Vote Your Conscience, Revisited

“Vote your conscience” said a recent election message aimed at Catholic voters, and I’ve heard more than one objection. The number of believing Americans without a proper understanding of ethics and civic duty is, I’d venture to guess, devastatingly large, and the last thing these individuals need is affirmation in their (and the media’s) confusion. Among those who do have a sense of morality in public life, most are wrenched in multiple directions, struggling to perform a moral calculus that avoids any scent of one-issue proclivities. Conscience is a murky land, not the sort of place to make a firm decision.

As Luther observed, however, where else can one stand if not on his own conscience? The underlying imperative here (not lost on the Catholic Vote campaign) is to form one’s conscience, and form it well.

Thomas More, patron of statesmen and politicians, illuminates this call. “More believed he had to follow his conscience, but not because he thought he was smarter or holier than anyone else,” writes Archbishop Chaput in his new book, Render unto Caesar: Serving the Nation by Living Our Catholic Beliefs in Political Life . “More obeyed his conscience because he knew that he was obligated to obey God first. And knowing his personal sins and weaknesses, he also knew his duty to rightly form his conscience by anchoring it in the truth outside his own will.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about Thomas More lately, especially after seeing the Broadway revival of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons . At one especially memorable point, Bolt’s More gives an impassioned defense of his political conviction: “What matters to me is not whether it’s true or not but that I believe it to be true, or rather, not that I believe it, but that I believe it.”

A powerful statement, and yet, when the real Thomas More clung to his conscience, it was because his conscience clung to his heritage—a heritage his reason trusted to be true. “If there were no one but myself upon my side, and the whole Parliament upon the other,” court transcripts record him as saying, “I would be sore afraid . . . .[But] I am not bounden to change my conscience and conform it to the council of our realm against the general council of Christendom.”

Following one’s conscience is a duty that falls solely to the individual. Forming one’s conscience, however, takes place within a civilization, a culture, and a Church. It takes place here and now, but never alone; it looks back to the wisdom and tradition of the past, and ahead to the sure prospect of eternity. “I die the King’s good servant,” Bolt’s More asserts on his way to the gibbet, and there he stops. The martyr of history, however, continues: “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first .”