Freedom of conscience: why it matters and why it is under threat
Ahead of Easter, and as a taster for this year's Living Freedom Summer School, watch this lecture by Frank Furedi from our 2023 event.
As well as debating up-to-the-minute controversies, Living Freedom summer school offers opportunities each year to take a step back from day-to-day concerns to explore the emergence and evolution of ideas that have proved central to shaping our understanding of freedom.
Ahead of Easter weekend, we are featuring one of the highlights from our YouTube archive of summer school talks. Sociologist and social commentator Frank Furedi delves into the meaning of freedom of conscience, exploring how this vital concept emerged and has evolved, and why it remains so important.
Many will recognise freedom of conscience as integral to ensuring every individual’s ability to act on their religious or faith-based beliefs. Just last week, a decision by the Finnish Supreme Court to convict Päivi Räsänen – a parliamentarian and former minister of the interior – for expressing her Christian views on homosexuality shows how fragile conscience-based freedoms have become.
Whether Christian street-preachers, controversies over praying in the vicinity of abortion services providers or public prayer gatherings such as the recent Open Iftar in Trafalgar Square, the extent to which expressing religious beliefs in public should be tolerated is much debated in many different contexts.
As this lecture explains, however, questions of conscience go far beyond the issue of expressing religious beliefs. For centuries, in religious and secular times alike, societies have wrestled with conflicts between inner life and external authority - and dilemmas as to how we should live in accordance with our inner-most thoughts and beliefs.
In recent decades, as boundaries between personal and political spheres have eroded, new threats to conscience-based freedoms have emerged. Public authorities increasingly colonise internal life, extinguishing the space for individuals to exercise moral reasoning and make judgements based on deeply held moral beliefs.
Ultimately, as this lecture argues, ‘tolerance creates the conditions for the free expressions of opinions, beliefs and behaviours associated with the exercise of individual conscience’. Today, however, debate rages over the extent to which we should tolerate what many judge to be intolerant ideas.
Along with many other tricky dilemmas, this is a topic that will be central to this year’s summer school, on 9-11 July in central London. So do make sure and apply now.
LIVING FREEDOM SUMMER SCHOOL 2026
Date: 9 - 11 July
Location: Westminster, London
Eligibility Criteria: open to anyone aged 18 to 30
Programme, information and to apply: click here.