A Conscience Rightly Informed

Puritan Casuistry and the Theological Justifications for Religious Establishment

Bibliographic Data

ID5708199
AuthorsCory D Higdon (corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume66
Issue4
Pages235-244
Publication date2024-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Church and State (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-969X • E-ISSN: 2040-4867
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jcs/csae026
OpenAlexW4396842840
LanguageEN
References cited3

In the early modern debates over religious liberty and toleration, religious dissenters often raised the issue of an individual's conscience as a primary support for disestablishment. Dissenters like Roger Williams contended that establishmentarian policies persecuted tender consciences. God, according to dissenters, had not granted authority over the conscience to civil rulers; thus, religious establishment was both theologically specious as well as politically perilous. Much attention has been given to how religious dissenters discussed the human conscience and its place within the civil society. This essay, however, focuses on how magisterial Protestants developed their theological system of religious establishment in concert with their own understanding of the human conscience. Proponents of establishment utilized their own theology of the conscience as grounds for religious establishment, and this essay seeks to understand how they reconciled their soteriological convictions and their conception of the human conscience with their belief in the magistrate's authority in matters of doctrine and religion

Casuistry · Conscience · Doctrine · Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Toleration · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Legal Studies and Society · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies

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