Institutional conscience protection at Princeton

I'm currently at Princeton, where the Witherspoon Institute is hosting a roundtable discussion on the protection of institutional religious conscience.  The papers have been thoughtful and provocative, and the accompanying discussion very rich.  A couple of examples:

Christopher Tollefsen and Daniel Sulmasy both presented papers arguing that associations have consciences based on the reality of collective intent embodied in associational life.  I'm sympathetic to any effort to protect associational freedom, but I'm not persuaded on the merits or as to the necessity of making the argument.  I think it's enough to say that associations are essential venues for the formation, expression, and living out of conscience, and that failing to defend the freedom of associations effectively cuts conscience off at the knees.  My concern with making the stronger claim -- that associations should be viewed as having consciences -- is that it will weaken the argument that conscience is ontologically real and a core anthropological truth.  Conscience is not just a convenient construct or instrumental device for capturing important human values; conscience is a real facet of the human person, and I don't want to weaken that perception by stretching it to cover non-human entities.  Both Christopher and Daniel will deny that associational conscience weakens the human reality of conscience, but I have my doubts.  I think some of the negative reaction to Citizens United illustrates the discomfort folks have with attributing human qualities to non-human entities, and I'm not sure why we need to go down that path.

Gerry Bradley presented a paper defending the value of institutional ministry, arguing that "the religious act of charity is much richer than its secular counterpart."  He compared a religious charity's work to that of a family farm, and a secular social services provider's work to that of agribusiness -- both the family farm and agribusiness provide the same product, but there is a web of relational goods that permits us to value the family farm differently.  My question is whether the difference in "richness" between religious and non-religious charities can be expressed in terms accessible to the state.  I believe that the state can recognize the value of religious charities as being different -- especially to participants -- than the value of secular charities, but I'm not sure that the state can recognize the difference in a comparative way.  I understood Gerry as making the claim that the state can actually recognize the religious charities as being better / richer than the secular counterparts, and that's where I'm still not quite persuaded. 

In any event, these are just some of the great conversations on important topics that have occurred.  More to come.