Do people possess a conscience, an internal moral compass alerting us about right and wrong? Or are our moral inclinations nothing more than personal preferences? The idea of individual moral responsibility is not unique to Christianity. All major world religions have their version of it. Hindus and Buddhists believe in highly individualised karma. One of the barriers against a Hindu or Buddhist becoming Christian is the implausibility, for them, that someone else can take the consequences of their actions. Muslims believe that all people must properly worship God according to his laws. This is consistent with the belief that all people have a genuine, if imperfect, internal moral guide, that is shaped by our human circumstances but at core has been instilled by the Creator (see Ps 19:1–6; Rom 1:18–20, 2:12–16; Rev 14:6–7). John Calvin saw conscience as an expression of the sensus divinitatis, the innate awareness of God’s existence and authority (Institutes, 1.3.1).
But the legitimacy of this kind of individual moral guide depends on the existence of an objective external reality to which an individual person’s conscience truly, if imperfectly, responds. Objective right and wrong depends on objective reality. If that kind of external reality doesn’t exist, neither does conscience, because moral claims would become nothing more than personal preferences.
Totalitarianism Crushes the Conscience
Alexander Solzhenityn’s 1974 essay Live Not By Lies (not Rod Dreher’s 2020 book of the same title!) was a plea to the Russian people to have courage in the face of the totalitarian communist Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn judged the USSR to be characterised by vranyo: intentional deception, unreality.
The courage he called his neighbours to was not courage expressed in revolution—he and his people had seen the fruit of
those conceited youths who sought, through terror, bloody uprising, and civil war, to [supposedly] make the country just and content.
Instead of peace, justice, and prosperity, revolutionaries created poverty, surveillance, censorship, and despair: the “vileness of the means begets the vileness of the result.” Nor was Solzhenitsyn urging his people to engage in public protests, for Soviet communism had systematically expunged all the institutions and agencies that underpin liberal democracy—independent media, protest marches” and free and fair elections to public office.
Solzhenitsyn called on his people to re-engage their personal conscientious convictions about truth and falsehood, and—this is the key point—to have the courage to enact them in public by refusing to participate in contradictions of what they knew to be genuine reality. To not “live by lies” has a double meaning: to not let your life be characterised by lies, and, derivatively, to not preserve your life by participation in lies.
The Social Benefits of Affirming the Conscience
Solzhenitsyn was confident that the passive refusal to affirm what we know to be untrue would have positive individual and social effects. Individually, it would affirm “spiritual independence” instead of “spiritual servility”. By spiritual, he did not mean something supernatural or religious, he meant a person’s internal fortitude. This assumes that a person possesses, and recognises that they possess, the ability to know reality well enough to discern truth and falsehood; a subjective connection with external reality, sufficiently independent that the individual is able to recognise when human authorities are wrong. Solzhenitsyn had a totalitarian communist government in mind, but the principle applies to other human authorities, including family, and ethnic or religious leaders. Solzhenitsyn understood the formative effects of both courage and cowardice. Habit reinforces itself over time, so one would be “made,” i.e. formed, “in favor of either truth or lies.”
These internal convictions about the existence and nature of reality, and the confidence to enact those convictions in public, are what has been understood as the conscience. This is different from mere personal preference. Although these internal convictions are necessarily private and subjective, they are seen to have a true connection with external, shared, objective reality. Therefore, they are (possibly imperfect) perceptions of public truths. Insofar as they are true, they are not just true for me, but true for everyone.
Solzhenitsyn expected the public nature of conscientious truth would expose the violence required to maintain the degree of deception inherent in Soviet communism, and through that revelation, dismantle the entire system:
For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence … When people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist.
Thus, the violence required to maintain such systemic lies becomes unnecessary.
Pleasure Dulls the Conscience; Conflict Hardens It
In the twenty-first-century West, threats to conscience are not so obvious. We can, as Neil Postman put it, “amuse ourselves to death”, by permitting the wealth, comfort, and security we enjoy to dull our conscientious pursuit of truth and justice in favour of enjoying life. And we can simultaneously retreat into tribalised echo chambers that reinforce our preconceptions, in part by mocking those who disagree with us. Both pleasure and tribalised conflict define us more by comfort and safety than by a shared pursuit of truth. They are both versions of living by lies.
The defence against them is therefore similar to the defence against the lies of a totalitarian state. We must again reckon with our consciences—with the inescapable conviction that certain things are real, and therefore universally true, regardless of how we feel about them. If they’re true for everyone, then the loving thing is to have the courage to seek them, live according to them, and call everyone to do the same, especially when conformity to truth is uncomfortable.
Social commentators have recently perceived a Western cultural ‘vibe shift’[1] against the aggressive atheism advanced by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and the associated ‘hard secularity’ that views belief in the supernatural as nonsense underserving of serious consideration. Mny people are no longer satisfied with the immanent frame of this worldview. There is a new interest in transcendentals: realities that are deep, wide, and long-lasting, that can guide not only an individual but a family, a society, even an entire civilisation. This is an encouraging desire to not live by lies.
Christ Alone Cleanses the Conscience
Conscientious, morally upright atheists (and agnostics) exist, even if the lack of a transcendent foundation for their morality renders it philosophically thin, and therefore unreliable, and unstable. For example, Jordan Peterson “is known for coming to the defense of religion for the values they impart upon us, Christianity in particular,” although his ethics are more Stoic than religious. He rightly recognises how different religions have for millennia shaped individual consciences in a transcendental frame. Religion provides a sense of personal responsibility before the final cosmic authority—God himself—which can adequately anchor an individual within a community. Religiously grounded morality builds families, societies, states, nations, and even entire civilisations.
This kind of non-Christian conscientious morality is both a benefit and a hindrance. It is a benefit of God’s common grace in providing substantial (if always imperfect) secular peace and harmony. This world may not be heaven, but it isn’t hell either. But that benefit will often (usually? nearly always?) hinder people from sensing their need for Christ.[2] Conscience alone will not guide someone to Christ.
Conscientious morality is good for this world, but is never good enough for the Consuming Fire before whom the angels cry “holy!”. Only
the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God [can] cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! (Heb 9:14)
The call to repentance and faith addresses people’s consciences, as they are informed by the gospel. True repentance flows from a deep conviction that I am not right with almighty God, the creator and judge; that I cannot through my own efforts repair that wrong; and that Christ alone has done everything required to reconcile me to God.
To not live by lies requires sufficient confidence in the truth to live by it. The biblical gospel provides us with confidence for our eternal destiny. Absolute certainty is for humans impossible, because the omniscience required for absolute certitude belongs to God alone. But God has provided enough information for us to be confident that the biblical Christ is true. The New Testament is not based on myths but eye and ear-witness testimony (Lk 1:1–4; Jn 20:30–31; 2 Pet 1:16–21; 1 Jn 1:1–4).
The repentance the gospel requires involves intellectual reflection. It can be proclaimed, argued for, and taught. But it cannot be reduced to the merely cerebral acceptance of religious dogma. Conscientious repentance affects people’s emotions and will often be expressed emotionally but cannot be genuinely manufactured through mere emotionalism. Conscientious repentance is authentic in the best sense of the word: it is a true response of one’s whole self to the “truth that is in Jesus” (Eph 4:21).
Moral inclinations are not fundamentally expressions of personal preferences or cultural fashions. They are expressions of a God-given and irrepressible desire for justice and righteousness. Solzhenitsyn called his people to have the courage to exercise their consciences under Soviet communism. We need to call people in our day out of mere worldly pleasure and the security of echo chambers, to live morally responsible lives in this world. We need to call them to have the courage and humility to recognise their need for Christ. to not live by the lie of independence from God, nor the lie that their religious devotion can satisfy him, but to live in Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life.
[1] Sean Monahan probably coined the term in a Substack article. He doesn’t refer to a specifically religious shift, just a change in the dynamics and direction of people’s interests and expectations. The two books which best describe the religious dimensions of this shift are Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites and Justin Brierley’s The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God with its associated podcast. The UK Bible Society has documented what they call a ‘quiet revival’ in the UK, albeit revealing earlier this year that they are now aware of flaws in the underlying data of their earlier report. See also Derek Rishmawy’s article from late last year.
[2] In fact, Christ’s free forgiveness offends the religiously upright because they it threatens the merit of their moral and devotion. Take the example of Jesus’ response to the notoriously ‘sinful’ woman wept over and anointed Jesus’ feet. People were amazed that he forgave her sins without requiring her to reform her life through some kind of penance beforehand (Lk 7:36–50). Paul had to write Romans 6 straight after his depiction of the glories of grace in chapter 5 to defend against the charge that such free forgiveness encourages sin.
