The decades before Locke’s adulthood were grim: the Gunpowder Plot, the execution or assassination (depending on one’s view) of Charles I, the English Civil War, the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, and the Thirty Years’ War, among other painful events. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes lived through these years, and his sinister assessment of human nature is perhaps colored by them.
By 1660, these episodes were over, and Locke would have been 28 years old.
For most of his adult life, Locke lived in an era which was still mixed, but perhaps slightly better. Locke was suspected of being involved in the Rye House Plot, a failed attempt to assassinate Charles II; Locke had to flee to the Netherlands in 1683.
But on a happier note, Locke also witnessed the Glorious Revolution, so called because it was accomplished without violence or casualties. The concepts of parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy were developing during Locke’s life — indeed, he was involved in the development himself — and both of those concepts had an optimistic aspect.
Locke suspected that much of the world’s misery and violence had its roots in a distorted version of Christianity, as historian Joseph Loconte writes:
Conspiracy theories, nativism, militant religion, mob violence, a plot to topple the government — welcome to 17th-century England. English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) lived through one of the most turbulent and divisive periods in British history. At the center of the storm, he believed, was a degraded form of Christianity. “All those flames that have made such havoc and desolation in Europe, and have not been quenched but with the blood of so many millions,” he wrote, “have been at first kindled with coals from the altar.”
By contrast, Locke saw uplifting events in history as based on an authentic and accurate understanding of Christianity. He studied the New Testament carefully, and saw in it a source of tolerance and justice, as Joseph Loconte explains:
Locke’s response was to offer the world a new political vision: a liberal society based on a radical reinterpretation of the teachings of Jesus. The bracing message, contained in his Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, was about the liberty and dignity of every human soul. It would form the bedrock of the American political order.
Behind Locke’s embrace of majority rule is founded on the notion of imago dei — the idea that each human being carries an imprint of the supreme intelligence which oversees the universe. The principle of majority rule is attractive only if there’s some reason to believe that the majority of people will produce the right answer in the majority of cases. If each human being bears the imago dei, then it increases the chances that the majority of a group has likely chosen the correct course of action.
A similar logic provides a foundation for the concept of popular sovereignty.
Additionally, Locke sees God as valuing each human being. If God attributes worth to every human, then no human can deem another human to be worthless. The notion that God values people arises in part from the notion that He owns all people, having created them.
For Locke, the first order of business was to insist that every human being bore the imprint of an intelligent, personal, and purposeful Creator. No one must be treated as a means to an end, as someone else’s property. Rather, every individual belonged to God, and was designed for a noble and transcendent purpose. As Locke declared in his Second Treatise: “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one Sovereign Maker, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.”
The work ‘workmanship’ alerts the reader to a New Testament passage:
Most of Locke’s audience, literate in the Bible, would have recognized his allusion to a passage from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).
Long before John Locke, authors such as Richard Hooker used the phrase “divine right” to describe royal authority in his book of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie published in the 1590s.
Against the notion of a “divine right,” Locke posed “popular sovereignty,” a concept which would appear often in American civilization after Locke’s death.
The political and religious leaders of Locke’s day invoked the “divine right” of kings to justify political absolutism. In contrast, Locke argued that only a government based on the consent of the governed could honor the divine prerogative. Here, in brief, is his religious argument for the right to revolution: If the political authority tries to oppress God’s servants — by threatening their life, liberty, or property — it becomes morally illegitimate.
There is a thoroughly Lockean sentiment in these words: The purpose of a government is to protect the lives, liberties, and properties of its citizens. Anything less is negligence; anything more is tyranny.
Locke’s search for the “why” of government — what is the purpose of government? — shifted the emphasis of the debate. The apologists for absolute, or near absolute, monarchy were busy explaining that the dynasty rightly held all the power. Locke is asking, not who holds the power, but for which purpose is the power held?
Once the purpose of the sovereign is clear, then it is also clear that imposing an arbitrary religion on the subjects does not serve that purpose. This is a reflection on the struggles between the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics in the British Isles: since the early 1530s, this had been a matter for the Crown and the Parliament to ponder.
But Locke is suggesting that neither the Crown nor the Parliament needs to busy itself with choosing between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. The task of protecting life, liberty, and property is indifferent to the question of religion.
In the century before Locke’s birth, the Protestant Reformation had opened the doors to religious pluralism throughout Europe. For his political theory to work in societies with competing religious traditions, another sea change in thinking was required. The state must stop punishing people for refusing to endorse the preferred national religion. Likewise, church leaders must stop trying to manipulate the levers of power to impose their sectarian values on an unwilling population. “No peace and security, no, not so much as common friendship, can ever be established or preserved amongst men,” Locke wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration, “so long as this opinion prevails . . . that religion is to be propagated by force of arms.”
The Lockean notion of tolerance was directed to the practitioner of a faith, not to the faith itself. Given this nuance, Locke was free to argue for the ‘toleration of the dissenters’ without committing himself to the truth of their faith; likewise, tolerance for the Jews or the Muslims, to the extent that they practice their faith without damaging the lives, liberties, or properties of citizens.
Spanning two centuries, a number of conflicts had been named ‘wars of religion’ — the French Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598, the Thirty Years’ War from 1618 to 1648, and the fighting in Ireland. Locke saw that these wars were not truly about religion, but simply about political power. He also saw that the results of these wars left governments in place which failed to serve the purposes for which any and all governments are instituted.
Locke became an eloquent and modern champion of tolerance, as Joseph Loconte reports:
In the wake of the wars of religion, it was assumed that the best guarantee of civic peace and social cohesion was the rigid imposition of a national creed — Catholicism in France, Calvinism in Geneva, Anglicanism in England, and so on. Yet laws criminalizing dissent created a permanent underclass across Europe. Locke watched in anguish as religious dissenters were persecuted, jailed, executed, or sent into exile.
Locke never set foot in America, but his formulation of religious tolerance both shaped and expresses an American point of view:
Locke decided to turn conventional thinking on its head. The key to political stability was not conformity through coercion. Rather, a government that protected — with equal justice — the rights and freedoms of people of all faith traditions would enjoy widespread support. Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Catholics, Quakers, Jews, even Muslims — no one, according to Locke, should be denied his essential civil rights because of religion. “The sum of all we drive at is that every man enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.” (Locke is routinely accused of having denied toleration to Catholics, but a close and contextual reading of his Letter strongly suggests otherwise.) Here is a revolutionary application of the Golden Rule, one of the pillars of Christian morality.
The creation of the United States leaned on many thinkers: Montesquieu, Burlamaqui, Cicero, and others — but perhaps on Locke most of all. Yet Locke’s influence on the U.S. can be misunderstood. He advocated for a truly revolutionary level of religious tolerance; yet he understood that act of tolerance itself as a Christian act.
Locke might say that extending tolerance to a Jew or to a Muslim is itself a distinctively Christian act.
The American Founders, supported by the nation’s clergy, thoroughly absorbed Locke’s political principles — from the separation of powers to the separation of church and state. Nevertheless, many on today’s religious right reject Lockean liberalism for supposedly opening the door to relativism and “radical individualism.” Progressives, on the other hand, applaud his commitment to individual rights but rip it from its religious foundation.
An examination of Locke’s writings reveals the detail and seriousness of his study of theology, and the depth to which his theological studies shaped both his political and his philosophical texts.
In fact, Locke’s political outlook was saturated with Christian assumptions about justice, equality, freedom, and natural rights. Like no thinker before him, Locke combined Whig political theory with a gospel of divine grace and mercy.
God’s omnibenevolence was, for Locke, a foundation for popular sovereignty, majority rule, and the idea that each and every human life has value and is therefore to be protected.
A lifelong student of the Bible, he searched the scriptures for examples of God’s indiscriminate love. He founded a philosophical society that required prospective members to affirm their love for “all men, of what profession or religion soever.” For many years he kept notes from a sermon based on Galatians 5:6, “the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” — a theme that appears throughout his writings and personal letters.
The text of the New Testament was, for Locke, a roadmap to the goal of ensuring that every human life is valued and protected. It is debatable whether Jesus is moderately pacifistic or radically pacifistic, but in either case, Locke saw in Jesus the principle of protecting lives, liberties, and properties.
The life and teachings of Jesus were his lodestar. Jesus never bullied people into becoming his followers, never used force, and scolded his disciples when they were inclined to do so. Christ came into the world, Locke believed, to bring life and peace to those who had become God’s enemies. To Locke, Jesus was “our Savior,” “our Lord and King,” “the Captain of our Salvation,” and “the Prince of Peace.”
By 1695, Locke had expressed his religious views in detail. He was solidly Anglican; he devoted care to the precise study of Scripture, and he did all of this in a way which nonetheless won him admiration from Deists and Unitarians.
Tolerance was, for Locke, not an option but a duty:
Thus, the moral economy of the Christian story must inform the ideals of a political society: The gospel offered a path by which people could live together with their deepest differences. “The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion, is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the genuine reason of mankind,” Locke wrote, “that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind, as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.”
Locke’s texts may be sorted into three main groups: political, religious, and philosophical. In addition, there are other writings about the natural sciences or about economics. Yet Locke himself might have argued that such distinctions are not justified. He might have seen his political, religious, and philosophical writings as related and interconnected. The legal concept of a jury trial might be based in part on his empirical epistemology and in part on the concept of each human possessing the imago dei.
