Latter Day Sinner

For many years I have asserted that freedom of religion is an inferior way to talk about liberty than freedom of conscience. The biggest reason I have put forth is that appeals to religion shut out a significant portion of the population. It is, and I know this from experience, hard to convince an atheist that he needs freedom of religion. On the other hand I find that regardless of attitudes with regard to religion I can usually make appeals to the conscience of even the most anti religious people. This is in part because freedom of religion tends in the USA to be code for the freedom to practice traditional Christianity. As someone who is untraditional and hesitant to publicly declare myself a Christian this “code” when it is the unpinning of such advocacy is antithetical to my own advocacy. And for those reasons I prefer to frame my arguments around freedom of conscience.

But there is another reason that occurs to me why the latter is superior to the former. I will frame it with the phrase “Conscience is Atomic.” The right to practice one’s religion is a collective right. It is a right of association as much as it is a right to worship. But the right to avoid worship is one that does not at its heart require association. The right to live and work according to the dictates of my conscience is one that does not rely on protecting a greater order of things. I am a willing participant in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but my conscience is my own. That is at least in theory protected and promoted by both my church and my state government. I am in a good place for freedom of conscience. I want to extend that to the individuals around me. I wish to live and work according to my conscience and allow others to do the same. If that means helping them escape a religious framework that only protects the framework and not the individual I have and will do this. My wife left the LDS Church with my blessing, but ultimately her conscience does not require that blessing. And neither does yours.

There are limits of course. A person cannot kill, or rape, or mutilate, or imprison others and still claim conscience protections. Defending one’s conscience should never be at the expense of someone else’s. In practice promoting a religion will always be at the expense of other religions. Religions compete in a way that at least to me seems very Darwinian. Protecting the so-called atomization of individuals at the level of conscience on the other hand is anticompetitive. I don’t need to diminish your conscience to defend mine. I do and will diminish your religion to advance mine because I think mine is better. But as long as you are not as Thomas Jefferson said, “picking my pocket or breaking my leg” I can affirm your right to live and work according to the dictates of your conscience and you should affirm mine.