A documentary pursues “reality” while fiction’s goal is the “truth” .
A documentary accumulates facts and let’s them tell the story,
While a work of fiction creates an imaginary world.
We filmmakers hide truths within these imaginary worlds.
– Shoichiro Sasaki, Film director: “What Is a Story?”
In Liberty of Conscience, Martha Nussbaum presents her view of the constitutional protection of religion based on the writings of Roger Williams, an early American theologian who left the Massachusetts colony and founded what would become Rhode Island. By tracing a thread from Williams through the drafting of the constitution and Supreme Court decisions, she presents a coherent view of separation of church and state.
I approach these questions as a scholar of constitutional law, but also, and more fundamentally, as a philosopher. Philosophical ideas were important to the Founding, and thinking about some of the philosophical texts that formed its backdrop helps to clarify the underlying issues. I take an independent interest in these philosophical ideas as good ideas to think with, not just ideas that had a certain historical and political influence. But I will also be arguing that the constitutional tradition is best read as embodying at least some of these ideas, in some form.
-Martha Nussbaum
Philosopher/Scholar of Constitutional Law
“Liberty of Conscience”
A Historical Approach to Philosophy?
This historical approach to philosophy uses story understand where we are now. We seek pattern and coherence in the world- it’s the way people are. You might think that history is fixed and unchangable. But if history is viewed as the story we tell to explain what we see now, it makes sense that history will change as the world now changes or as the motivations and knowledge of the storyteller changes.
While the founders didn’t explicitly follow the ideas of Roger Williams, they were familiar with them. As it turns out, it’s useful to see his idea of “Liberty of Conscience” providing the basis for the First Amendment’s two clauses, the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause. As I learned, it’s not “separation of church and state”; that’s a much more modern concept and one that probably reflects the fact that lack of religion has grown so much in recent decades. In Nussbaum’s view, the First Amendment is aimed at preventing any citizens from being favored, ensuring that all citizens could follow their own way in matters of conscience. And that might include any truth seeking endeavor, whether it involves the God, many gods, or no god at all.
Nussbaum writes further:
People aren’t always content to live with others on terms of mutual respect. So the story of the tradition is also a story of the attacks upon it, as different groups jockey for superiority. What has kept the tradition alive and healthy is continual vigilance against these attacks, which in each new era take a different concrete form.
If deciding better depends primarily on improving the brain’s mapping of the world, then we need the freedom to study and act according to religion and more broadly conscience, philosophy.