Freedom of conscience is treated across The Bob Zadek Show as a founding principle of the United States and as a limit on what government may do to shape what people believe. Host Bob Zadek returns to the phrase in episodes on immigration, Title IX, curiosity and constitutional design, sometimes as a description of existing American liberty and sometimes as a liberty he says has been squandered. The sources do not offer a single definition; they show the concept doing different work in different arguments.
Language, worship and the home
In the 2013 episode on immigration policy, Zadek told a caller named Marie that people in the United States are free to speak whatever language they want in their homes and to worship any religion they want, and that the country has always had “total freedom of conscience.” He welcomed that freedom and argued that economic pressure, not law, would push immigrants toward English: those who do not learn it will find their job opportunities limited. He also told Marie that if she is served by someone who does not speak English, she can simply not patronize that store and take her dollars elsewhere, exercising her own freedom and sending a message to the manager. Let Them All In (2013)
Guest Alex Nowrasteh, of the Cato Institute, added survey figures on assimilation. He said that 97% of children of Spanish-speaking immigrants who were born in the United States speak English, and that the English fluency rate is 100% in the third generation. He said this rate of learning English is faster than that of Italians, Jewish immigrants, Russian immigrants and German immigrants. When Marie asked why schools spend extra money teaching these children English, Nowrasteh called it a problem with the school system and with government wasting money on programs teaching language the children already speak well or that immigrant children do not speak well. Zadek added that California is one of the offending states and that he opposes bilingual education. Let Them All In (2013)
The exchange places freedom of conscience in the private sphere — the home, the place of worship, the language one speaks — while leaving the public economic consequences to markets and individual choices rather than to government mandates.
Title IX and the charge of thought police
The 2018 episode with R. Shep Melnick concerned the transformation of Title IX. Zadek described the statute as passed in 1972 to address discrimination against women, and asked how it had changed. Melnick said Title IX was originally designed to end institutional barriers to education by women, that in 1972 many programs explicitly prohibited women and there was rampant sex discrimination in hiring in higher education, and that those barriers fell rapidly, with women now outpacing men in almost all aspects of education. The transformation, he said, was from ending institutional barriers to trying to change stereotypes about sex and gender and sexuality, not only among students and faculty but among the public at large. Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018)
Zadek framed the shift as a move from prohibiting discrimination to influencing social mores, and invoked the founding era: if one thing was sacred then, he said, it was freedom of conscience, meaning freedom to believe whatever one chooses, and it is not the business of government to affect what people think even if it is wrongheaded. He called the transformation something akin to thought police. Melnick, who described himself as not a libertarian but more of a liberal Democrat, said he fully agreed that the founding principle of limited government means limiting government to affecting overt behavior rather than changing people’s basic thinking, and said what bothers him most is how prescriptive the regulations have become, trying to “change the culture” on the basis of a very thin legislative platform. Title IX’s Transformation: R. Shep Melnick on the New Civil Rights Debate (2018)
Here freedom of conscience is invoked against administrative regulation rather than against a statute’s original purpose. The disagreement the episode records is not about whether conscience should be protected but about whether the regulations in question cross the line from conduct into belief.
Curiosity, risk and the founding ethos
In the 2021 episode with Frank Buckley, Zadek tied freedom of conscience to curiosity and to the founders’ respect for it. He said the founders profoundly respected freedom of conscience, which to them was the freedom to think whatever they wish without it being monitored or altered by government, and that although the word conscience or consciousness is not in the founding documents, it was a driving force to protect that freedom. He said that freedom has been squandered and is being denied today. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Buckley agreed and broadened the term: conscience, he said, refers to more than religion and involves one’s thoughts about all the different ways of living one’s life, and he said the country has moved away from an old-fashioned liberalism based on tolerance of different kinds of opinions. He also argued that risk-taking is intrinsically admirable, telling the story of Jack and the Beanstalk as a lesson in taking risks, and describing Steve Jobs and Apple as an example of entrepreneurship that began with curiosity about the unknown; he noted that securities regulators in Massachusetts said Apple could not sell its shares there because the investment was too risky. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Zadek closed by saying that curiosity and risk-taking are being taught out of younger schoolchildren, through protections from physical harm and from ideas that might frighten them, and that protecting somebody from ideas sentences them to an intellectual death at an early age. The episode thus links freedom of conscience to exposure to ideas rather than to shielding from them.
Conscience in a progressive constitution
The 2021 episode with Caroline Fredrickson concerned a proposed progressive constitution. Zadek asked how a more robust democracy would protect the basic rights of a minority — the 49% on any issue — against the will of the majority, listing among natural rights the right to travel and freedom of conscience. Caroline Fredrickson on the Progressive Constitution (2021)
Fredrickson said she and her co-authors believe in democracy and that their draft provides more robust protections for democracy, including free and fair elections, uniform voting requirements and protections against gerrymandering; she said they do not eliminate the Bill of Rights and that key protections remain in the constitution, including rights of conscience covering religion and also freedom of conscience for those who may not be religious. She said this goes back to James Madison’s original conception of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience or thought, and that the draft also provides an Equal Rights Amendment covering gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, and reaffirms protections for minorities based on race. She said most rights are left to the political process, which their constitution aims to make free and fair, and that they carve out reasonable campaign finance rules from First Amendment freedom of speech. Caroline Fredrickson on the Progressive Constitution (2021)
This episode is the only one in the sources in which a guest proposes a concrete constitutional text for conscience, and the only one in which the speaker identifies as a progressive rather than a libertarian.
Across episodes
The topic recurs in four episodes spanning 2013 to 2021, and the treatment shifts with the subject. In 2013 Zadek uses freedom of conscience to defend private language and worship against a caller’s complaint about immigration and assimilation; in 2018 he uses it against Title IX regulations that he says aim at changing how people think; in 2021 with Buckley he treats it as a founding ethos that has been squandered and links it to curiosity and tolerance; and in 2021 with Fredrickson the guest proposes anchoring rights of conscience in a rewritten constitution. The constant across the episodes is Zadek’s framing of conscience as a limit on government; what changes is the adversary — a caller’s cultural complaint, federal regulators, a general decline in tolerance, and finally the question of how a majority protects minority conscience. The sources show no single developed doctrine, only the repeated invocation of the same founding principle in different arguments.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state which amendment or amendments protect freedom of conscience, nor do they name a controlling case. They do not give the text of Title IX, the name of any bill, or the holding of any decision. The founding date of the principle and the identity of the founders who held it are asserted but not documented in the excerpts, and the Fredrickson episode’s draft constitution is described only in the terms quoted above.