Don’t Feed Your Conscience to the Dogs

Manifesting One’s Innermost Thoughts and Moral Convictions Should Never Be Done at Gunpoint

“Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your peals before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.” — Mt 7

We live in a society where people are forced to manifest their conscience on issues ranging from sexuality to geo-politics to abortion — even on whether or not they agree with someone else’s tweet — in real-time, and practically at gunpoint. The threat of ostracization, job loss, or public ridicule lurks behind the slightest deviation from the mimetic moral norm of the day.

Even among people who recognize that this is obviously a serious problem, I believe the problem goes deeper than they may imagine. The issue is not merely about ‘free speech’, as Jonathan Turley thinks.

At a far more fundamental level, it is a fight about the very nature of the human person — a battle between those who acknowledge and respect the existence of the conscience as the sacred center of a person (even if it may at times be wrong), and those who do not.

The conscience is the place where a person is alone with God, where he must confront life’s most essential truths, and where he must either assent to or reject those truths. The act of trying to gain forcible entry into another’s conscience is not unlike a kind of spiritual assault, even a kind of rape. And it can deeply wound and scar — especially when the conscience is in a formative stage of development.

I learned about the importance of erecting boundaries around my conscience at my first job after college when I dipped my toe into the investment banking waters (for what turned out to be less than a year, before moving to California and launching a company.) In our little investment banking ‘group’, the politics were particularly nasty. The junior people realized very quickly that senior bankers were trying to sniff out our degree of orthodoxy about everything from the president to clean energy (and this was 2004–5), and that there were professional consequences for saying the wrong thing.

As young and overly ambitious junior people, none of us wanted to be penalized for…