Church-state relations and the rise of toleration: Locke on Toleration

The reading this week is John Locke's Letter on Toleration. There are also many printed editions; a modern one is edited by John Horton and Susan Mendus (London, Routledge 1991; it has some useful recent essays on Locke and toleration by the editors and others). For background, items on the two earlier Locke lists are still relevant. Also very good is the material at the Ockham-Bayle site - also available in a zipped file . The first includes an essay by John Kilcullen on Locke's great contemporary Pierre Bayle, and (in the zipped file) extracts from Bayle's Philosophical commentary on the words of the Gospel "Compel them to come in." Bayle mounted one of the strongest cases ever made for religious toleration. Locke mounted another.

In medieval and early modern Europe it was widely believed that every government should enforce what it took to be the true religion. A government which failed to punish people who maintained heretical opinions (that is to say, opinions contrary to fundamental Christian doctrines) would risk trouble for several reasons. Firstly, divine providence would deal harshly with those who supported or tolerated heresy, both in the afterlife (by damning them), and in this life (by inflicting plagues and similar calamities upon them). Governments have a duty to promote the common or public good; so they also have a duty to punish heresy. Secondly, religious disagreements were highly likely to bring about political conflict. Thirdly, even if you could argue that people have a right to choose their own religion, surely you could counter-argue that true Christians have a still stronger right to be protected from the offensive and blasphemous activities of heretics, which they regarded in terms roughly equivalent to hate speech (if we want to outlaw speech that we think is hateful, should we allow Christian communities to outlaw things that they find hatefully offensive?).

In the seventeenth century, intolerance was commonplace in most Protestant and Catholic countries. In England, no one was burned as a heretic after 1612, but Catholics suffered many legal disabilities. So too did Protestant dissenters. Dissenters (including Presbyterians, Congregationalists or Independents, Baptists, and Quakers) were excluded from government employment and university education, and it was only in 1689 that they were granted freedom of worship. The key argument that the English authorities used to justify intolerance ran like this. The dissenters refused to worship in the established English (Anglican and episcopalian) church because they disliked the ceremonies used in church services, and the form of church government by bishops (episcopacy). But, the authorities' argument went, the ceremonies, and the way the church was governed were matters indifferent (or adiaphora). Something is indifferent if it is not either required or prohibited by our religion or by morality (in early modern terms, by the laws of God and nature). It is precisely in indifferent matters that the state has the right to tell us what to do, and that we have a duty to obey it. For example, the state tells us on which side of the road we should drive, as it is important that we all drive on the same side, since otherwise people will get killed and the state will be failing in its duty to govern in the public good. Driving on (say) the right side is not against morality nor against my religion, so I ought to do it if the state tells me to. I ought also to obey the state if it requires me to use certain religious ceremonies (like bowing at the name of Jesus, or kneeling to receive holy communion). By encouraging everyone to use the same ceremonies in worshipping God, the state promotes uniformity, and decency and order in the church, and these are intrinsically good things.

Locke's Letter on Toleration was published in Latin in 1689 as Epistola de Tolerantia. Its purpose was to justify religious toleration by undermining the arguments outlined above. Locke claimed that the state has no authority to make laws in religious matters. Nor can it make laws in things indifferent except when doing so promotes the public good. But laws prescribing religious ceremonies would not promote the public good. The state is not authorized to use coercion in religion, and such coercion would in any case be ineffective at converting people, since (religious) belief arises through persuasion not force. Churches are purely voluntary institutions, which people must be able to join and leave freely. In ancient Jewish times, indeed, the law of Moses (consisting of moral, judicial, and ceremonial instructions) provided for the punishment of blasphemers and idolaters. But Christ had abrogated much of the Mosaic law, including those intolerant clauses. Locke concluded that dissenting Protestants should be tolerated, but he denied that the same applied to Catholics, for they claimed that pope has the power to depose secular heads of state, and in effect therefore gave their primary political allegiance to the papacy rather than to their own country.

How convincing are Locke's arguments? To what extent do they apply not just to religion but to all ideologies and attitudes? If Locke is correct in justifying religious freedom, can his arguments be extended to defend the freedom of everyone to express any ideas whatever? Locke claims that the expression of religious and other opinions should be restricted only in extreme circumstances. What are those circumstances, and is Locke right about them?