The Coerced Conscience by Amy Gais is a slender book that tackles some very large subjects. The book is one of many recent efforts—by scholars such as Teresa Bejan, Rainer Forst, Martha Nussbaum, and others—to address the topic of free conscience from both a historical and a normative perspective. The Coerced Conscience offers a series of four discreet essays on canonical early modern theorists of conscience: John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle. An introduction sets out the theoretical context for the intervention, and a final chapter applies lessons to two U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning liberty of religious conscience. Gais has produced a careful and judicious study, offering rich local observations. The essayistic scale of the book perhaps renders its conclusions more suggestive than decisive, but it is a provocative volume worth reading and pondering.

The Coerced Conscience has certain methodological traits common to much historically directed writing by political theorists. Its chapters offer textual exegesis of canonical authors’ primary works, with virtually no effort at historical contextualization or attention to more minor works by the relevant authors or their critics. “For better or for worse,” she writes, “these early modern figures have shaped our modern world, and by deepening our understanding of this intellectual tradition, we arm ourselves with insights into our inherited political assumptions, intuitions, and logic, often invoked today without rigorous interrogation” (p. 21). The interrogation we are offered explores the inherited canon as a set of authorities speaking to timeless themes. “For Milton, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle, the question of whether the state should protect liberty of conscience, as well as what protecting liberty of conscience actually meant in practice, was one of the central questions of their time,” Gais notes. “This question, which it has certainly morphed in shape, continued to dominate out contemporary moment; their thinking as such, remains strangely relevant…” (p. 22). Thus the book presents a claim of relevant continuity rather than one of disclosive incongruity.

Historians will balk at this. But Gais compensates with theoretical expertise from her own discipline of political theory. Two literatures, in particular, shape her argument: first, scholarship—influenced by John Rawls’s liberal theory and critical legal scholarship—that critiques recent directions in the jurisprudence of religious liberty in the United States; second, critical studies (often emitting from comparative religious studies) of the concept of individual conscience itself, which deconstruct it as a Euro-centric notion imposing Protestant definitions of conscience as freedom. In this latter literature are scholars such as Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, for whom Islam serves as a useful analytical “other” exposing the partiality of Western notions of conscience. In the former literature are liberal theorists such as Jeremy Waldron and Cécile Laborde, as well as legal scholars such as Douglas Laycock, Douglas NeJaime and Reva Siegel, who take different positions on the legitimacy of recent expansions of religious liberty in the United States.

Gais offers up this series of early modern thinkers as a storehouse of observations that might be relevant to today’s engaged theoreticians. The exclusion of John Locke is in this respect puzzling, and generally unexplained. Surely no early modern writer is namechecked in American religious liberty court decisions and briefs more than Locke. But he is missing.

What is here, however, are four close and intelligent readings. Gais corrals her massive subject by focusing, thematically, on the psychological “repercussions of conformity” (p. 8) generated by dissimulation, hypocrisy, social lying, and intellectual passivity. These constitute harms to be measured against the social interests that—in the early modern world—might have justified confessional uniformity, and—in the modern world—might justify the constraint of religion in the service of secular polities. (This paradoxical inversion, which renders recent conservative religious believers more subalterns than masters, looms over the entire book.) From her four thinkers, Gais draws four accounts of conscience, each of which speak differently to the psychological costs (acknowledged by all four) of conformity.

John Milton’s extensive defense of conscientious speech and publication, as well as of free religious worship (for Protestants), was based on what Gais calls “expressive conscience.” The key Miltonic claim is that intellectual (and religious) discernment and cultivation require a conscience that is exercised, constantly honed through argument and against the arguments of others, including against base or incorrect arguments. Denying this opportunity for exercise, even in the service of truth, produces mental slavery. Bayle is Milton’s liberal pair in Gais’s account, a theorist of the “tormented conscience,” and a thinker alive to the “cognitive harm” of forced conformity (p. 107). This harm, Bayle argued, included not just intellectual enslavement but often reactive entrenchment into stubborn error.

For Gais, Hobbes sits at the authoritarian pole. (She has a rather traditional understanding of Hobbes in this regard and does not fully accommodate much recent work on Hobbes as an idiosyncratic tolerationist.) Hobbes’s hostility to conscience, however, did not simply accept coerced conformity as the necessary wage of stability. Effective control of dissident conscience, Gais argues, required that Hobbes use educational resources to achieve an “instilled conscience.” Hobbes therefore emerges as a theorist wary of “tormented” consciences but unwilling to indulge “exercised” ones. He prefigures the “nudgers” of our modern liberal world, coaxing consensus in the interests of sound science. Subjects therefore correct their conscience by coming to “know with” the state.

Gais presents Spinoza as a close neighbor of this view: as a Hobbesian insistent on the dangers of unbound consciences but as someone unwilling to either suppress or fully liberate them. Spinoza instead promoted “conscientious speech”: a requirement that subjects obey sovereignty in all outward things, but that they enjoy the one liberty of verbal (perhaps only spoken) dissent. Uniformity is therefore maintained, but crippling hypocrisy avoided.

These are insightful readings, cutting in opposite directions. Gais takes this arsenal of positions and applies them to two modern American court cases: Arlene’s Flowers v. State of Washington, where a florist was required to serve a gay wedding; and United States v. Warren, a case in which an aid worker used conscience claims to successfully defend himself against charges of illegally aiding undocumented migrants. Gais does not presume to resolve these cases with an unproblematic application of any one early modern model of conscience, but rather proposes implications for each case. A Spinozist, for instance, might force a florist to serve a gay wedding in conformity with the law, but allow them to advertise their opposition and their preference against accepting such business. Milton, she surmises, would go further in the protection of conscience in such a case: conscience in his case mobilized action in the world. She considers with Bayle that coerced participation in morally contested laws likely represents a hollow achievement, compromised by hypocrisy and perhaps tending to “radicalize dissenters” (p. 126).

Gais wishes to occupy neutral ground in her final chapter, but she does not always do so successfully. She discusses “anti-choice” advocacy, “dignitarian harms,” base “values of exclusion and prejudice,” and the rights of “birthing people” in a way that signals her own political intuitions. It may thus give some conservatives and libertarians pause that she seems surprisingly sympathetic to the modern relevance of Hobbes’s “instilled” conscience. Gais is at least willing to entertain the necessity—when facing conservative religious citizens like Baronelle Stutzman, whose views she flatly characterizes as “counter to human dignity” (p. 132)—of using the “state” to “work to change people’s minds and hearts” (p. 121–122). There may be a certain liberal perfectionist streak lurking in the argument of this book.

Gais is of course right when she writes of conscience rights that there has recently been a “polarization of this longstanding freedom” (p. 3). She assumes that the conservative cast of religious freedom jurisprudence in recent years will bother most of her readers. This assumption will in turn irritate conservative readers, who might well consider the rising suspicion of religious freedom on the left to be the more relevant phenomenon. Nevertheless, this book is generally honest and interpretively generous, and its implications will at times provoke readers of all stripes. On the whole, The Coerced Conscience succeeds at using canonical texts, and a thematic focus on the “social and psychological dynamics” of conformity, to “think beyond the narrow framing” of religious freedom that prevails in most current debate.