Freedom of conscience, the freedom of individuals to think and act as they believe, has been part of the social contract of societies which have sought to replace autocratic rule with various forms of self-government. Whereas dictatorial leaders might seek to direct the thoughts and activities of people within their domain of influence, documents such as the Magna Carta in England and the American Constitution sought to reserve for individuals certain rights, including the right to express their own beliefs and the freedom to act upon those beliefs.

The right, and some would assert, responsibility, of individuals to think, speak, write, and act as they consider to be appropriate and necessary—the right and responsibility to exercise their freedom of conscience—has played a significant role in democratic communities. Recent changes in Eastern Europe exemplify this process: where leadership could no longer enforce unpopular policy, revolution became irresistible. Institutions can and do change, sometimes peacefully, sometimes by revolution; the American people insisted on their freedom of conscience and broke away from the British Empire to become a nation.

The "liberty" that the Constitutional framers sought to guarantee to American citizens was incorporated into the First Amendment of [p.viii] the Bill of Rights, which states: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

As a result of the overwhelming Mormon plurality in Utah and Congress's concerns about religious domination, the Utah constitution not only incorporates the freedoms of the Bill of Rights, but also includes added protection in its Article I, Section 4:

The rights of conscience shall never be infringed. The state shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; … there shall be no union of Church and State, nor shall any church dominate the State, or interfere with its functions. No Public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise or instruction, or for the support of any ecclesiastical establishment …

The balance between freedom and authority has always been difficult. Jean-Jacques Rousseau felt that governments should have only limited rights to regulate the behavior of individuals who contract to be part of that society. Ultimately, the authority of leaders depends on the willingness of individuals in a society or organization to accept that authority. Governmental authority derives from people who support a state with taxes and agree to obey its laws; ecclesiastical authority derives from congregations who agree to follow its edicts and to support its leaders financially.

Following a long tradition which evolved from Roman jurisprudence and developed in British Common Law, American courts have continually adjudicated the boundaries between appropriate state authority and the rights of individuals. Tensions between group and individual rights expressed in the current essays have a long historical tradition.

Issues of conscience versus state and church authority were articulated by such rebels as Socrates, Jesus, and Galileo. Socrates was a fifth-century philosopher and teacher of Athens, scholar of geometry and astronomy, veteran of the Peloponnesian War, legislator, and father of three sons. He helped lay the philosophical foundations of western culture, although he wrote nothing; his ideas are reflected in [p.ix] Plato's dialogues and the writings of Xenophon. Impressed with the providential order of nature, as he saw it, he applied universal definitions and divisions to nature and developed a system of inductive reasoning. Socrates defined the "soul" as character and intelligence; he reasoned that happiness depended on the goodness of one's soul. When one "knows" true goodness, doing right is involuntary. Socrates followed this early argument for freedom of conscience to the point of political dissent, for which he was tried and condemned to death.

Jesus (Greek for Yeshua or Joshua) was the son of a Judean carpenter in a Roman colony at the edge of the empire. He became a teacher or rabbi and wandered through settlements in and around Galilee with twelve followers preaching religious reform, teaching by parable, and practicing healing. Jesus preached the redeeming love of God for every person regardless of social class. His attacks on hypocrisy and his indifference to wealth and status were well received by common people and opposed by the privileged. We would expect this reaction to any religious reformer who gathered the homeless and walked to the center of town assailing church leaders. Religious and political authorities alike accused him of being a revolutionary. Regarded by some as the long-awaited Messiah, Jesus was arrested by Roman soldiers, condemned as a blasphemer by the Sanhedrin—a Jewish council—and was crucified by the Roman procurator, Pontias Pilate. Christianity developed around belief in his resurrection from the dead.

Although, like Socrates, Jesus wrote nothing that is extant, various stories and narratives about him were written down and edited some time after his death. Among the writings considered by scholars to be most representative of what Jesus actually said are some of the parables. He taught that the letter of the law was an insufficient guide to ethical behavior; he rejected the legalistic actions of the Jewish Pharisees. Jesus was an advocate for the marginalized: heathens, Samaritans, publicans (tax collectors), and harlots. His parable of the Pharisee and the publican demonstrates his respect for humility over dogmatic obedience (Luke 18:10-14a). In his remarkable exercise of independent conscience which cost him his life, Jesus preached a universal message that offended the establishment of first-century Palestine.

[x] Galileo Galilei, an early seventeenth-century professor of mathematics at the University of Padua, Italy, was an astronomer and physicist whose discoveries contradicted the moral authority of the Christian church. Considered one of the founders of the experimental method, he developed the astronomical telescope with which he discovered the satellites of Jupiter and learned that the Milky Way was composed of stars. From his observations and analysis he affirmed the Copernican theory, that the planets revolve around the sun, similar to a long-ignored theory of the third-century B.C.E. Greek astronomer, Aristarchus.

Although a member of the established church who had attended a monastery near Florence, Galileo could not deny what he knew: the earth revolves around the sun and is not the fixed center of the universe. When Dominican prelates denounced Galileo for blasphemy, he wrote to church authorities in Rome to remind them that, in the past, when the Bible conflicted with undeniable scientific truth, scripture had been interpreted allegorically. Quoting church dicta, he warned that it would be "a terrible detriment for the souls if people found themselves convinced by proof of something that it was made then a sin to believe." Galileo went to Rome to persuade the Pope to lift the ban on Copernicus's ideas. He was brought to trial before the Inquisition, interrogated, threatened with torture, and forced to recant. Although he spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest as punishment for having "held and taught" Copernican doctrine, he managed to finish his book New Sciences and smuggle it out to Protestants in the Netherlands. It was published in 1638, four years before Galileo died.

The struggles of Socrates, Jesus, and Galileo exemplify significant innovators of our civilization who expressed their freedom of conscience at great personal cost. The tradition of exercising freedom of conscience, of speaking truth to authority, was a primary theme of the Renaissance, when humanism was born. Often traced to the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch, from whence it spread across western Europe, humanism elevated humanity's relationship to God. Humanism advocated free will and the capacity to understand and control nature. The mysteries of the sun, moon, stars, planets, rain, lightning and thunder, and the seemingly endless [p.xi] systems of plants and animals were now examined analytically and treated as subjects for humankind to study and understand.

The Renaissance inspired widespread interest in knowledge from advanced cultures of the past. As Augustine had years earlier sought to combine ancient Greek thought with Hebrew scriptures in a Christian synthesis of Plato and Moses, scholars now widely searched for ancient documents. This thirst for understanding began to challenge subservient reliance on both the state and received tradition.

By the nineteenth century humanism incorporated the positivist thinking of August Comte, which produced a value system independent of a belief in God. However, twentieth-century theologians such as Karl Barth asserted that the Christian gospel was part of humanism in that it taught that each person is uniquely created in the image of God.

From its outset humanism emphasized a questioning attitude, objective analysis of perceived experience, and respect for the dignity of humankind. An intelligence capable of critical scrutiny and self-inquiry was a "free intelligence." In his "Orations on the Dignity of Man," Italian philosopher Pico della Mirandola asserted that humanity had been assigned no fixed limit by God but was free to seek its own level and create its own future. With this focus on human thought and analysis, humanism embraced freedom of conscience.

Although religious thinkers advocated some of its principles, humanists inevitably found themselves on a collision course with religion. Humanism led scholars to the secular realm of science and mathematics, and to the pagan literature of Greece and Rome. Studies in these areas effectively eroded the territory of faith. Intellectual individualism challenged the Catholic church's presumption of universal authority. The church distrusted secular humanism because it entertained new ideas on their merits rather than judging them against a prescribed standard of belief.

While religious authority has often played a role in limiting freedom of conscience, many religious movements themselves could have been born only in a climate of freedom. The Mormon church arose and flourished in an atmosphere of toleration and freedom of conscience that the pluralistic society of nineteenth-century America provided. Mormon founder Joseph Smith and his early followers could not accept the principles of Christian churches practicing in [p.xii] New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois during the 1820s-40s. Specifically, these early Mormons rejected the doctrine of "original sin" by which errors of judgment attributed to biblical Adam impugned the dignity of all. Smith discarded the Christian notion that the Earth was created ex nihilo—out of nothing. Incorporating concepts of the Scientific Revolution, Smith believed that matter was eternal and that the earth must have been created out of existing elements in a cosmic reorganization. Furthermore, at a time when the biblical flat-earth scenario, with Heaven above and Hell below, had been rendered obsolete by Copernicus, Joseph Smith envisioned a creator living, not above sluice gates of rain in the "great dome," but on a separate planet. He attributed to this creator a natural progression from the status of human being, complete with spouse, parents and grandparents. In fact, Smith thought that every human being had the potential to become a god and rule a personal planet.

Smith went far afield from traditional Christianity and offended the sensibilities of neighbors. Illinois governor Thomas Ford listed the following causes of antagonism toward the Mormons: violations of freedom of the press, general religious views, polygamy, military strength, rumors of intent to destroy a nearby newspaper, Mormon alliance with native Americans, alleged coronation of Joseph Smith, vigilante bands, assertions that God had consecrated neighbors' property to Mormons, and bloc voting which made Mormon approval necessary for politicians (History of Illinois [1854], 2:166-76). Mormons were as different and undesirable to their mid-western neighbors as the Rajneesh was to Oregon or David Koresh to Texas. Mormons suffered what they considered to be deprivation of their rights, while their neighbors felt that their rights were threatened by the Mormons. However, it was internal dissent over the secret practice of polygamy in Illinois that, in large part, led to a chain of events which resulted in the death of the Mormon prophet and the expulsion of the Mormons from Illinois. Smith's followers left the United States to take refuge in the Great Salt Lake Valley (in Mexican territory at that time) where they felt they would be able to exercise religious freedom.

Following their migration to Utah, the Mormons modified their doctrines to gain public acceptance. In 1890 the church abandoned polygamy in exchange for eventual statehood in 1896. As recently as [p.xiii] 1978, another dissonant doctrine was terminated, the disfranchisement of blacks for some postulated curse attributed to wrongdoing in a pre-earth existence. Mormons no longer preach that the end of the world is near or that they will soon occupy their neighbors' property and rule over them. But a century after freedom of conscience was invoked to form their radically new religion, the rhetoric of some Mormon leaders is ambivalent regarding the universality of such a right.

At a time when academic freedom is circumscribed by loyalty oaths and doctrinal hegemony at Brigham Young University, when Mormon scholars are excommunicated for discussing contradictions in historical documents, it is easy to forget that Mormon leaders have consistently embraced "free agency" as an essential principle of Mormon doctrine. Founder Joseph Smith said, "I teach the people correct principles and they govern themselves" (Journal of Discourses 10:57-58); also, "We are not disposed, had we the power, to deprive anyone of exercising… free independence of mind" (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 49).

The importance of freedom is evidenced in Mormon scripture, which declares that freedom emanated from the mouth of God: "It is not meet that I should command in all things; for he that is compelled in all things, the same is slothful and not a wise servant" (Doctrine and Covenants 58:26-28). Further, "Every man may act in doctrine and principle… according to the moral agency which I have given unto him, that every man may be accountable for his own sins in the day of judgment" (Doctrine and Covenants 101:78). According to the Book of Mormon, one purpose of earth life is to allow eternal beings to make choices (2 Nephi 2:15-16). If forced to choose the right, a 1993 Mormon Sunday school lesson explained, we would not be able to demonstrate what we would choose for ourselves. The lesson suggested that the teacher put a cord around a child's arms and ask if he or she felt free (Gospel Doctrine Sunday School manual [1993], chap. 4, 18).

Jesus is often quoted in LDS sermons, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). Early Mormon apostle Orson Pratt preached that "All beings having intelligence must have their agency. Laws must be given, suited and adapted to this agency; and when God sends inhabitants on various creations he [p.xiv] sends them on the great and grand principle of giving them an opportunity to exercise that agency (Essential Orson Pratt [1991], 374). Brigham Young agreed that freedom is "a law of [human] existence, and the Lord cannot violate his own law; were he to do that he would cease to be God … this is a law which has existed from all eternity, and will continue to exist throughout all the eternities to come. Every intelligent being must have the power of choice" (Journal of Discourses 11:272). Latter-day Saint president Joseph F. Smith wrote, "The Almighty raised up [this nation]… to the end that those who are kept in bondage and serfdom may be brought to the enjoyment of the fullest freedom and liberty of conscience possible for intelligent man to exercise in the earth" (Gospel Doctrine [1939], 409).

Some Mormons believe that political and religious liberty is critically important for the church today. Current LDS apostle Dallin Oaks has explained:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not attempt to isolate its members from alternate voices. Its approach, as counseled by the prophet Joseph Smith, is to teach correct principles and then leave its members to govern themselves by personal choices. Members of the church are free to participate or to listen to any alternate voices they choose, but church leaders should avoid official involvement directly or indirectly (Ensign, May 1989, 28).

Similarly, the current senior apostle of the LDS Quorum of the Twelve, Howard W. Hunter, reflected: "To fully understand this gift of agency and its inestimable worth, it is imperative that we understand that God's chief way of acting is by persuasion and patience and long-suffering, not by coercion and stark confrontation" (Ensign, Nov. 1989, 18).

Elder Loren C. Dunn of the LDS First Council of the Seventy endorsed freedom of conscience with these words: "No one will force us to do what is right. We should be 'in tune' with the spirit, that is, listen to our conscience, and then 'discipline ourselves'" (This I Know [1985], 6-7). Apostle Boyd K. Packer was asked by the wife of a U.S. Army general how Mormons are able to control their youth. He responded, "We develop control by teaching freedom… A four-star general is nothing if not a disciplinarian. But when one understands [p.xv] the Gospel, it becomes very clear that the best control is self control" (Ensign, May 1983).

The mutual heritage of freedom of conscience among Mormons and humanists provides common ground for dialogue. Although each group might not agree entirely on the meaning of religious and intellectual expression, they both understand and recognize the importance of freedom.

The present conflict in the Mormon community regarding academics and feminists is addressed in the essays contained in this volume. BYU faculty have been forbidden from participating in unapproved symposia and conferences. In 1992 Phi Beta Kappa for the third time in fifteen years denied permission to establish a chapter at BYU because its mission statement, which forbids academic work that contradicts fundamental church doctrines, is "problematic for an institution of higher learning where free inquiry should prevail" (Salt Lake Tribune, May 20, 1992). The 1995 accreditation process for BYU begins this year with self-evaluation by BYU administrators, and must be pursued with courage and integrity.

We hope that the Mormon community will recall its heritage as religious humanists, a heritage of freedom of conscience and expression that requires the community to find a way to listen to thoughtful dissenters and discuss differences with mutual respect. At the same time, secular humanists, with their tradition of tolerance and open-mindedness, will find that they have much in common and much to admire in the passion, honesty, and intellectual integrity of Mormons, as well as of people of other faiths who earnestly try to harmonize their religious and intellectual traditions.