Why Is Most Important Right Missing from U.S. Constitution?

Sent to us by the author.

Somewhere between reason and feeling exists another basic component of our humanness known as conscience. So important is this faculty of human existence-an individual’s conviction about the rightness or wrongness of their actions-that James Madison believed conscience should have been a permanent part of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, even an unalienable right.

When Madison spoke to the First Congress he proposed 20 amendments for a Bill of Rights, not the ten that most people are accustomed to today. One important liberty that Madison wanted to protect from federal and state governments and abusive powers was conscience. According to Madison and in a pre-preamble to the constitution: “No state should violate the equal rights of conscience, …”(1)  

He also wanted to include conscience again in the First Amendment religion clause: “The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on an pretext, infringed.”(2) But after a series of debates and revisions by other members of congress, conscience was omitted from the First Amendment.

Assuming that an individual’s conscience is based on universal principles of reason and goodness towards others, informing the person what they should or should not do, is it not grave violation to prevent someone from doing what they think is good and just? Can it also be considered an oppressive form of tyranny against the inner dictates of a well formed, highly ethical, and necessary conscience in which society functions properly?

So strong was Madison’s conviction to include conscience as a natural right in the constitution that he implied it again within the framework of the Second Amendment. Following “the right of the people to keep and bear arms and maintain a well regulated militia for a secure state,” he proposed: “but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

“Religiously scrupulous” refers to an individual’s religious and moral conscience in not wanting to participate in war or other forms of violence. This was due to a strong pacifist movement that existed in some parts of the thirteen colonies, especially in Pennsylvania and Virginia among Quakers, Friends and Baptists. A moralist, he also thought it strange to ask or require people to do not what they think is right but what they believe is wrong.

The ramifications and consequences for excluding a person’s conscience from the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are many. Does it explain why many are still fascinated, even addicted, to firearms, often associating them with freedom and security. Does it reveal how a young republic became an aggressive, militant inner-continental empire, and then a global one, mainly through imperialistic violence and bloodshed?

Unlike European nations that included conscience as a right and have recently become progressive and pacifistic, the mere omission of conscience in our Bill of Rights has suppressed an essential aspect of humanness. This would explain why democracy is declining, why civic engagement is dead, the rise of archaic views within the Commons, and why conscientious living and moral convictions appear missing from public spheres.

It would also help clarify as to why slavery existed for so long in the U.S., why there was increasing apathy towards unjust wars, and why economic inequalities and corporate cruelty has become institutionalized. In a market economy, can omitting conscience as a protected right or from any discussion even rectify it, making it into another packaged commodity? If so, this explains a decline in morals and acts of civic consciousness.

Many years before the Bill of Rights Madison has horrified when he heard religious prisoners of conscience singing from a jail who had been imprisoned due to their beliefs. The incident consumed Madison, who denounced it as “that diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution.” Angry at his own failure to secure the release of the ministers, he asked others to pray that a Liberty of Conscience be revived.(3)

Without the right to one’s good and reasonable conscience, can there really be liberty? Instead, ruling ideologies become the status quo. Not only does one’s conscience become violated, but over time it becomes violent. The inner voice, which should be informing individuals about what they should or should not do, becomes self-destructive. Can a national inner voice become collectively destructive?

America’s revolutionary spirit is incomplete. Without a conscience it is misguided. To avert ruin, a new debate will have to emerge about the right to one’s moral conscience. It should not only entail conscientious objection towards wars and certain mandated religions and ideologies, but taxation and cruel institutions. If all people are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, surely the most important one is conscience.

Dallas Darling

(Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.worldnews.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and wn.com//dallasdarling.)

(1) www.yahoonews.com. “Five items congress deleted Madison original bill right.”

(2) Schultz, Jeffrey D., John G. West and Iain Maclean. Encyclopedia Of Religion In American Politics. Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 1999., p. 152.

(3) Meacham, Jon. American Gospel, God, The Founding Fathers, And The Making Of A Nation. New York, New York: Random House, 2007., p. 68.