of religious conscience. The fourth period, from the 1920s to the 1970s, saw the incorporation of the US Constitution’s religion clauses against the states, and new or amended state constitutions’ textual conscience protections borrowed language from the US Constitution. Some state interpretations of conscience-related issues closely mirrored those from the Supreme Court. In the fifth period, from the 1970s to present, some states were protective of religious conscience, while other states have hewed to religion-harmful interpretations occasioned by the Supreme Court’s case of Employment Division v. Smith. In this period, some states passed Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRAs) modeled after the federal statute.

Helen Alvaré chronicles tension between Christian individuals and institutions, and laws promoting sexual expression rights. Church and state used to share outlooks on these matters. Today, laws often mandate cooperation with behaviors opposed to Christian teachings on abortion, contraception, or same-sex relationships. State and certain private groups claim that new laws are necessary to secure interests such as dignity, equality, privacy, and personal identity. These laws are reinforced by cultural movements pressing individual autonomy and sexual freedom. Corporations and media have favored sexual expression protections and have discouraged exemptions for religious conscience. Christians, though, link religious teachings about sexual expression to core articles of faith on matters such as the nature of God, God’s relationship to humans, and how humans are to treat one another. Christians judge, then, that they should not cooperate with laws against these commitments. They also point to the close ties between impaired family relationships and increasing divides between racial and socioeconomic groups in the United States. The stakes for both sides of the controversy are high.

Kent Greenawalt discusses the permissibility, scope, and rationale for law to provide exemptions to protect religious and nonreligious conscience in the United States. It may be difficult for the law to determine which sentiments amount to conscience given differences in individuals’ perception and the strength of their convictions. Even the notion of a religious conscience is complex. Religious citizens’ conclusions about matters of interest to religion may proceed from both religion and reason, or only from reason. It is not clear what should count as religious, given differences between denominations and their ideas over time. There are a host of factors bearing on the permissibility and wisdom of granting exemptions, determining their scope, and deciding whether to extend protections to nonreligious conscience. A first principle is the importance of respect for others and for tolerance in a democracy. These questions about exemptions can be considered by looking closely at contested issues, like objection to the military draft, laws governing the manner of killing animals, ingestion of banned substances, abortion, and objection to insurance mandates concerning contraceptives.

David VanDrunen ties the natural law concepts found in both the Old and New Testaments to a sense of conscience. The notion of natural law appears early in the Old Testament, in God’s covenant with Noah. God instructs Noah that, for example, the killing of an innocent must be recompensed (thereby indicating that innocent people must not be wantonly killed). While there is not one Hebrew word for conscience in the OT, it does identify the “heart” (leb) and “kidneys” (kelayot) as the mechanisms by which the wise and discerning person applies what he knows to be true about the way the world works. In the New Testament, conscience is the “subjective human faculty that recognizes right and wrong and thus bears witness to a person’s standing before the law.” The Apostle Paul’s discussion of natural law in Romans chapters 2 and 3 reveals that although not all receive God’s express law (as did God’s people on Mt. Sinai), all people everywhere have an innate sense of moral rectitude to which their consciences testify. All persons everywhere therefore are subject to God’s righteous judgment.