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The following selection is excerpted from ����ֱ��’s Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus.

Just as the framers of the First Amendment battled against the establishment of an official state-backed religion, the First Amendment also prevents the state from forcing citizens to believe, or articulate, an officially sanctioned point of view, whether political, philosophical, or personal. Free individuals disagree about and debate such views, and they seek to change each other’s beliefs by persuasion and argument, not by coercion and force.

The concept of the First Amendment’s protection of the freedom of conscience and deterrence against official attempts to engage in “thought reform” of its citizens, is best exemplified by the opinion of the Supreme Court in the landmark 1943 case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.

America was at war with totalitarian powers in 1943. It was not yet clear what the outcome of that war would be, although the Allied Powers were doing better than in the earliest years of the conflict. Still, the fates of the Western democracies, including the United States, were hanging in the balance. The West Virginia legislature, expressing a desire to aid the national war effort against European fascism, had enacted a statute to require all public and private schools to teach, foster, and perpetuate “the ideas, principles and spirit of Americanism.” The state Board of Education ordered a daily flag salute. Refusal subjected the student to dismissal and subjected parents to criminal penalties.

Several members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion — parents and their children — objected to participating in the flag salute, believing that to pledge to a flag was an act of idolatry, a form of bowing to graven images, prohibited by the Old Testament. They did not object to others pledging, but they refused to do so themselves. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Supreme Court analyzed the constitutionality of such a requirement not solely in terms of religious liberty but, more broadly, in terms of the right of private conscience against governmental coercion of expressions of belief and loyalty. 

Writing for the majority, Justice Robert Jackson had no quarrel with West Virginia’s requirement that certain courses be taught, nor with its attempts to inspire patriotism by exposing students to national history and traditions. However, in the Court’s view the Board’s flag salute requirement was different, because it compelled a student “to declare a belief [and] . . . to utter what is not in his mind.” In matters of belief, the Court saw human beings as essentially distinct; each was free to find “jest and scorn” where another found “comfort and inspiration.”

The Court found that the underlying issue was not any claimed conflict between liberty of conscience and the state’s ability to survive in time of crisis. The issue was not weak versus strong government, but, rather, seeing the strength of America in “individual freedom of mind” rather than in “officially disciplined uniformity for which history indicates a disappointing and disastrous end.” Enforced conformity, far from teaching the value of liberty, would “strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.”

FIRE's Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus

Freedom of conscience is the right to arrive at one’s private beliefs, without being coerced into an artificial unity by those who wield power over us.

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Justice Jackson explained why even men of good intentions should not possess the awesome power to compel belief. Both the good and the evil had attempted “to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential.” Such goals had been variously racial, territorial, and religious, but each such effort, Jackson reasoned, raised the bitter and profoundly divisive question of “whose unity it shall be.” Nothing, ultimately, would divide society more than “finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing.”

Surely all of human history taught the “ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence,” as seen in Roman efforts to destroy Christianity, the Inquisition's attempt to ensure religious unity, and “the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies.” In short, Jackson wrote for the majority of the Court, “compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” He concluded: “It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.”

For the Court, arguments that wartime and patriotism raised singular problems constituted “an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.” Without the toleration of eccentricity and “abnormal attitudes,” we could not have either our treasured “intellectual individualism” or our “rich cultural diversities.” It would violate the very spirit of liberty to make an exception for coercion of what society found to be its most important beliefs. The “freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much,” the Court wrote: “That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.”

Justice Jackson concluded with a particularly eloquent refutation of claims for the value of enforced orthodoxy in civic life. His words addressed issues that lie at the heart of the links among the First Amendment, academic freedom, and the right of individuals to define their deepest sense of themselves. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” he wrote, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by words or act their faith” in such orthodoxy. “The purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution,” he concluded, was precisely to protect “from all official control” the domain that was “the sphere of intellect and spirit.” 

Thus was confirmed the primacy of individual conscience over the perceived social benefits of conformity, the need for each individual to enjoy liberty in order for a common liberty to exist, and the intolerability of restricting even one person's liberty in “the sphere of intellect and spirit” in an attempt to create some better world or even a better human race.

Want to learn more about the freedom of conscience? Read ����ֱ��’s Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus.