Abstract

The protection of religious liberty in liberal theory relies on the suprapolitical status of conscience, yet the state retains the right to punish acts of conscience which interfere with state law and public peace. The liberal state is thus in the position of undermining its justification for rights of conscience with every regulation of conscientiously motivated acts. I present three alternative responses to this dilemma by examining the writings of John Locke, Isaac Backus, and the contemporary contractarian theorists David Richards and Kent Greenawalt. ;Locke represents a political response to the capaciousness of conscience; Backus a religious one; and the contractarians attempt to dissolve the difficulty by constructing some pre-political agreement regarding the scope of conscience. I argue that Locke and Backus's alternatives are no longer accessible to us, while the contractarian alternative is incoherent. ;The last chapter of the dissertation suggests a new approach to the clashes between religious citizens and the state. I argue that we should separate the need for standards to decide religion-state clashes from universal procedures for incorporating religious citizens into the civil life of the country. The goal ought not to be resolving the tension between public order and the authority of individual conscience, because attempting to do so involves theorists in devising universal theories of the good which are inherently illiberal. Instead, we ought to define standards that allow us to resolve clashes between religious citizens and the state. In such an effort, I advocate a turn to a revisable harm standard