John Locke is a fascinating figure: although he is now treated as a key Enlightenment figure, he was taught at Oxford University by the great Puritan theologian John Owen, and wrote a book in which he offered a defence of the reasonableness of Christianity.

Locke’s philosophical interests were wide-ranging. He wrote on epistemology in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, repeatedly on political philosophy, and also on natural and Christian theology.

In this post I am going to discuss only one aspect of Locke’s thought but my reading of Locke’s thought is that his three projects were mutually supporting. What Locke thought about how we could know things affects his views about what a good society would look like and about how tightly or broadly a national church should draw its confession of faith. If you want to explore that more look at my article on Locke and Rawls on Religious Toleration and Public Reason.

John Locke was born in 1632 and died in 1704. When Locke was growing up, England, Scotland, and Ireland were ripped apart by a series of civil wars that decimated the population of England and Scotland and up to the direct or indirect deaths of up to 20% of Ireland’s people.

After England’s experiment with republican government ended and Charles the Second returned to the throne, draconian laws were imposed against Catholics and against Protestants who were not Anglicans (Episcopalians). The laws were designed to force people to attend Sunday worship in the Church of England. Those who refused to do so were subject to penalties which excluded them from public office, from teaching in schools, from attending the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and from meeting in groups of more than five people who were not members of the same household.

For Locke, the wars in the British Isles and the even bloodier conflict of the Thirty Years War in Continental Europe raised three key questions: (1) what is the basis of a ruler’s authority?, (2) what is the extent of a ruler’s authority?, and (3) does a ruler’s authority extend over matters of religious belief and practice?

For Locke’s contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, the answers to those questions were: (1) in a state of nature, i.e. where there is no centralised political authority, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Therefore, because of their fear of out of control violence, people submit to a sovereign, (2) the sovereign has the power to do whatever is necessary to promote public unity, harmony, and peace, and (3) therefore the sovereign has the power to impose on their subjects whatever form of religious belief and practice is most conducive to the political stability of their regime.

Locke’s answers to those three questions were different. He agreed with Hobbes that the best place to think about politics is to think about what the lives of people would be like in a state of nature. He, like Hobbes, thought about the people in such a state of nature as individuals. One has the strong sense reading his political philosophy that the people he has primarily in mind are self-sufficient, white, adult, male individuals.

Unlike Hobbes, however, Locke did not think that these individuals would constantly be in fear of one another. For Locke, individuals are, by nature, all free, equal, and independent. Instead, he thought that they would naturally collaborate. Political structures were, for Locke, a way of regularising collaboration in areas where allowing the majority to make decisions which bound the minority was necessary because of what we might refer to as the resulting efficiency gains. Political structures depend on popular consent. In other words, we start with individuals who have rights and those individuals voluntarily give up some of those rights to political structures established by a social contract. The key difference between Hobbes and Locke is that whereas for Hobbes individuals would be prepared to give up their rights in full, for Locke, they would only do so to the extent that they had reason to believe that the sovereign or the majority would make better decisions than they would themselves. Under the Lockean social contract, the magistrate acquires jurisdiction in respect of civil concernments but not in relation to the salvation of souls. In Locke’s own words: “The one only narrow way which leads to heaven is not better known to the magistrate than to private persons, and therefore I cannot safely take him for my guide, who may probably be as ignorant of the way as myself, and who certainly is less concerned for my salvation than I myself am.”

For Locke, the purpose of the state ‘is to preserve and advance the civil goods of its members, which Locke identifies as bodily life, health, and liberty, as well as the secure possession of external things needful for these, such as property, money, houses, furniture and so on’.

Remember the three questions: (1) what is the basis of a ruler’s authority?, (2) what is the extent of a ruler’s authority?, and (3) does a ruler’s authority extend over matters of religious belief and practice? Here are Locke’s answers:

1. A ruler’s authority is based on the consent of the individuals to entrust the enforcement of certain of their natural rights to a public authority;
2. Public authorities and political societies are established for the sole end of securing ‘every man’s possession of the things of this life’;
3. It follows, therefore, that a ruler has no authority over religious belief and practice unless that religious belief and practice involves acting in ways which are unlawful in the ordinary course of life.

Locke can be seen as a father of human rights but, because of the centrality of property in his thinking, what he offers is a theory of natural rights for rich, white, men. This impression is reinforced by the fact that Locke was paid at one point by King Charles II in stock in the Royal African Company and that he accepted the commission to draft the Constitution of the Carolinas, a colony whose Lords Proprietors owned and exploited African slaves. There may be mitigating factors in both cases but Locke’s implication in the United States’ history of slavery is undeniable.

Against a background of renewed religious conflict and intolerance in England, Scotland, Ireland, and France, Locke wrote his famous Letter of Toleration in Amsterdam in the winter of 1685-86. Locke argued that each human being was responsible for their own salvation, that true belief could not be forced, and that the church was a voluntary society.[1] As a consequence, a wide range of theistic beliefs could be, and should for the sake of public peace, be tolerated.

Locke is both the moment at which arguments for toleration arising out of the Reformation receive their definitive statement and the point at which the door is opened for a very different understanding of human rights.

Those reformers who appealed for toleration did so in the name of freedom of conscience. Freedom of conscience as they understood it was the freedom to respond sincerely to God’s calling and to God’s commands as one understands them. Locke vacillates between that account, which is fully compatible with traditional conceptions of natural law and demurs only on the question of authority, and an alternative account of freedom conceived as the opportunity to pursue pleasure and to avoid pain. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke explores the thesis that all human beings desire to be happy. He acknowledges the reasonableness of a subjectivist approach to the good if this life is all there is. Because, however, of his convictions as a Christian, Locke argues that true happiness lies in aligning our desires with “the true intrinsick good” in things (is this to be found in Essay II.xxi.51)? This intrinsic good is part of a God-given natural law, capable of being discerned rationally,[2] and forms a major part of Locke’s argument in Two Treatises of Government (1690).

There are, therefore, two different accounts of the good and consequently two different conceptions of freedom in Locke’s thought. One account is a development of the tradition of theistic natural law. The intrinsic goodness of things is to be found in their God-given nature and ordering. Human beings are free when they are able to discern that intrinsic goodness and to conform their desires to respond appropriately to it. Viewed in this perspective, Locke’s argument for toleration is an argument that governments do not have an epistemic privilege in discerning the ultimate good that is God. The other account is hedonistic. As we have already seen, Locke defined property as “that property which men have in their persons as well as goods”.^[3] Human beings have ownership over their bodies and their possessions and therefore should be free to choose for themselves the things which they think will cause them pleasure and to avoid the things which they think will cause them pain. ^[4] Seen in this light, natural rights can therefore be secularised, with ownership of things becoming the dominant paradigm.

Lockean scholars disagree about whether the two accounts are incompatible or whether they can be reconciled (because Locke believes that we can derive happiness from knowing that we have done our duty and because sanctions can alter the balance of pleasure and pain).[5]

On the one hand, Locke is the moment at which the idea that religious toleration is good for the peace of a society goes mainstream in Western or at least English-speaking thought. On the other hand, Locke anticipates Immanuel Kant in putting what Locke calls civil government and religion into separate boxes. This is clear from the start in the Letter Concerning Toleration: ‘I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other’.

Locke seeks to establish a public basis for limits on government, to delineate an area in which religion may affect people’s lives, but one which is demarcated on public, not religious, grounds. With regard to their private lives, people should apply Locke’s method for discerning their religious duties but are not to be persecuted solely on the grounds that they do not. However, before religious beliefs can contribute to the resolution of political questions, they must satisfy Locke’s test of reason. Locke’s test for whether a religious belief or practice ought to be tolerated is whether it is ‘lawful in the ordinary course of life’.

So, for example, he writes, ‘Is it permitted to speak Latin in the market-place? Let those that have a mind to it be permitted to do it also in the Church. Is it lawful for any man in his own house to kneel, stand, sit, or use any other posture; and to clothe himself in white or black, in short or in long garments? Let it not be made unlawful to eat bread, drink wine, or wash with water in the church’.

Locke’s theory of rights and authority is really important. It is important in British history because Locke’s ideas became the unofficial philosophy guiding British public life after the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 saw the Catholic king James II replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary II and her husband and cousin William III. It also important because Locke’s view of the division of Church and State is clearly reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.

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[1] David McIlroy, ‘Locke and Rawls on Religious Toleration and Public Reason’, (2013) Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 1.

[2]  Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature in Mark Goldie (ed.), Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 79-133; in An Essay IV.iii.18, Locke says that moral rules are knowable with the same degree of certainty as “any Demonstration in Euclid.”

[3] Locke, ‘The Second Treatise of Government’, paragraph 173. 

[4] Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, ‘Natural Law and Perfect Community: Contributions of Christian Platonism to Political Theory’, (1998) 14 Modern Theology 20; ‘The Concept of Rights in Christian Moral Discourse’, in M. Cromartie ed., A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics and Natural Law (Eerdmans, 1997), 143-156, Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Empire and International Law: The Real Spanish Contribution’, (2011) 61 University of Toronto Law Journal 1.

[5] Patricia Sheridan, ‘Locke’s Moral Philosophy’ (2016), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online at  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-moral/. Accessed 9 June 2021.