A Letter Concerning Toleration

Overview

A Letter Concerning Toleration is sixty pages, written in Latin in the winter of 1685 and published anonymously in 1689, the year Locke returned to England after the Glorious Revolution. The English translation was made by William Popple, a Unitarian merchant, without Locke’s supervision, and it is the version everyone reads; Locke never publicly acknowledged authorship of either.

The circumstances are in every line. Locke had fled to Holland in 1683 after the Rye House Plot against Charles II, in which his patron Shaftesbury was implicated. In October 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, ending a century of legal toleration for French Protestants and driving perhaps two hundred thousand of them into exile, many of them into the Dutch towns where Locke was living. He wrote the letter that winter.

The form is a letter to a friend, and it is genuinely one: it is addressed to Philipp van Limborch, a Remonstrant theologian with whom Locke was staying, and the abbreviation on the title page stood for a Latin phrase naming them both.

It is also the first of four. Locke wrote three further letters answering an Oxford clergyman named Jonas Proast, who had argued that moderate force could usefully make people consider arguments they would otherwise ignore, and the later letters are longer and more grinding. The first is the one that lasted.

The argument

What a commonwealth is. Locke begins by fixing terms. The commonwealth is a society constituted for procuring and preserving civil interests, which he lists: life, liberty, health, freedom from bodily pain, and the possession of outward things such as money, land, houses and furniture. The magistrate’s whole jurisdiction reaches only to these, and his instrument is force.

Why the care of souls cannot be his. Three arguments, and Locke presents them as sufficient.

First, God never gave it to him. Nowhere is any man authorised to compel another in religion, and no man can give such authority to a magistrate by consent, because nobody has the power to abandon the care of his own salvation to someone else’s judgement.

Second, and this is the load-bearing claim, the magistrate’s power is force and force cannot produce belief. Penalties can change what a man professes and what he attends; they cannot change what he is persuaded of, and a religion consisting of profession without inward conviction is worth nothing before God. So persecution cannot produce what it says it wants.

Third, even if force could work, it would not lead to truth, since there is one truth and many magistrates, and a principle licensing each ruler to impose his own religion would deliver most of the world into error by the accident of where they were born.

What a church is. A voluntary society of people joining of their own accord to worship in the way they judge acceptable. Nobody is born into one, nobody is bound to remain, and the only power it has over its members is persuasion, admonition, and finally exclusion from its own communion, which takes nothing from a person but the membership he freely took up.

From this Locke derives what churches may do to each other, which is nothing, and what they may do to the civil rights of dissenters, which is nothing. Excommunication removes a man from the congregation and does not touch his goods, his liberty or his standing.

The attack on the persecutors. The most pointed section. Locke observes that those who claim to be saving souls by force display no interest in the sins of their own members. Whoredom, fraud, malice, avarice and drunkenness go unpunished in congregations whose ministers are exercised by the errors of a neighbouring sect. If zeal for souls were real, it would begin with the conduct of the zealous; that it does not suggests the true motive is dominion. He also points out that the persecutor’s claim to certainty is one every persecutor makes and that it cannot settle anything, since each is equally sure.

Where the line falls. The magistrate may legislate on anything in the civil sphere even if it touches religion. He may forbid the slaughter of cattle if the country needs the herds, and the fact that some sect wishes to sacrifice cattle does not exempt them; but he may not forbid it because it is a sacrifice. The test is whether the law would be legitimate if religion were not involved.

And then the exclusions, which every modern reader has to face. Locke tolerates pagans, Muslims and Jews explicitly. He does not tolerate those whose religion delivers them into the service of a foreign prince, which in 1689 England meant Catholics without naming them. He does not tolerate opinions contrary to human society or that claim special privileges for the believer. And he does not tolerate atheists, on the ground that promises, covenants and oaths are the bonds of human society and can have no hold on someone who denies God, so that an atheist’s word is worthless and the toleration that permits all religions cannot extend to the removal of religion altogether.

How to read it

Read it in one sitting; it is sixty pages of clear, hard prose and it moves.

Separate the principle from the limits. The argument that force cannot produce belief, that churches are voluntary, and that the magistrate’s remit is civil goods is complete and is what everything after descends from. The exclusions do not follow from that argument and Locke does not pretend they do; they are political judgements about who is safe.

Read the passage on the persecutors’ sincerity carefully. It is the most rhetorically effective thing in the essay and it is a genuine argument: the selective application of zeal is evidence about the motive.

Read Proast’s objection if you can find it. His case, that force cannot produce belief directly but can make a person attend to reasons they are avoiding, is better than it sounds and Locke spent years on it without obviously winning.

Then read Mill’s On Liberty, which extends the ground from religious belief to opinion generally and argues from the value of contested truth rather than from the limits of coercion. The two together cover most of the case.

And read the exclusions against the principle. A document that founds religious toleration in English and denies it to atheists is not a hypocrisy to be dismissed; it is a demonstration that a principle and its author’s willingness to follow it are different things, and that the extension took another two centuries.

Questions it raises

• Force cannot produce belief. Is that true? Proast argued that penalties can make people consider what they had refused to hear, and conversions under pressure are not unknown.
• If a church is a voluntary society, what about people born into one and formed by it before they can choose?
• Locke’s test is whether a law would be legitimate without the religious element. Does that work for cases where the practice is the religion, such as diet, dress or refusal of medical treatment?
• Atheists are excluded because oaths cannot bind them. Is the premise about oaths true, and does the exclusion survive if it is not?
• The magistrate must not impose religion, and Locke assumes a Christian commonwealth throughout. How much of the argument depends on that assumption?
• Toleration here is a limit on government power. Is that the same thing as freedom of religion, or something narrower?