Rev. Dr. James Anderson, Carl W. McMurray Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary Charlotte, posted a helpful engagement at the intersection of Christianity and natural rights on X this week. “If natural rights are bestowed by God,” wrote Anderson, “then there cannot be a natural right to do what is forbidden by God’s moral law. God is not at odds with God.” Seems non-controversial enough, but in the United States our understanding of natural rights is ostensibly received less from the Protestant and Reformed—or Anglican, for that matter—tradition and more from John Locke. But wait, the committed Lockean, might object: do we not believe that we have natural right to freedom of conscience? or to fulfill our desire for happiness ala Jefferson? And should not our government, predicated on natural rights, codify that same understanding? “There is an important difference, Anderson reminds us, “between ‘You have the natural right to do X’ and ‘You have the natural right not to be prevented by the government, fellow citizens, etc., from doing X.’” That the American republic might not prevent you doing something does not, therefore, mean you have a natural right to do that same thing.

            Anglicans throughout history have shared Reformed reservations regarding certain articulations of natural rights and the extent to which Locke baptized and conflated certain so-called conscience rights with natural rights. Ideas like liberty of conscience and the right of conscience, particularly as they were rendered after the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, were roundly rejected by Church of England and Episcopal clerical intellectuals. One group who’s interactions with natural rights and rights of conscience theory has been understudied is the Tractarians. Historians have given the lion’s share of their research to the Oxford Movement’s attempts to reestablish ritual and sacrament, but questions of conscience were on the minds of divines like E.B. Pusey. For Pusey, all consciences were bound by God’s hatred of that which is evil, and the reality that humans could know god and know evil.

Now for the present God does not shew Himself so much without as within. His works indeed tell of Him, and proclaim His power; still they are but His handywork, not Himself. Those who do not know Him otherwise see but little of Him in them. They talk of vast power, every where diffused, and of infinite and yet most minute intelligence, but they scarce think of His Holy Will, His all-wise Election, His hatred of evil, His everlasting Love, His marvellous government.

Knowledge of God was therefore liberating, only is as much as humans could discover the moral character of God, and follow his commands. Since God did not manifest himself to Christians in the same ways he did Ancient Israel, his court, as it was, established itself in the human conscience and not in a physical temple or palace. God, Pusey wrote:

must be known within if we would really know Him. Sought far and wide, looked for in the fire, felt for in the earthquake, listened for in the mighty wind, there at last the devout soul finds Him, speaking with gentle but awful utterance-a still small voice-in the depth of its own being. There it is that He makes things known to us as they truly are, and there that we must deal with Him for life or death. There He offers to be with us, and we welcome or scorn. His Presence. There it is, therefore, that we must look, if we would see what sin is. Conscience there is His court, and, if we listen, there His Law is declared. Even there, indeed, we cannot so find Him as actually to fasten even the eyes of the mind upon His very substance. But there we meet Him unseen in such wise that it is Himself, and not any mere image or shadow, to Whom we bow down our will, and to Whom we uplift our love and thankfulness.

Pusey, in sum, tells us that the conscience is fundamentally bound by God’s law. And therefore freedom of conscience, to a considerable degree, is a metaphysical impossibility for the Christian.