A Moderate Proposal: Jonathan Dickinson and Benjamin Franklin Debate Freedom, Conscience, and Consensus

Abstract

In matters of twenty-first century public policy, age-old questions surrounding freedom of conscience and both personal and civic liberties remain in perennial tension with the necessary demands for civic conformity, custom, and consensus. These questions were also of critical importance in early eighteenth-century colonial America. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a hotbed of religious, intellectual, and cultural diversity was fomenting considerable conflict in Philadelphia, setting the stage for a vital debate over the nature and parameters of religious liberty and freedom of conscience in the colonies. Within this context of the eighteenth-century religious and cultural landscape of colonial Philadelphia, this article will examine a debate between Jonathan Dickinson and Benjamin Franklin whereby two distinctly different interpretations of religious liberty and freedom of conscience were established. Left to themselves, these two interpretations lead to sharply divergent trajectories. Nonetheless, by considering these two viewpoints in dialogue with one another, the Franklin–Dickinson pamphlet debate can serve as a useful tool for conceptualizing twenty-first century public policy issues related to freedom of conscience: policies that preserve the essential aspects of what constitutes each person’s humanity while simultaneously respecting the broader exigencies for public order and responsible policy in the aggregate.