Constructing conscience: freedom and self-governance in colonial New England

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dc.contributorMcCutcheon, Russell T.
dc.contributorKopelson, Heather M.
dc.contributorSimmons, K. Merinda
dc.contributor.advisorAltman, Michael J.
dc.contributor.authorMcMurray, Keeley Malone
dc.contributor.otherUniversity of Alabama Tuscaloosa
dc.date.accessioned2020-09-30T17:25:06Z
dc.date.available2020-09-30T17:25:06Z
dc.date.issued2020
dc.descriptionElectronic Thesis or Dissertationen_US
dc.description.abstractAmerican politics and law, like other liberal democracies, couches itself in the protection of the free individual, one who possesses both “beliefs” and the unalienable right to those “beliefs.” The “freedom of religion” guaranteed to U.S. citizens in the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment prioritizes this supposedly private and transcendent realm of “sincerity,” “faith,” and “experience,” kept separate from the contextual and temporal world of society and politics. Historians of American religion, and scholars of religion more broadly, have long taken this “interiority” rhetoric to be self-evident, ignoring the prescriptive implications of positing such an interiority at all. Rather than understanding these rhetorics of “interiority” as referencing a non-empirical and apolitical reality of autonomous “selfhood,” this paper will argue that the constitutional protection of the autonomous individual is constitutive of a particular type of political subjectivity, one that allows for those in power to manage dissent by authorizing some differences and marginalizing others. I will therefore interrogate the function of institutionalizing such an “interiority” in the first place, in order to understand how and why American society works the way that it does. Using three cases from seventeenth-century New England to better inform contemporary cases involving “conscientious objection,” I will argue that the privatized discourse of “religion,” and thus a discourse of the “self-governing individual,” functions as a tool of governance through the authorization, exclusion, and negotiation of unfalsifiable claims.en_US
dc.format.extent35 p.
dc.format.mediumelectronic
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.otheru0015_0000001_0003636
dc.identifier.otherMcMurray_alatus_0004M_14143
dc.identifier.urihttp://ir.ua.edu/handle/123456789/7035
dc.languageEnglish
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Alabama Libraries
dc.relation.hasversionborn digital
dc.relation.ispartofThe University of Alabama Electronic Theses and Dissertations
dc.relation.ispartofThe University of Alabama Libraries Digital Collections
dc.rightsAll rights reserved by the author unless otherwise indicated.en_US
dc.subjectReligious history
dc.subjectAmerican history
dc.subjectRhetoric
dc.titleConstructing conscience: freedom and self-governance in colonial New Englanden_US
dc.typethesis
dc.typetext
etdms.degree.departmentUniversity of Alabama. Department of Religious Studies
etdms.degree.disciplineReligious Studies
etdms.degree.grantorThe University of Alabama
etdms.degree.levelmaster's
etdms.degree.nameM.A.

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