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.

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.

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