Of Liberty of Conscience

It is commonly thought that he who holds no opinion is indifferent, and that indifference is treachery. I have found the opposite to be more often true: it is the man who holds his opinion with absolute certainty who is most likely to do damage, because absolute certainty removes the only brake on human action — the possibility that one might be wrong. In matters of religion, where certainty is most absolute and most unfounded, the damage has been correspondingly immense.

Julian the Apostate is not a name that orthodox history treats well, but I have always read his story with considerable sympathy. He was a pagan emperor surrounded by Christians, and he could have persecuted them — he had the power, he had the grievance, he had the precedent. Instead he tolerated them, made use of them, argued with them, and simply declined to compel what he could not persuade. This seems to me more admirable than most of what passes for religious policy on any side of any argument. He treated his adversaries as men whose minds might be changed, not as enemies whose bodies needed to be broken.

To constrain a man’s conscience is to invade the last private room of his humanity — and to destroy the possibility of honest faith, which can only be freely given.

What I have seen in my own lifetime — the wars, the massacres, the burning of men for what they believe about the nature of bread and wine at a ceremony — has convinced me that the attempt to enforce religious uniformity by violence is not only wicked but stupid. It has never yet produced the uniformity it sought; it has produced instead a hardening of positions, a multiplication of martyrs, and a population that has learned to conceal what it actually believes. The man who conforms at swordpoint has not been converted — he has been silenced, and silence is not faith.