“A Conscience Rightly Informed”: Puritan Casuistry and the Theological Justifications for Religious Establishment

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.