A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF BRITISH CONSCIENCE

Historically, freedom of conscience has been included in English law as part of a pragmatic compromise, balancing claims of productive citizenship with a stress on the importance of inner conviction. In seventeenth-century England, for example, conscience was not simply a category of religious faith, but was also part of a wider debate about civic participation. The Toleration Act of 1689 established the right of Protestant dissenters to conscientiously object to taking a religious oath. The Act was based on the assumption that Puritans wanted to be active citizens, particularly through lending money to the king, and therefore for the crown to exclude them was financially counterproductive (Wyckes Reference Wyckes1994). Crucially, the Act gave no rights to non-Protestant confessions. Two centuries after, in the late 1800s, a conscience clause was used to mediate tensions over mandatory vaccination (Durbach Reference Durbach2001). The anti-vaccination movement based its campaign for exemption on the claim that their members were rational and responsible citizens. Exemption was eventually allowed for practical reasons, since it was proving difficult to force parents to allow their children to be vaccinated, and fines did not seem to be curbing opposition. Notably, the nature and content of conscience were not defined in law.

The conscience clause in the law of military conscription was similarly a product of compromise. Britain has historically avoided compulsory military service. The British government only introduced conscription for the first time in 1916, much later than most European states. For its advocates in Britain, an army based on volunteers was preferable to one based on conscription, due to the perceived greater moral virtue of its soldiers. A year into the First World War, Member of Parliament G. N. Barnes argued, for example, “I refuse to believe that volunteerism is going to fail us, because to believe that would be almost tantamount to believing in the moral bankruptcy of the nation.”Footnote ⁵ By 1916, though, voluntary recruitment was proving an inefficient system for recruiting the necessary manpower needed for the armed forces. However, when conscription was first proposed, trade unions and members of the Liberal party objected to the potential for forced labor. Exemptions for COs were created in order to prevent a parliamentary revolt over the bill (Rae Reference Rae1970: 26). To gain support from socialists and atheist parliamentarians, the Military Service Act of 1916 also did not set out the grounds for conscientious objection, which formally could include both political and religious claims. The Act simply stated that exemption could be granted “on the ground of a conscientious objection to the undertaking of combatant service.”Footnote ⁶ Importantly, Ireland and the colonies, as well as all women, were exempted from military service. Conscription, and therefore conscientious objection, was limited to those who were assumed to be the most committed citizens. At its heart, conscription was not simply a method of military recruitment, but was also treated as a fundamentally moral issue to do with the obligations and loyalties of citizens.

Tribunals were set up in order to make decisions over the precise nature of the exemption, which could be absolute, conditional, or refused. In practice, absolute exemption on grounds of conscience was relatively rare. The tribunals, which also heard cases for medical exemption, contained army officers and local dignitaries, who saw their principle job as recruiting for the military. During the First World War, sixteen thousand people appeared before the tribunals seeking exemption on the grounds of conscience (Rae Reference Rae1970). Of these, over six thousand were arrested after their applications were denied and they refused military service.

Following the reintroduction of conscription in 1939, the conscience clause was retained. Many leading COs from the First World War were now senior politicians, with at least three serving in the wartime government, including Home Secretary Herbert Morrison.Footnote ⁷ Taking lessons from the First World War, the British government and military were reluctant to force people who did not want to fight to join up. As Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain put it, “In the Great War … I think we found that it was both useless and an exasperating waste of time and effort to attempt to force such people to act in a manner which is contrary to their principles.”Footnote ⁸ Importantly, the creators of the conscience clause saw it as proof of British commitment to freedom. Lord Beveridge declared in a radio broadcast, “Admission of the right of conscientious objection to serve in war is the extreme case of British freedom. Nor have I any doubt that it makes Britain stronger in war rather than weaker” (Hayes Reference Hayes1949: 6). The Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang similarly argued, “At a time when we are claiming … that freedom of conscience must everywhere be honoured, it obviously is our duty to show that we fully support it.” The protection of conscience was claimed as a key mark of British difference from the totalitarian states of mainland Europe.

As during the First World War, the tribunals could grant full exemption, or conditional exemption, or dismiss the application. Conditional exemption was usually granted on the grounds that the applicant was willing to do some specific work of “national importance.” In 1941, for the first time, women, too, were made liable for conscription to specific auxiliary units. Women could also opt to take up civil defense or industrial work, and were never obliged to carry arms. Married women or women with children under the age of fourteen were exempt altogether.

THE WHO, WHAT, AND WHY OF CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION

Those who applied for exemption did not represent all of those who objected to war. There were other ways of avoiding military service, such as working in a reserved profession, or simply going AWOL. Many people emigrated, sought medical exemption, or went on the run. Angus Calder contends that in 1943 alone over three hundred thousand people were discharged on medical grounds (Reference Calder1993: 336). Estimates put the numbers who went AWOL over the course of the war at more than one hundred thousand (Glass Reference Glass2013). It is likely that at least some of these people were motivated, in part, by an objection to combatant duties. As such, it is also probable that only a small minority of those with a political or moral objection to war sought registration as COs. Registration as a conscientious objector therefore represented a very particular attempt to give a public presence to claims of conscience.

The numbers of people applying for military exemption on grounds of conscience ranged from 2.2 percent of those conscripted in October 1939, to 0.57 percent by mid-1940 (Barker Reference Barker1982). Stereotypically, COs came from the intellectual middle classes, but in practice they ranged from skilled laborers to white-collar workers.Footnote ⁹ Among those who sought registration, Quakers and Methodists were particularly prominent, but there were also members of the Church of England and Catholics, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses, Christadelphians, and others, including socialists and secular humanitarians (Ceadel Reference Ceadel1980). The vast majority of applicants claimed a religious or a mixture of religious and moral motivations for the objection.Footnote ¹⁰

To say that someone had a pacifist conscience says, on its own, very little. To take a negative stand against war is not necessarily to take a stand for anything in particular. During the First World War, the socialist left had been the leading voice among conscientious objectors (ibid.). Resentment of the generals and politicians who sent men to their slaughter combined with economic misery and recession to make class-based opposition to war particularly compelling. However, the seemingly natural alliance between pacifism and socialism would not last. By the late 1930s, the civil war in Spain and the increasing threat of fascism forced many socialists to feel they had no choice but to support war against Germany. As Fenner Brockway, an Independent Labour Party MP who had been imprisoned in the First World War for his opposition to conscription put it: “I was in all my nature opposed to war.… But I saw that Hitler and Nazism had been mainly responsible for bringing the war and I could not contemplate their victory.… I could no longer justify pacifism when there was a fascist threat” (Reference Brockway1977: 135). By the start of the Second World War, socialist opposition to military service was highly equivocal.

Many pacifists sought to justify their position through a mixture of Christian doctrine and humanistic morality. For Christian pacifists, Christianity was essentially a religion of nonviolence. For example Jesse Hillman, an Anglican railway clerk from South London who became a vicar, later recalled that before the war, “It seemed to me it was quite illogical to try and follow the example of Christ and use the methods of modern warfare.”Footnote ¹¹ Similarly, William Elliot, the son of a train driver from Surrey who, like Hillman, later became a vicar, believed, “The whole life and example of Christ's teaching indicates quite clearly to us that to take another life would be incompatible with being a follower of our Lord.”Footnote ¹² Elliot felt that just as Jesus had refused to lead a war of rebellion against the Romans, twentieth-century Christians should refuse to take up arms. Christian pacifists were often adamant that pacifism was the only way of being a true Christian.

Yet support for pacifism was far from being a self-evident Christian position. The Church of England and the Anglo-Catholic hierarchy had long supported the British military. William Temple, who would go on to be Archbishop of Canterbury, described pacifism as a “heresy.”Footnote ¹³ Elsewhere, Baptists spent four years deliberating before coming down on the non-pacifist side. Methodists decided not to take a formal position. There were of course anti-war groups within British Christianity, but these were usually small and inward-looking sects such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Christadelphians, and Plymouth Brethren. Furthermore, Jehovah's Witnesses are not pacifist in the narrow sense of the word—they do not object to fighting in all wars, only ungodly ones. The Quakers are probably the group most associated in the popular imagination with Christian pacifism, but during the First World War over a third of Quaker men of eligible age served in the military in some way (Ceadel Reference Ceadel2003: 23). Indeed, the historian of British pacifism Martin Ceadel has contended that it was only after that war that Quaker pacifism became a relatively settled and absolute position (ibid.).

It is important to note here that many COs saw themselves as loyal British citizens. Although pacifists could have a commitment to brotherly love or class solidarity that stretched across national boundaries, they were also often keen to stress their patriotism. The aforementioned Roy Ridgway wrote in his diary, “The love of one's country is inherent in everyone.”Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, many COs saw the scope for pacifist society as most suited to what they understood as a particularly British tolerant sensibility. John Hunt would later recall that he thought “there must be something right with a country who would allow people to take up this stand, because I know nowhere else in the world where it would have happened in this way.”Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, C. H. Smith wrote to a friend shortly before he appeared before a tribunal, “You know this is a remarkable country—so much so, that it is not easy to refuse the services they demand.”Footnote ¹⁶ Conscience was seen by many COs as part of their patriotic duty.

When the fighting started in 1939, public hostility towards COs was not nearly as intense as it had been during the First World War. In 1916–1918, those who refused to fight were often detained, beaten, harassed, and in a few cases shot. The conscientious objector was seen as the antithesis of the heroic British soldier: selfish, cowardly, indolent, and degenerate (Bibbings Reference Bibbings2010). Tribunal judges, many of whom were military officers, would insult those who came before them, and routinely refuse any dispensation. Objectors were consistently sent to jail, released, and then detained once more if they refused to fight. Even after the war ended, many conscientious objectors remained imprisoned. Some went on hunger strike, and over 190 were eventually force-fed. Those put under military detention were disenfranchised for five years.

In contrast, during the Second World War many COs commented on the general “tolerance” shown to them by the wider population. COs recall that people would tell them they disagreed with their stance, but respected their position from principle. John Hall-Williams, a CO from a middle-class Welsh-speaking family from South Wales, later remembered being “treated with courtesy and respect.”Footnote ¹⁷ Similarly, Ray Bellchambers, a CO from Buckingham who worked as a farm laborer during the war, recalled that amongst his colleagues “generally speaking there was a lot of tolerance. There were a few who were very bitter and sarcastic about it, but generally that did not make too much difference.”Footnote ¹⁸ Bernard Hicken, a South Yorkshire Methodist who volunteered to undertake medical trials, recalled, “I did not have unpleasantness from people, let me say that people were very tolerant.”Footnote ¹⁹ A poll taken in February 1940 claimed that 40 percent of respondents did not know what they thought of COs, and more than 25 percent said they were “tolerantly disposed” toward them.Footnote ²⁰ In April of that year only 14 percent thought it was a bad thing for pacifists to be allowed to publicly express their opinions.Footnote ²¹

The change in attitude towards COs has to be understood, in part, against the background of the different “moral economy of sacrifice” during the Second World War (Allport Reference Allport2010). Whereas during the previous war the home front remained relatively unscathed, during World War II those who stayed at home faced hardships, with air raids and rationing causing real privations. One result was that the sacrifices of those serving in the armed forces were not as heavily privileged over those of the civilian population. Whereas the violence on the home front could have added pressure on COs to take up arms to protect their country, it also created spaces for them to take up alternative forms of service for the country. This moral economy of sacrifice must also be placed in the context of new forms of masculinity. As the historian Sonya Rose has shown, by the late 1930s male heroism was not associated only with individual acts of spectacular bravery, but was also culturally understood to lie in the ordinary acts of unexceptional people (Reference Rose2003). For Rose, interwar British culture brought an emphasis on a form of “tempered masculinity” (ibid.: 154); British COs could potentially participate in “tempered masculine virtues” without taking up arms.

Despite their claims to patriotism and the general sense of tolerance, COs could still face serious criticism, at work, in public, or even from family and friends. George Orwell was amongst their most prominent critics, famously claiming, “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.… If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other…” (Reference Orwell1942). For Orwell, pacifists were naïve at best, dangerous at worst. Attacks on COs were not limited to harsh words, and direct pressure was occasionally applied. Over one thousand COs were sent to prison after their applications for exemption were rejected, and there were isolated incidents of violence. Most often criticism and pressure took the form of simple name-calling, and some COs sensed that people were talking behind their backs.

Against a background of competing loyalties and limited but consistent public criticism, the decision as to whether to apply for exemption on the grounds of conscience could be difficult. Pacifists were caught in a web of moral obligations to family, friends, colleagues, and country. The claims of conscience were rarely, if ever, straightforward. Ridgway only applied for exemption after a period of intense personal reflection and preparation. One month into the Second World War he began to have doubts over his convictions. He wrote in his diary, “Some of the remarks that slip from me in conversation are not the words of a pacifist.… I find myself saying things I ought not to say.”Footnote ²² He was also being teased by his father, and was worried about his mother's reaction. At work Ridgway was reprimanded by his boss and was concerned that everyone thought he was a coward. He later recalled, “My heart said no and my head said yes, I was confused about it.”Footnote ²³ Similarly, prior to his decision to register for exemption, Alexander Bryan, from a Yorkshire Methodist family, was studying to be a teacher in Sheffield at the start of the war and remembers being filled with “despair,” since his “mind was in turmoil,” and he began to “doubt the path” he had chosen was the right one. As his friends criticized him or avoided him completely, Bryan was “assailed periodically with doubts about the course” he was taking. Ken Shaw, from the South London suburbs, who had a brother in the air force and a father who thought that everyone should “do their bit,” also doubted whether, if given the choice between serving in the army and being shot, he would have the courage to refuse. He described himself as a “not very brave person.”Footnote ²⁴

Conscience has often been seen historically as the ground of an authentic moral personhood. Martin Luther, for example, is famously reported to have said, “Here I stand. I can do no other.” This is an image of conscience that is resolute and individual. Later scholars have understood conscience as being at the center of a modern sense of self. For Foucault, for example, the subject is “tied to his own identity by a conscience” (Reference Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow1983, 212). Charles Taylor has argued that conscience is comprehended as the most intimate and essential aspect of a person (Reference Taylor1992a). In this context, conscientious objection has been described as an “unambiguous expression of morality. A clear-cut example of moral convictions” (Levi Reference Levi1997: 199). For British COs, however, claims of conscience did not simply create a profound and clear sense of themselves, standing against the rest of the world. Instead, for those asking for military exemption, claims of conscience could produce an experience of estrangement and confusion about their own convictions and beliefs. It is in this context of hesitations about their own conscience that COs had to try to persuade others that they were genuine.

CLAIMING EXEMPTION

The application for exemption from military service was a short document, often no more than a page long. The forms were mostly written in a conventional manner, stating that the applicant was a “conscientious objector” and then setting out very briefly the grounds for this exemption. Charles Alexander of Peterborough, for example, asserted, “Being a true lover of the Lord Jesus Christ … I could not with a clear conscience take life.”Footnote ²⁵ Edwin Green wrote, “I cannot reconcile the taking of life with the principles which one desires to live up to. A Christian should be marked by meekness, kindness and love.” F. Morel, from East London, stated that as “a member of the working class it has been my firm conviction for the past ten years that war does not solve any of the difficulties of the countries of the world, but only increases the poverty, degradation and misery of the working class.”Footnote ²⁶

In the written application, conscience was often presented as stemming from a profound individual moral sense, despite the doubts than some COs might have had about their own convictions. For Jesse Hillman, “conscience was something that was so precious” and he had no choice but to follow his conscience where it “led” him.Footnote ²⁷ Gwendolene Knight, a Quaker pacifist who worked as a volunteer in an ambulance unit, argued, “It does not matter whether pacifism is a success or not, that's not our business…. But if it is right then that's what you've got to do.”Footnote ²⁸ Conscience was often portrayed as something that the applicants could not control. Alexander Bryan, for example, said he felt compelled to register for exemption by the “promptings of conscience,” and that as a CO he had “the right to obey the dictates of my conscience.”Footnote ²⁹ For F. Corsellis, an Anglican CO, his conscience was a product of the “commands of the Sermon on the Mount.” One written statement after another presented conscience was not a choice but a duty.

Making a written claim to conscience was one thing, but preparing to look genuine in person before the tribunal was another. There was an awareness amongst COs that the questions asked by the tribunal members were relatively predictable and could therefore be prepared for. The Central Board for Conscientious Objectors (CBCO), a coalition of pacifist organizations, was the most significant source of information.Footnote ³⁰ A volunteer for the CBCO had advised Ridgway on the best way to present his case, and suggested that he not seek unconditional exemption since he would be less likely to win that.Footnote ³¹ The CBCO also often arranged mock tribunals. Ridgway had been worried about how he might perform at the tribunal, and jumped at the chance to rehearse his case.Footnote ³² The mock judges asked him why he was willing to eat food imported by sailors who were risking their lives, why he paid taxes when those taxes were spent on weapons, and what he would do if Nazi troops occupied Britain. Ridgway became tongue tied and could not get his words out. After the hearing the mock judges all agreed that they found no one very convincing.

The CBCO tried to avoid telling people what to say before the tribunal, and instead concentrated on helping them think through their own case. One pamphlet advised that it was not designed to “help you to outwit the Tribunals, and get a better exemption than you deserve.”Footnote ³³ Alan Staley, a Methodist who ran a mock tribunal, would later recall that they were very helpful “particularly when the person who was always most confident of himself had his statement torn to pieces.”Footnote ³⁴ Staley insisted, though, that the mock tribunals “never told you what to say. They just picked holes in what you were going to say so that you could see your own weakness.”Footnote ³⁵

There was a pervasive feeling amongst COs that too much preparation for a tribunal could be counterproductive. The CBCO advised applicants to look spontaneous. One handbook suggested applicants “talk of your conscience without self-consciousness.”Footnote ³⁶ Not preparing too much was an ethical as well as a practical issue. Some applicants were concerned that if they presented too polished a case and were then exempted, they would be gaining release on the basis not of their own beliefs but rather its surface presentation. Bryan Alexander, a Quaker from Leeds, worried that if he had been granted complete exemption it would have been due to the skills of his advisors rather than his own “merits.”Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, Tony Parker, a socialist pacifist from Manchester, thought preparing too much would be “cheating in a way.”Footnote ³⁸ COs tried to become experts in presenting a form of conscience that did not appear prompted or trained.

TRIBUNALS OF CONSCIENCE

Roy Ridgway appeared before the tribunal in West London on 17 July 1940. He wrote in his diary that he thought the judges were already convinced that everyone who came before them was a “shirker.”Footnote ³⁹ In the event, his case lasted no more than ten minutes. He was very nervous and later that day worried that he “did not express myself clearly.” He had declared that all the early Christians were pacifists, but when pressed for their names could not remember any. He was also asked to explain what he meant by nonviolent resistance, and he told the judge that in the event of a German invasion he would refuse to cooperate. One of the judges asked whether he meant that, for example, everyone should refuse to mend broken drains, even if people were dying of typhoid? Before Ridgway could answer, another judge asked a further question about his vegetarianism and whether he wore leather boots. He replied that it was impossible to be completely consistent in anything. Judge Hargreaves, the senior member of the tribunal declared, “Non-violence is a joke.” Following a brief conferral amongst the judges, Ridgway was ordered to undertake noncombatant duties. In the following months, he would be sent to prison for refusing the tribunal's direction, before eventually agreeing to take up ambulance work. Forty years later, he looked back on his experience and concluded that he had been unable to convince the tribunal because his attitude had been a “little superior.”Footnote ⁴⁰ He recalled trying to persuade the judges in their “own terms” rather than “expressing his own ‘feelings.’”

The tribunal usually consisted of a judge, a trade union official, and more often than not an academic.Footnote ⁴¹ Tribunal hearings would routinely begin with the members reading the typed statement of the applicant. The applicant would then be asked if he wanted to add anything to his statement or submit other forms of evidence, either in the shape of witnesses or letters, before being questioned on the basis of their objection.

The tribunals seemed constantly suspicious that people were seeking exemption from military service out of cowardice or laziness. As one judge put it, the tribunal had to ask questions “to plumb the depth of an applicant's convictions, and to see that conscience is not made a cloak” (Hayes Reference Hayes1949: 42). Another judge is reported to have said, “Many of the Conscientious Objectors really mean that they are afraid of being killed themselves when they say they do not want to kill other people.”Footnote ⁴² For G. C. Field, a philosopher at Bristol University who sat on the Southwest Tribunal, judging the sincerity of a conscientious objector involved an evaluation of the “temperamental and emotional factors which make up his character” (Reference Field1945: 106). He “felt a suspicion of various motives at work … [such as] dislike of being disturbed in their accustomed way of life, dislike of being under discipline” (ibid.: 107). Some judges openly said they thought many applicants were not being entirely honest.

The questions asked by the tribunal would commonly try to tease out the consistency of the objection to violence. The experience of Alexander Bryan, a student from Sheffield, was typical.Footnote ⁴³ In the spring of 1940, Bryan appeared before a tribunal in Leeds, and was asked how long he had been attending Quaker meetings. He replied that he had only been going for a matter of months, and had been brought up in a Methodist family. Another tribunal member asked him whether the university was maintained by public funds, and what he thought about the fact that much of this money was produced through the manufacture of munitions. After a brief conferral, the chair of the tribunal declared that Bryan was to be removed without qualification from the register. A few days later, he received a letter informing him, “We have come to the conclusion that this is not a genuine case…. He started to attend the Friends' meetings immediately after the outbreak of the war. He appears to us to illustrate the type of objector who says ‘I will not serve.’”

Common questions at the tribunal included: “What sacrifices have you made for your principles?” “What would you do if Hitler landed in England today?” “Aren't you forgetting your neighbor in ‘loving your enemies?’” “Would you use an air-raid shelter?” “If you object to taking life are you a vegetarian?” “Don't you want to shorten the war by bringing it to a speedy conclusion?”Footnote ⁴⁴ Many questions sought to examine the extent to which a CO would help another British citizen in the face of Nazi aggression. Perhaps the most common theme in questioning concerned what an applicant would do if their wife, sister, or daughter was being attacked.Footnote ⁴⁵

Those applicants who were more articulate were often perceived by others to be more successful before the tribunal. Mervyn Taggart, a privately educated London Quaker, recalled, “People who had not debated and discussed and thought a lot about this, people with a certain educational background, were at a very great disadvantage in tribunals.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Ronald Mallone, a Christian pacifist and socialist who was training to be a teacher, thought that his application had been successful because he had “taken care. I was a very vocal person and used to speaking in public.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Another observer commented, “An applicant who knows all the answers and can express themselves clearly stands more chance than one who may be just as sincere but cannot express himself so well.”Footnote ⁴⁸

It was possible to be too articulate, and Judges widely objected to the use of “jargon and cliché.”Footnote ⁴⁹ One complained to the Birmingham Post of “organized” preparation, and said that it made their job harder to “break through the veneer and varnish of artifice.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Judge Field alleged that the “regularity with which the arguments, and even the phraseology, of the different groups are repeated by one applicant after another suggests … a ready-made set of ideas taken from other people, rather than an individual and independent examination of the problem” (Reference Field1945: 6). There was a very fine line between the need to be articulate and the need to avoid sounding rhetorical and deliberate.

Tone could be as important as content to presenting a persuasive claim. COs were often advised to be polite and courteous, and above all not to appear quarrelsome. Roy Ridgway's brother Derrick had registered as a conscientious objector in 1940.Footnote ⁵¹ When he appeared before the tribunal, the judge told him to take his hands out of his pockets.Footnote ⁵² Derrick responded angrily that the tribunal was a “farce.” The judge told him that he was a “very bad mannered man.” Derrick was refused exemption and told that he was “utterly insincere” and had “no conscience in the matter at all.”Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, C. Worrall, a socialist pacifist from Manchester, was derided for “intellectual vanity” by a judge after he had argued back.Footnote ⁵⁴ COs supporters advised them, “Histrionics will do you no good.”Footnote ⁵⁵ One group of Christian pacifists told COs, “It is important to be most courteous … do not attempt to make debating points.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Among those who had the most difficulty before the tribunals were political objectors, who were predominantly socialists. Judges often accused them of picking and choosing the wars they wanted to fight. One frequent observer of the tribunal commented that socialist objectors “were not well liked.”Footnote ⁵⁷ “The only genuine and logical conscientious objection on political grounds,” argued Judge Field, “would be that of a convinced Fascist” (Reference Field1945: 15). The Ministry of Labour went so far as to appeal any case where a political objector was granted unconditional exemption.Footnote ⁵⁸ A CBCO observer at one tribunal wrote, “The tribunal will not accept political objectors … and the only objectors who will be recognized are those who base their objections on religious grounds.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Many political objectors could also articulate their claims in explicitly religious terms, and often did so.

Seemingly most persuasive to the tribunals was evidence of past, formal, and long-term affiliation with a pacifist group, and a pacifist church in particular. One judge in northwest England explained, “We have found that the most important factor to consider is the religious or ethical background behind the objection.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Judge Burgis, who had taken sick leave after being attacked by an applicant, gave a speech on his return to work in which he claimed, “We can only ascertain whether there is a genuine conscience and a deep conviction by getting to understand the background of the lives of each of those who come before us…” (Barker Reference Barker1982: 17). C. Worrall, a hospital administrator from Manchester, remembered that it “became obvious to me, that the tribunal members tended to find it more understandable that an applicant might have a conscientious objection to military service if he came from, what they perceived as a good ‘church background.’”Footnote ⁶¹ COs were believed most readily when they could show that they had attended a particular pacifist church or group over a long period, and particularly if their family were members as well.

Not all assertions of religious belief persuaded the tribunal. Jehovah's Witness beliefs, in particular, seemed to represent a form of religiosity that the tribunal found hard to comprehend, and Judge Field described adherents as “strange and even fantastic” (Reference Field1945: 17). Dennis Hayes from the CBCO concluded that Jehovah's Witnesses found it most difficult of all applicants to persuade the tribunal judges. He thought this was because Jehovah's Witnesses were “more militant” than other applicants and seemed “impervious to argument on the part of the tribunal.”Footnote ⁶² The professed neutrality of Jehovah's Witnesses in “ungodly wars” seemed hard for the judges to take.Footnote ⁶³

Affiliation with Quakerism was seemingly most convincing. When Alexander Bryan appeared before the tribunal he asked an acquaintance from the Quakers to give evidence.Footnote ⁶⁴ Roy Ridgway would later recall that his association with Quakers through medical voluntary work had probably made his life easier when he was released from military prison.Footnote ⁶⁵ For some COs, an association with the Quakers was such persuasive evidence that they tried to downplay their Quaker connections lest it give them what they felt to be an unfair advantage. Mervyn Taggart later felt “unworthy” for raising his Quaker family history because he felt it made “it somewhat easier. People understood the Quaker position and by saying you were a Quaker … you did not have to explain in very great detail anymore.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Faced with a questioning of their testimony, applicants would try to bring together as much other evidence as possible to attest to their convictions. Ridgway had set about collecting letters from friends and acquaintances that could confirm the sincerity of his beliefs. One friend wrote a letter saying that Ridgway was a “vegetarian because he believes it is wrong to kill animals” and that “for many years he has been an ardent pacifist.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The chairman of his local pacifist group wrote a letter stating that Ridgway was a “sincere pacifist” and that his “attitude to war is not an isolated thing, but is part of his whole attitude to life.”Footnote ⁶⁸ F. Morel was a trade unionist on the East London docks, and produced a letter from a municipal councilor stating, “I can verify … that he has been engaged for a number of years for the emancipation of workers and that he will not support any war.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Especially common were letters from church officials confirming that they thought an applicant's convictions, although “perhaps misguided,” were “strongly held.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Secondhand documentary evidence from “respected members of the community” was seen as providing potentially more secure evidence of conscience than direct oral testimony from the person claiming exemption.

In sum, claims of conscience seemed most persuasive when they were not thought to have been freely chosen. The irony was that people who could show that their objection was part of a long family history, rather than personal critical reflection, found it easier to get exemption. There was a danger that judges might hear evidence of deliberate reflection as evidence of mendacity.

A PUBLIC CONSCIENCE

The tribunals' legal responsibility was to make decisions on the genuineness of a particular claim to conscience. And yet, much to the annoyance of some judges, the law gave no direct guidance as to the grounds upon which true conscientious objection should be recognized.Footnote ⁷¹ The British tribunals were therefore formally open to accept any form of conviction as evidence of conscience—religious or secular, emotional or reasoned.

Debates over the forms of emotional and rational justification through which legitimate claims can be made on public goods have been central to modern liberal politics (Habermas Reference Habermas2006; Mahmood Reference Mahmood2006; Rawls Reference Rawls1993). At stake here is not a simple distinction between the religious and the secular, but rather broader questions about the forms of commitment and conviction that are deemed to have legitimate place in public life. In this context, the liberal public sphere is often analyzed in terms of an ideological split between the rational and the emotional. For John Rawls, for example, personal convictions, religious or otherwise, need to be translated in seemingly neutral and publicly accessible, comprehensive terms (Reference Rawls1993). The Rawlsian position has been criticized for its vision of neutrality, and for the way it limits the forms of conviction that have a place in public debate (Connolly Reference Connolly1999: 20). As Elizabeth Povinelli has argued, in practice both the deliberative and the sensual are present in modern liberal ethical debate, and form a “zone of undecidability” (Reference Povinelli2011: 88). The seemingly rational and emotional can combine to mediate the relationship between the state and its citizens.

When British tribunals attempted to make judgments about whether to grant exemptions from military service, a form of conscience was promoted that seemed to walk a line between the coldly analytical and the passionately spontaneous. A claim to conscience that looked too rational was in danger of looking like self-interest; one that seemed too emotional could be heard to indicate cowardice or extremism. Least likely to be judged to have a “genuine” conscientious objection were COs who came across as politicized, as adhering to forms of religiosity other than non-conformist Christianity, or as impassioned and fervent. The most successful were those the judges identified as moderate and restrained.

In prioritizing conscience, the tribunal and those who appeared before it faced the problem of how to make interior convictions publicly present. The anthropology of religion has highlighted the ways in which otherwise invisible processes are mediated through material practices (Engelke Reference Engelke2010; Keane Reference Keane2007). However, it is not only the transcendental claims of religion that need to be made concrete in order to have social and political purchase. Political convictions, too, must be substantiated or they can remain intangible, illegible, and ineffective. As such, CO tribunals should be understood in the context of a wider history of attempt to legally adjudicate on the inner life of individuals, ranging from criminal law's concerns with intention, to the inquisition's focus on the soul (compare Halfin Reference Halfin2001; Kravel-Tovi Reference Kravel-Tovi2012; Langbein Reference Langbein2006). The key issue that such processes face is how to make the internal motivations, qualities, desires, and character of the person before them visible so that they can pass judgment on it.

In Second World War Britain there were widespread claims that the CO tribunals were being asked to do an impossible job. In the parliamentary debates over the National Service Act in 1939, some asserted that it was impossible to judge conscience at all. As Conservative MP Sir Arnold Wilson argued, the “mind of man is not triable.”Footnote ⁷² T. Edmund Harvey, an independent MP, similarly told parliament, “There is no machinery which the House or any other House can set up for judging the conscience of men that would be satisfactory.”Footnote ⁷³ For many COs, too, the rigorous public assessment of individual conscience was a futile task. London Quaker CO John Wood described judges as “being in an impossible position” since you “cannot really judge in human terms a person's conscience. You can listen to what a man says about his conscience … but you can't really decide that the man's conscience tells him to do this or that … the judge has to judge by externals.”Footnote ⁷⁴ James Bramwell, a student from a wealthy Scottish family who served in a noncombatant unit, concluded that he “very much doubt[ed] whether it is possible [to judge conscience].… They had to accept rather on the impression the person made.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Tony Parker would later recall similarly that he did not think one could know another person's conscience.Footnote ⁷⁶

The question of sincerity was central to the attempt to assess claims of conscientious objection and was constantly evoked and questioned at the tribunal.Footnote ⁷⁷ Judges Wethered, for instance, stated that his task was merely to discover whether a COs view was “honestly held.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Likewise, Judge Burgis told the tribunal in Manchester that he was principally concerned to discover whether views were “sincere and deeply felt.”Footnote ⁷⁹ From this perspective, it was the depth of the objection that mattered rather than its nature. One judge wrote, “All we have to consider is whether the views are sincerely and deeply felt.”Footnote ⁸⁰ COs therefore had to perform their sincerity before the tribunal—they had to put their conscience on show so that it could be judged. As Lionel Trilling has argued, the norm of sincerity calls on people to be really the way that they present themselves to others (Reference Trilling1972). However, Webb Keane points out that such a focus assumes that the words and signs through which sincerity is performed can have a direct relationship with the sincere self (Reference Keane1997). For Keane, not only are the meanings of words anything but self-evident, but equally importantly, there can be a limited sense in which people are felt to be the authors of the words they use. The perceived relationship between the “sincere self” and its presentation is potentially unstable. Keane contends, therefore, that the effect of performances about sincere intention depends on conventions (ibid.; see also Austin Reference Austin1975; Derrida Reference Derrida and Allison1973). From such a perspective, the successful performance of conscience depends on cultural assumptions in order to bridge the gap between an inner moral life and its public display.

It is the very performance of conscience, though, that risks making it unpersuasive. At one level, the space between internal conscience and its outward presentation creates a space for doubt. The words, bodies, and actions through which conscience is made manifest constantly point to an absence (compare Butler Reference Butler1990: 184). Interior conscience is not reducible to the ways it is presented, precisely because it is understood to reside internally within individuals. And yet the issue is more than simply the problem of knowing other minds; the problem is also a product of the very notion of conventionally persuasive conscience. A conventional conscience can also seem deliberate, cautious, premeditated, and predetermined—everything that free internal, individual conscience is understood not to be. In the British tribunals, the act of making conscience public therefore opened it up to suspicion. Any attempts to perform conscience before a tribunal raised questions about the applicants' intentions and the extent to which their conscience was being made transparent. It was obvious that people could lie before the tribunal, and anyone could say they had a conscientious objection. It was because claims of conscience were easy to make that judges were suspicious of jargon and cliché. Other forms of evidence, too, raised questions about the intentions behind their production. A letter from a supporter attesting to the sincerity of an applicant's convictions was a reasonably easy document to produce. As elsewhere, the truth of any document was not self-evident, and thus produced its own suspicions.

The point here is not simply that claims to conscience were always in doubt. Ways were found to put doubts aside, or at least to come down on one side or the other and decide that a claim was persuasive or not. Not all claims of conscience were denied. The question then becomes: why and how were claims formally accepted? Ultimately, trusting neither words nor documents as signs of conscience, and being unsure about what was being signified in the first place, the tribunal would often try to avoid making firm determinations. Much time at the tribunal was spent questioning applicants about whether they would do any form of alternative service, and if so what type.Footnote ⁸¹ One of the three options available to the tribunal was to grant conditional exemption. In practice, what was at stake in most determinations was not whether a pacifist would be forced to bear arms, but whether he would be given noncombatant duty or be fully exempted from national service.Footnote ⁸² Fewer than 5 percent of applicants were given unconditional exemption by the local tribunals, and less than 30 percent were removed from the register completely. The remaining 65 percent were given some kind of alternative service (Barker Reference Barker1982: 145). COs took up work in agriculture, forestry, fire watching, civil defense, or various forms of broadly humanitarian or social work.

COs were widely keen to cooperate with the demand that their convictions be demonstrated through action. Indeed, many stressed that they were willing to help their fellow citizens and worried about being seen to “reap the rewards of the sacrifices of other people.”Footnote ⁸³ Bernard Nicholls, a Christian CO who carried out social work in the East End during and after the blitz, would recall that he did not see his pacifist stance as “involving a break with society.… I saw it as a role to be played within society.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Those COs who did take up alternative service were often highly critical of absolutists (who refused to undertake any activity directed by the state), seeing in them a self-centered martyr complex, or a naive and self-defeating attempt to cut themselves off from the world.Footnote ⁸⁵ For both the tribunals and COs, labor became a way to objectify inner convictions, seemingly compensating for the otherwise relative lack of substantial, tangible, and persuasive evidence to back up claims of conscience.

CONSCIENCE IN COMPARISON

Conflicts over exemptions from military service go to the heart of the tensions between rights and obligation within liberal citizenship (see Cohen Reference Cohen1985). It might be argued that conscription is no longer a central problem for liberal democracies. Britain, for example, has not had conscription since 1960, and the United States since 1973. The number of liberal democracies with compulsory military service has been in decline for several decades. Yet, precisely because it is such an extreme case, debates about conscription and its exemptions can point to central fissures that run through liberal democracies.

Twentieth-century Britain represents a particular form of liberal democracy, with its mixture of an established church and secular commitments, and a self-conscious stress on individual freedom and collectivist sentiments (Thompson Reference Thompson1962: 42; Freeden Reference Freeden1986). The way in which conscience was understood and formally protected is arguably a key part of this particularity. In 1916, Britain was among the first states to introduce the legal possibility of exemption from conscription during war on the grounds of conscience. Other, largely Protestant states in northern Europe would follow soon after. British exemptions were also formally broader than those of other states, making no stipulation on religious content and setting out the possibility of absolute exemption. In the United States, for example, during the First World War only Christian conscientious objectors from the historical “peace churches” were permitted to join noncombatant units; even they were not granted complete exemption.Footnote ⁸⁶ Conscription was introduced in Republican France in 1793 but exemption on the grounds of conscience was not allowed until 1963, and conscientious objection was not recognized at all in the Soviet Union.

The forms of evidence that were treated as persuasive when making claims of conscience are also part of the particular history of British liberal democracy. In perhaps the most extended ethnography of COs to date, Erica Weiss has argued that Israeli COs, for example, are required to show the embodied grounds to their objection to military service and violence, often demonstrated through vegetarianism (Reference Weiss2012; Reference Weiss2011). Principled arguments would not get an Israeli CO very far before a tribunal (ibid.: 83). For Israeli COs, claims of conscience were most convincing to others when they were emotional and embodied. In partial contrast, in mid-twentieth-century Britain, instead of visceral emotion, the presentation of claims of conscience was most persuasive when it was restrained. Conscience that seemed to have its roots in political conviction or esoteric forms of Christianity was much less convincing than that linked to mainstream Protestantism. COs were often keen to present themselves as tempered, moderate, and loyal citizens.

Many aspects of the history of conscience in mid-twentieth-century Britain were found more widely. For one, the implicit or explicit collapse of freedom of conscience into freedom of religion is not particular to the British experience. In the United States in the 1960s, in response to objections to the Vietnam War draft, the Supreme Court ruled that conscience could apply to non-religious convictions. Even so, the court maintained the foundational role of particular post-Protestant understandings of religion when it ruled that the conviction had to have a “parallel position” in the lives of the holder to a belief in a “supreme being,” and “essentially political, sociological, or philosophical views were excluded.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The reduction of conscience to religious belief should come as no surprise. Although freedom of conscience is often seen as a wider and more universal form of freedom than freedom of religion (Maclure and Taylor Reference Maclure, Taylor and Todd2011), it is important to remember the origins of liberal notions of freedom of conscience in the Protestant Reformation. It is of course a mistake to confuse origins for current usages, but it is worth recalling, for example, that for John Locke freedom of conscience was about protecting a narrow form of Christian dissent. Catholics, Muslim, Jews, let alone nonbelievers, were thought incapable of conscience. As Cecile Laborde has argued, freedom of conscience “ultimately ‘piggy-backs’ on ideas, conceptions, and values that originally made sense in a world comprehensively structured by a broadly Christian ethics” (Reference Laborde2012). Ideas about what constitutes “good conscience” therefore have a strong tendency to fall back into ideas about Protestant forms of Christianity.

The requirement that COs prove their convictions through labor is also widespread. In the United States during the Second World War, Civilian Public Service provided conscientious objectors with an alternative to serving in the military. In Germany by the 1990s, nearly half of those liable for conscription ended up doing social work (Kuhlman and Lippert Reference Kuhlman, Lippert, Moskos and Chambers1993). The channeling of conscience into public service was the route taken by most European democracies that practiced conscription in the late twentieth century. This is a very particular “work ethic” that sees attempts to produce evidence of conscience taking shape in labor for the “public good.”

The demand that COs prove conscience through labor points to a wider anxiety over whether it is possible to consistently and fairly judge conscience. Eleven of the European states that recognize the right to conscientious objection have done away with a personal hearing altogether, and decisions are made solely on the basis of a formal application. In Germany in the years before conscription was abolished in 2011, up to 99 percent of applications for exemption were accepted (ibid.). An implicit refusal to confront issues of conscience head on can also be found in the European Court of Human Rights—the jurisdiction with perhaps the most extensive and broadest jurisprudence on the right to conscientious objection—which seems to find it difficult to rule on particular cases. No absolute right to conscientious objection exists, but there is a qualified right to alternative service.Footnote ⁸⁸ More often than not, though, the court has decided to deal with cases of apparent conscientious objection as issues of equality or the right to association.Footnote ⁸⁹ Liberal democracies may promote freedom of conscience as an abstract principle, but they seem reluctant to judge individual conscience.