Dr. Amy Gais

“The Coerced Conscience is a formidable and incisive book, one offering fresh ideas for cultivating and protecting conscience against anxieties of conformity, insincerity, hypocrisy, and torment. Gais supplies inspired analyses of long-standing concerns in modern “The Coerced Conscience is a formidable and incisive book, one offering fresh ideas for cultivating and protecting conscience against anxieties of conformity, insincerity, hypocrisy, and torment. Gais supplies inspired analyses of long-standing concerns in modern and contemporary political theory, generating a powerful treatment for conscience and its demands.”

Lucas Swaine, Dartmouth College

“Freedom of conscience is a malleable, contested, and often misunderstood concept. By recovering the ideas of its most ardent defenders and most vocal critics of the early modern period, Amy Gais’ beautiful new book powerfully reminds us of how central freedom of conscience is for the capacities of citizenship, civic trust, and individual authenticity.”

Glory Liu, John Hopkins University

“In a time when claims of conscience constantly—and controversially—clash with the demands of social equality and the rule of law, this work could hardly be more timely. Gais’ compact, sensitive interpretations of Milton, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle illuminate conscience’s multifacted aspects and origins. Her deft contemporary arguments stress both the political and moral costs of overindulging conscience and the social and psychological costs of belittling it. Her arguments will unsettle almost everyone. An excellent book.”

Andrew Sabl, University of Toronto

The Coerced Conscience examines liberty of conscience, the freedom to live one’s life in accordance with the dictates of conscience, especially in religion. While this freedom has long enjoyed esteem in American politics, it has come under renewed scrutiny in contemporary debates on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights, reproductive health and abortion, and immigration and religious asylum. Commentators on both sides of the political aisle criticize liberty of conscience, condemning it as too minimal or too exclusionary, suggesting that liberty of conscience is ill-equipped to accommodate the deep religious pluralism which characterizes our modern world.

My book, however, argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theories of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. Many religious dissenters were not afforded liberty of conscience in early modernity but conformed to the state religion to avoid violent death. Their hypocritical conformity ranged from disingenuous participation in mandatory religious services to the equivocation of certain religious proclamations, such as refusing to bow one’s head during a prayer. Influential theorists of toleration, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of this conformity. 

For more information on my book, please see the Cambridge University Press website.

For example, Baruch Spinoza argues that hypocritical conformity erodes civic trust. In a world characterized by hypocritical conformity, individuals cannot trust that others’ outward expression reflects their genuine inner conviction, breeding mistrust among members of a political community and thwarting political collaborations. By attending to the significance of sincerity and the socially corrosive consequences of enforced conformity, hypocrisy emerges as an underlying impetus for Spinoza’s defense of liberty of conscience.

This project invites us to reflect on the psychological stakes of contemporary debates on liberty of conscience. Early modern theorists acknowledge that government implies some degree of infringements on conscience, but they also argue that more meaningful violations of conscience create their own set of problems. While attending to the proprieties and stakes of historical comparison, I argue that we should consult early modern intuitions about what it means to be free and how to negotiate the delicate balancing act between conscience and law.

I began this book during graduate school at Yale University, where I won the Robert C. Wood Prize and was a finalist for the American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowship. I completed this book during an Andrew J. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.

This book serves as the backdrop for several articles on hypocrisy and conformity both published and in progress. My article based on this research, “The Politics of Hypocrisy: Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle on Hypocritical Conformity,” was published by Political Theory. You can access the article here. This article situates influential early modern figures in overlooked debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity (i.e. the outward profession of a religion one does not believe in or a denial of a religion that one does), to show that early modern toleration was shaped by concerns with the social and psychological repercussions of religious dissimulation.

Abstract: Contemporary political theory has increasingly attended to the inevitability, and even advantage, of hypocrisy in liberal democratic politics, but less consideration has been given to the social and psychological repercussions of this ubiquitous phenomenon. This article recovers Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle’s critiques of hypocritical conformity to demonstrate that their influential theories of toleration and freedom were shaped considerably by concerns with enforced conformity. Reframing Spinoza and Bayle as theorists of hypocrisy, moreover, suggests that recent redemptive accounts of hypocrisy in political theory overlook deeper and arguably more discerning anxieties about a politics characterized by hypocrisy, specifically the deleterious effects of social mistrust and psychological distress.

Another article of mine on Thomas Hobbes and toleration, “Thomas Hobbes and ‘Gently Instilled’ Conscience” was recently published by History of European Ideas. You can access the article here.

Abstract: This article engages with a key interpretive puzzle in Hobbes’s political thought—his seemingly contradictory view of liberty of conscience—and argues that Hobbes theorizes civic education as a powerful tool to confront and refashion prevailing views of conscience in early modernity. While influential accounts have recovered more ‘tolerant’ arguments in Hobbes’s political thought, recent revisionist accounts have argued that Hobbes does not merely advocate for the compulsion of outward conformity but also subjects’ inward persuasion. Yet this nuanced attention to the sovereign’s role in cultivating obedient, peaceful subjects does not attend fully to his shaping of the consciences of his subjects. Situating Hobbes in the early modern discourse on casuistry, as well as political debates on educational reform, reveals that the sovereign can and should try to shape the consciences of subjects, specifically returning to a view of conscience as a kind of “knowing with” others. Reframing Hobbes’s project of civic education as strategy to “gently instill” the consciences of subjects does not merely shed light on the interpretive puzzle of Hobbes’s ambivalence toward toleration but also draws attention to one of the most powerful and arguably underappreciated ways to overcome the threat of conscience to sovereignty.