Should Christians Be Wary of Conscience Talk?

First Things: Does freedom of conscience lead to a naked public square? When religious people try to protect their own rights of conscience, does this undermine their ability to advance their convictions publicly? In responding to the recent HHS mandate for religious employers to provide contraception and abortifacients, religious groups and individuals have argued that their rights of conscience trump any potential desire of their employees for these medications. Their private religious convictions about contraception and abortion prevent them from taking these actions, and under the First Amendment they cannot be coerced to violate those convictions.

However, these religious people are not trying to be only privately religious. They have convictions about abortion and contraception—and immigration, economic justice, and war, for that matter—that they want to argue in public and legislate. And they ground these convictions not only in their own religious teachings, but in the natural law and public reason. They seek to live their religion privately and to advance and act on its claims publicly. But, in the HHS case, if they frame the debate not about the rightness or wrongness of abortion and contraception, but of private religious convictions, doesn’t that knock the public foundation out from under those claims? Doesn’t it make religious teaching about abortion and contraception—or, in another case, any other issue of public import—just a matter of private religious conviction, like dietary laws or smoking peyote?