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Religious Non-Affiliation and Objections of Conscience

This chapter is concerned with the implications of growing religious non-affiliation for objections of conscience, which have proliferated lately in the culture wars of Western democracies. Through the eighteenth century, when the U.S. Constitution was framed, the concept of conscience was tightly bound to religion. This chapter’s leading question is: what force do claims of conscientious objection have in the context of growing religious non-affiliation? Underlying this question is a subtler one: what else might we lose when we lose religion? The chapter’s thesis is twofold. First, the public conception of conscience has changed under the pressure of both growing religious non-affiliation and growing religious pluralism. Second, the appeal to conscience is now much less powerful than it was when God figured more prominently in the picture. The buffer between citizen and state has become thinner, and the reasons to accommodate objections of conscience have become weaker.