A School for Conscience
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Constitution, as well as seeking to rearticulate the supposed religio-moral substance of the Republic. These rearticulated beliefs revise inherited con-victions from the perspective of contemporary concerns. The glorious faith of the “Founders” is partly an invention of present discourse. The pristine
Gospel of many American evangelicals is actually a theological construction in reaction to the realities and ambiguities of modern life. Ironically, advo-cates of “articulation” miss the ways in which rearticulating the moral sub-stance of a culture is an act of invention which changes the commitments
they seek to express. The conservative is unwittingly an innovator.especially when we cast the discussion in terms of identity. Communitarians, as we will call them, insist on the priority of a specific bounded moral sub-There is a genuine gain but also a problem in this kind of social thought,
stance in the formation of identity, whether that substance is the will of the people or religious beliefs and stories. They grant the complexity of identity (say, American, Female, Christian, etc.) and yet want to organize people’s identity through the priority of one identity over others. The freedom to make
choices about identity is best when it endorses an identity that stops the demand of ongoing choice. The position thereby risks making identity into destiny, as Amartya Sen names it. If moral substance is the condition for identity, then it would seem impossible to use reason and choice to challenge
and change those identities when they run into conflict with others. “Many communitarian thinkers,” Sen rightly notes, “tend to argue that a dominant communal identity is only a matter of self-realization, not of choice.”particularists – as a religious version of communitarianism – want to con- (^9) Christian
form identity to the Church’s story. This means that among true believers, a person has really only the choice to conform or live in sin. But that misses the importance of the freedom to make choices about what to give in our identities without assuming that this choice must be once and for all. priority
That kind of freedom, we will see in a moment, is important in the social contract tradition.it is to be more than mere license, must be infused with substantive com-There is an insight in the communitarian argument. Human freedom, if
mitments about what is a good human life and just society. As historical beings we form our lives with others and for ourselves; we never can nor should escape the bonds of community, the legacies of tradition, that sus-tain and make possible meaningful life. The question, for any humanist, is
not freedom versus tradition, but, rather, freedom as a way to tions and communities. What that means will emerge in the remainder of the chapter. inhabit tradi-