I.

Exposition of A Letter Concerning Toleration

Before we examine the substance of Locke’s Letter
Concerning Toleration, we must point out two possible
sources of confusion in understanding it.
First, throughout the Letter, Locke complains that in his day Christians are killing
and persecuting each other on account of differences in belief and that they are
often using the power of the state to do so. His repeated condemnation of this
state of affairs can make one think that the unjustness of using the state to kill
and persecute one’s neighbors on account of religion is really what the Letter is
all about. In fact, however, the main purpose of the Letter is to establish a
general doctrine concerning the very natures of Church and state from which the
unjustness of using the state to kill and persecute one’s neighbors on account of
religion follows as a consequence. It is this general doctrine which constitutes the
central target of our attack on the Letter.
Second, throughout the Letter, Locke speaks of the “mutual toleration of
Christians in their different professions of religion” [emphasis added].[8] This can
make it seem that Locke intends the equal toleration of different religions implied
by the separation of Church and state to extend only to Christian bodies. Later in
the Letter, however, Locke speaks of toleration not only for the “different
professions of religion” within Christianity but for all religions. He asks:
Shall we suffer a Pagan to deal and trade with us, and shall we not suffer him to
pray unto and worship God? If we allow the Jews to have private houses and
dwellings amongst us, why should we not allow them to have synagogues?[9]
Therefore, the reason that Locke refers frequently to toleration for different
Christian religious bodies is merely that he is writing for Europeans, nearly all of
whom happen to be Christian; his principles, however, demand toleration for all
religious bodies.[10]
Let us now examine the substance of the Letter. As we have said, the central
contention of the Letter is that the state can have no interest in the salvation of
souls and that the Church can have no interest in civil affairs. Concretely, this
means that the state must grant equal status and liberty to all religious bodies
within its domain and that those religious bodies must in turn refrain from all
intervention in affairs of state.
To show the first part of the Letter’s central contention, namely, that the state can
have no interest in the salvation of souls, Locke begins by defining the state as “a
society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their
own civil interests.”[11] By civil interests Locke means “life, liberty, health, and
indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands,
houses, furniture, and the like.”[12]
If we wish to understand fully what Locke has in mind when he defines the state
in this way, we must turn to his Second Treatise of Government, where he gives
an account of how the state comes to be. Here he says that prior to the existence
of the state, men are in a state of nature, that is, “a state of perfect freedom to
order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think
fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending
upon the will of any other man.”[13] This “state of perfect freedom” belongs to all
men equally, so that the state of nature is also a state of equality, “wherein all the
power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than
another.”[14] Further, the “state of perfect freedom” is not unlimited but is
bounded by the “law of nature,” which obliges every man to preserve himself and
“teaches all mankind…that being all equal and independent, no one ought to
harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”[15] In other words, since
all men possess the freedom to dispose of themselves as they please equally,
the only limit to one man’s exercise of that freedom, aside from not destroying
himself, is not to hinder another man’s exercise of that same freedom. Every one
may do as he likes, so long as he lets others do as they like.
Most men, however, do not let others do as they like. Hence, Locke declares that
while man always has the “right” to enjoy his “state of perfect freedom,” his actual
enjoyment of that state is “very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasion
of others.”[16] In order to make that enjoyment certain, men form a contract with
each other whereby they agree to unite into a society and to create some
authority to whom they confer the power of protecting their lives, liberties, and
possessions from the encroachments of others. The society thus instituted is the
state. While it is true that, in entering the state, men give up certain “rights”
belonging to their natural “state of perfect freedom”–most notably, the right to
punish those who attempt to harm them without appeal to a higher power–, they
do so only in order to enjoy the remainder of those “rights,” which they value
more, more securely.[17] The end of the state, therefore, is to protect those
natural rights which its citizens value most and hence want to enjoy most without
the interference of others. When these rights become the object of the state’s
protection, they become “civil interests” or “civil rights.” Hence, in the Letter,
Locke defines the state as “a society of men constituted only for the procuring,
preserving, and advancing their own civil interests.”
Having defined the state, Locke briefly describes the duty and power of the civil
magistrate. He says that the duty of the civil magistrate is to secure the
aforementioned civil interests to “the people in general and to every one of his
subjects in particular” through “the impartial execution of equal laws.”[18] To
execute these laws, the magistrate must have the power to punish those who
violate them, and to have this power, he must be “armed with the force and
strength of all his subjects.”[19] The power of the magistrate, therefore, “consists
only in outward force.”[20]
In light of his definition of the state and his account of the duty and power of the
civil magistrate, Locke provides four arguments for why the power of the civil
magistrate does not in any way bear upon the salvation of souls.[21]
The first argument is that care of souls has not been committed to the magistrate
by anyone. It has not been committed to him by God because God has not given
any man the authority “to compel anyone to his religion.”[22] But for the
magistrate to have a care of souls would be for him to compel men to his religion,
since the power of the magistrate “consists only in outward force.” Care of souls
has not been committed to the magistrate by the consent of the people because
no one may so “abandon the care of his own salvation as blindly to leave to the
choice of any other, whether prince or subject, to prescribe to him what faith or
worship he shall embrace.”[23] The reason for this is that “faith is not faith”
without “the inward and full persuasion of the mind,” which cannot be effected by
making someone “blindly” follow the dictates of someone else.[24]
The second argument is that the power of the magistrate “consists only in
outward force,” as stated, but outward force cannot affect what one holds in the
mind. Faith, however, as stated in the previous argument, demands “the inward
and full persuasion of the mind.” Therefore, the magistrate has no power by
which he can influence the religion of his subjects. Therefore, he cannot have a
care of souls.
Note that both of these arguments rely on the claim that, since the power of the
magistrate “consists only in outward force,” the magistrate cannot exercise care
of souls in any other way than by forcing his citizens to perform acts by which
they embrace the religion of the state. If we deny this claim, then the arguments
fall apart.
The third argument is that, even if outward force could affect what one holds in
the mind, that would bring about the damnation rather than the salvation of most
men. For given “the variety and contradiction”[25] of the opinions of princes with
regard to religion, most princes would force false religions on their subjects.
The fourth argument is that the salvation or damnation of one’s neighbor in no
way advances or harms one’s civil interests. If one’s neighbor goes to hell, one’s
health or money, for example, will still remain fully intact. The duty of the
magistrate, however, is to secure everyone’s civil interests. Therefore, matters
pertaining to salvation are wholly outside of the magistrate’s jurisdiction.
One might conclude from the foregoing arguments that the basis for religious
toleration is the mere fact that the practice of one’s religion is something outside
the state’s jurisdiction. Later in the Letter, however, Locke implies that the
practice of one’s religion is something more than that, namely, a natural right:
These accusations [that assemblies of religious bodies are nurseries of factions
and seditions] would soon cease if the law of toleration were once so settled that
all Churches were obliged to lay down toleration as the foundation of their own
liberty, and teach that liberty of conscience is every man’s natural right, equally
belonging to dissenters as to themselves [emphasis added].[26]
The language of “natural right” calls to mind the state of nature. Locke seems to
be implying that the freedom to practice the religion which one’s conscience
judges to be acceptable to God is really a particular determination or expression
of man’s natural “state of perfect freedom.” In other words, man’s natural
freedom to dispose of himself as he pleases implies his freedom to practice the
religion of his choosing. This makes sense, if we bear in mind that the only limit
to the “state of perfect freedom” is the law of nature, which forbids a man from
destroying himself and from harming the “life, health, liberty” and “possessions”
of others. Inasmuch as practicing the religion that one deems acceptable to God
violates neither of these prescriptions of the law of nature, it must necessarily be
a determination of man’s “state of perfect freedom,” and in particular, one of the
determinations that man does not give up when he enters political society. If this
is true, then it would follow that the practice of one’s religion, precisely because it
in no way encroaches on other men’s civil interests, is itself one of the civil
interests that constitute the object of the state’s protection.
Having argued that the state can have no interest in the salvation of souls, Locke
then argues that churches can have no interest in affairs of state. He begins by
defining a church as “a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of
their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such manner as
they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls.”[27] As
a consequence of this definition, Locke declares that each man is free to join that
church “in which he believes he has found that profession and worship which is
truly acceptable to God” and that he is free to leave the same church “if
afterwards he discover anything either erroneous in [its] doctrine or incongruous
in [its] worship.”[28] Moreover, since a church comes to exist through the
voluntary coming together of its members, the right of making the church’s laws
“can belong to none but the society itself; or at least (which is the same thing), to
those whom the society by common consent has authorized thereunto.”[29] In
other words, the power of a church resides in the wills of its members.
When Locke says that each man is free to enter that church which he judges to
be acceptable to God and to leave the same church if he later comes to think that
it is unacceptable to God, he is in effect maintaining that in matters of religion
each man is his own judge of what is true and false. Later, he says this explicitly:
Every man in that [religion] has the supreme and absolutely authority of judging
for himself.[30]
Though he does not mean that an individual’s judgment makes religious
doctrines to be true or false, he does mean that an individual may and even
should submit each doctrine to his own scrutiny before accepting it and allow for
the possibility that later on, upon scrutinizing the doctrine again, he may find it to
be false. This, of course, is a consequence of Locke’s doctrine of the natural right
to liberty of conscience, according to which the practice of religion is a mere
determination of man’s natural “state of perfect freedom,” and a man may
therefore hold whatever religious doctrines and perform whatever religious
activities he judges to be acceptable to God. We should note here that Locke
himself is “personally” a believer and thus thinks that God has made some kind
of special revelation to man, but from what we have said, he clearly thinks that
this revelation is ultimately a matter solely between God and the individual and
that its interpretation is subject to the individual’s supreme judgment.
Locke’s definition of a church helps us to see more explicitly a consideration that
was implicit in his fourth argument for why the state cannot have a care of souls,
namely, that the basis for the state’s toleration of the religions within its domain
has nothing to do with a duty of the state to worship God. If a church, as far as
the state is concerned, is nothing but a voluntary society of men, then its claim to
toleration cannot be based on a claim that it is of divine origin and must be
accorded freedom as a requirement of divine law; rather, such a claim must be
based solely on the church’s status as a free society whose affairs do not
jeopardize civil affairs and on the natural right of men to profess whatever religion
they choose.
In his arguments for why the state has no care of souls, Locke already attempted
to show that there is no connection between civil affairs and the salvation of
souls,[31] inasmuch as jurisdiction over civil affairs demands the use of force,
whereas jurisdiction over the salvation of souls does not (and in fact cannot).
From the proposition that there is no connection between civil affairs and the
salvation of souls, however, it automatically follows that churches cannot concern
themselves with politics. Moreover, since the exercise of religion is really the
exercise of a natural right, that is, a determination of man’s natural “state of
perfect freedom,” religion is a purely individual affair and therefore has no
bearing on political life. Therefore, just as the state has no interest in the
salvation of souls, so the Church has no interest in affairs of state.
To conclude our discussion of the Letter, let us examine Locke’s attitude toward
the Catholic Church. One might think that a Lockean regime would be friendly
toward the Catholic Church, since a Lockean regime is governed by the principle
of religious toleration, and, after all, the Catholic Church is a religion. Moreover,
about two thirds into the Letter, in order to illustrate how religious opinions do not
harm civil rights, Locke mentions the belief of Roman Catholics in the Real
Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, asserting that even though that belief is false
and absurd, Catholics do “no injury” to their neighbors by holding it.[32]
Later, however, Locke makes it clear that there are other reasons which make
the Catholic Church an exception to the rule of toleration. There are cases, he
says, when churches exist of which the members “arrogate to themselves…some
peculiar prerogative covered over with a specious show of deceitful words.”[33]
As an example of such a church, Locke mentions one which holds “that faith is
not to be kept with heretics” and “that kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns
and kingdoms.”[34] Such a church interferes with civil affairs and therefore affairs
that are outside the proper domain of religion. Locke is clearly thinking of the
Catholic Church here, since he is clearly thinking of those popes who in previous
centuries had excommunicated certain European monarchs for persecuting the
Church and then declared that their subjects no longer owed them allegiance.
Another exception to the rule of toleration, says Locke, is a church “which is
constituted upon such a bottom that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso
facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince.”[35]
Here Locke explicitly mentions Islam, the members of which are subject to the
Mufti of Constantinople, who is himself subject to the Ottoman Emperor. Locke
no doubt has the Catholic Church in mind as well, however, since in addition to
being the spiritual head of the Catholic Church, the pope really is the head of a
temporal dominion, namely, Vatican City and, at the time of Locke, the Papal
States.
It should be emphasized that for Locke to regard the Catholic Church as an
exception to the rule of toleration is perfectly consistent with his principles. For
even if he is wrong about the subjection of Catholics to a foreign prince, since the
pope’s authority as head of Vatican City (and formerly the Papal States) is
accidental to his authority as pope, it is still true that when the pope
excommunicates a political ruler and absolves that ruler’s subjects of the duty of
allegiance toward him, he has become involved in a nation’s political affairs
precisely in virtue of his universal solicitude for the salvation of souls, that is,
precisely in virtue of his office as pope.[36]
Moreover, an enormous part of Catholic doctrine is concerned with temporal
matters—a point that Locke does not make but that certainly strengthens his
case. What, for example, are the Church’s teachings on marriage, education, and
economics if not teachings that pertain to civil affairs? These considerations
should give those Catholics pause who subscribe in principle to an essentially
Lockean understanding of Church and State relations but nevertheless demand
that the state grant the Church liberty. For the Catholic Church, a Lockean
regime can turn out to be just as oppressive as a Hobbesian or Spinozan regime.