Rosalynde Welch and Nathan Oman describe how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has deployed conscience. Distinguished from many Protestant accounts of conscience, the church’s account does not focus on conscience as choosing by the self. Instead, it relies on externally provided, yet personally received revelation – whether available to all (“light of Christ”) or more exclusive (“gift of the Holy Ghost”). Though the church values personal revelation, interpretations and decisions by the church hierarchy prevails over conscientiously held beliefs of church members. Dissent is not unheard of in the church. For most of the nineteenth century, the church did not obey the anti-polygamy laws passed by Congress. Some resistance used language of conscience, while others identified outside forces – revelation, oracles, religious persecution, or the Constitution (which the church thought superior to mere laws) – as reasons to resist the federal government. Recently, in the case of Bishop v. Amos, the church based its liberty claim on its interest in running its own affairs. Regardless, the church generally has prized fealty to law over idiosyncratic conscientious resistance.

Locke’s doctrine of the fundamentals has important irenic implications. His omission of disputed doctrines from his account of Christianity implies toleration of all those accepting the Law of Faith. Moreover, his theological writings do not describe affiliation to a church as essential to salvation. This position implicitly makes denominationally uncommitted Christians tolerable. This is a step beyond the mere separation between the state and religious societies, which Locke affirmed in his “letters” on toleration. However, Locke argued that acceptance of the Law of Faith could lead not only to salvation, but also to properly comprehend and observe the divine law. This position is problematic, since Locke avoided extending toleration from competing conceptions of salvation to competing conceptions of the good. But, to Locke, those who believe in God, although rejecting the Law of Faith, are tolerable, because they acknowledge the divinely given Law of Nature and, thus, can meet at least minimally decent moral standards. This is why he did not exclude non-Christian believers from toleration, while he was intolerant of atheists and censured the immoral ideas held by Roman Catholics.

The "Reasonableness of Christianity" is Locke’s major book of theology. Before publishing this book in 1695, Locke always preferred to keep his religious ideas for himself. It was both his interest in some of the theological controversies of the day – particularly in the antinomian and deist controversies – and his effort to establish morality on convincing grounds that led him to turn to biblical theology. A markedly religious conception of life, however, conditioned his moral inquiry since the composition of the manuscript "Essays on the Law of Nature" (1664) and informed his reflections on morality in the "Second Treatise of Civil Government" and "An Essay concerning Human Understanding" (1690). In these works, Locke emphasized the necessity to believe in, and obey, a divine creator and legislator, and he described the moral law as God-given and, consequently, discoverable by natural reason (at least in principle) or through divine revelation. Nevertheless, Locke’s struggle to ground morality in theoretical foundations proved fruitless and eventually led him to turn, in the "Reasonableness," to a Scripture-based theological ethics in order to promote moral practice.

Rabbi Mosheh ben Naḥman (Nahmanides) was the originator of a remarkable legal theory that converted the traditional Judaic mode of belonging to the law into a conception of territorial jurisdiction. This monumental effort by the thirteenth-century jurist and thinker sought to revive a biblical idea that intimately associated the sovereignty of god with sacred geography, a radical suggestion that challenged the ethnic dimension of Jewish law and promoted its universalization within the Land of Israel as a land law. The accompanying analysis reveals a previously undiscussed aspect of Nahmanides’s antinomianism and contextualizes his legal theology in the conceptual vocabulary of Crusader propaganda and European legal reality.

Martin Luther’s adversarial conception of Jewish religious legalism ironically was a major factor informing the self-perception of modern European Jewish consciousness. This chapter uses the theme of religious legalism to address the process in which belonging to the law became a theological stance and subsequently a core component of religious identity. It argues that the characterization of Judaism as a law-based religion is a modern phenomenon that was propelled and accelerated by an ideological discourse that aimed to systematically differentiate between religious affiliations and identities and to map the fundamental differences between religions. The argumentation in this chapter is based on a historical survey of the interplay of law, religion, and identity in the late ancient Judeo-Hellenic world, the medieval Judeo-Arabic milieu, and post-Reformation Europe.

When Nicodemus approached Jesus under cover of night (John 3), he did so to keep from being seen with someone accused of taking liberties with Jewish tradition and morality. Both Nicodemus’s strategy and the associations he sought to avoid took on new forms in early modern Europe. Nicodemism was the practice of hiding one’s beliefs, usually to evade persecution. Libertinism included various forms of ethical indifference. Nicodemism and libertinism in the Reformation era are best understood in relation to the period’s profound cultural changes. A proliferation of new religious confessions in early modern Europe put many believers at odds with their communities. The resulting fluidity of religious identity meant that what one practiced did not always correspond with what one believed. More urgently, landing on the wrong side of belief could have disastrous, even deadly, consequences. The stakes were high at a time when religious pluralism was widely viewed as impurity that put a society under threat of divine judgment. Borders dividing mainstream from deviant religion could change quickly, so that a person found herself having to either prove she belonged or hide that she did not. Widespread persecution forced migration and exile upon those who could no longer worship according to their beliefs. Yet not everyone had the luxury of leaving for friendlier environs. Traditions of martyrdom and accusations of crypto-religion emerged within Catholic, Protestant, and radically reformed communities alike.