(John Locke’s 1689 “Letter Concerning Toleration” considered from the perspective of 2025.)

The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which ended the Thirty Years’ War is generally to be considered by many political scientists in our own times to be an important step in the creation of the modern state because it allowed for the abandonment of any project to unite Christendom and accepted that different states would have different official religions. Arguably the next important step to a the kind of state we now have was the establishment of the principle that states could allow religious belief to vary and to be a matter of individual conscience even while maintaining an established church. This was a step taken de facto in England by the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689 and justified in principle by the philosopher John Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration” of the same year which was written in exile from the catholic monarch James II.

Locke is mainly known in politics (as opposed to epistemology where he is even better known) for his Two Treatises on Government which has been studied by generations of politics students considering the validity of the argument and the varieties of interpretation of Lockean terminology. For a long time they were thought to be a “justification” of the revolution of 1689, but it is now generally acknowledged that they were written earlier. They are a form of the classic contract theory considering the limits and legitimacy of government in terms of what kind of government we might be considered to have agreed to and allocates a right to get rid of governments which have broken the terms of such an agreement, specifically and immediately the deposing of James II. David Hume in his essay of the “Of the Original Contract” dismissed this entire genre of argument. Governments come about because of military conquests and dynastic marriages; the questions of whether we should obey them or accept them or rebel against them are far more particular and contingent than contract theory allows for. I agree with Hume.

But although Toleration shares some of its arguments with the Treatises it does not have their weaknesses being a more precise and critical argument. It is written in a tone of urgent indignation, a message of the form that we can’t . . . mustn’t go on doing this any more. What we mustn’t do is carry on the endless wars, revolutions, persecutions and conspiracies which have gone on for two centuries because of two false assumptions. The first of these is that sovereignty comes from God so that we must accept only His anointed and fight to destroy all others. The second is that any of us are in a position to know the complete truth of religion and to destroy the bodies or the welfare of others in order to save their souls.

Locke’s argument is not covert atheism or agnosticism. It is a fervently Christian argument which denies the possibility of a complete and certain revelation. He quotes the gospel as saying that wherever two or three are gathered together in sincere love of Christ He will be with them (whatever their precise beliefs and interpretations). He says, “I esteem . . . . toleration to be the chief mark of the true church” and observes that “ . . . everyone is orthodox to himself”. An important subsidiary argument is that even if we did believe in a clear and complete revelation it would not be good to enforce it because you can only come to Christ through love, not through coercion. The dangers of enforced orthodoxy are that claims to correctness “ . . . are much rather marks of men striving for power and empire over one another than of the Church of Christ”. That, surely, has a ring of permanent truth about it and works for of all kinds of correctnesses, theological or otherwise.

This combination of theological enthusiasm with scepticism generates the crucial political doctrine which later came to be called the separation of church and state for “ . . . the business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth and of every particular man’s goods and persons”. Thus we can have a commonwealth independently and irrespective of our religious institutions and beliefs and it is the job of the commonwealth to create peace and to allow prosperity: “ . . . the church is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth.” The latter must confine itself to this task which is thereby relatively easy because, “ . . . there are a thousand ways to prosperity, but only one way to heaven.” Locke’s use of “commonwealth” here is, of course, particular and slightly dangerous because it was the name that the discredited republic that he lived under in his twenties had given itself, but in using it he distinguishes himself from other contract theorists who talk about government primarily in terms of sovereignty.

All toleration must have limits and Locke’s doctrines of limits contain both clarities and ambiguities. He says that “ . . . those who deny that there is a Deity are not to be tolerated at all.” This is because they cannot make plausible promises and commitments. But toleration is not to be confined to Christians because “ . . . neither pagans, Muslims nor Jews should be refused civil rights because of their religion.” This is related to Corinthians 1, 5, 12-13 and the exhortation to judge not “those who are without”. One might quibble about the meaning of “pagan” here on the grounds that certain kinds of opponents of monotheism could be subject to the same kind of reservations as atheists. The more complicated limit of tolerance is of religion with a specific kind of political content. “A church can have no right to be tolerated by a ruler if those who join it transfer their allegiance to another prince simply by joining it.” In the context of 1689 one would assume this is a reservation primarily conceived in terms of Roman Catholicism and the Stuart succession, but actually he exemplifies it in terms of Islam: “It is useless for anyone to assume that they are Muslim only in religion and in all the rest faithful servants of a Christian ruler if they admit that they owe blind obedience to the mufti in Constantinople who in turn is completely submissive to the Ottoman emperor”. Unlike the reservation about atheism this has a very contemporary resonance in the twenty first century and suggests tolerance for certain kinds of Islam but not for Jihadists or Islamic State.

It is difficult to establish that Locke’s Letter or the Treatises were immediately influential though clearly both had a massive influence later on and mainly on the other side of the Atlantic. But the Letter was clearly in sympathy with its times and in a broad way what Locke wanted came to pass. Voltaire, in exile in England from 1726 to 1729 remarked in his Lettres sur les Anglais that England was a commercial society with little real interest in religion and tolerant of Jews, “Mahometans” and even Quakers, by whom he was fascinated as a form of Christianity quite opposite to the Catholicism of the Continent. The only heretic in England, he claimed, was the bankrupt. Later in 1761 in the final volume of his history of England Hume famously remarked that whatever you thought of England’s system of government it had a “system of liberty” that was unprecedented.

Eighteenth century England was not an admirable place from many points of view. People were hanged and transported for stealing sheep; there was a slave trade in the colonies and on the high seas; for the poor conditions were harsh and often insanitary both in the countryside and in the rapidly expanding cities. And so on. Yet it was a place of toleration and one in which both ideas and trade flourished. Jews and non-conformists were excluded from political power and from fashionable society, but they were allowed to make money and many of them did. It was mere toleration, not respect or esteem let alone equality. In a sense the whole point of toleration is living with and letting live that which you do not respect and do not regard as equal; there were second class citizens, but they could lead profitable lives.

In some respects the model for the English system of toleration was to be found in Islam. There are several references to Islam and Muslims in the Letter. It was well known that whereas Islam had been eradicated by death and exile and forcible conversion in the formerly Muslim provinces of Spain Christian worship continued in many parts of the Ottoman empire such as Greece. At one point, in a passage that seems on the verge of despair over Christian schism and mutual loathing Locke imagines two sects of Christians in Constantinople, the Calvinists and Arminians, persecuting each other “ . . . whilst the Turks, in the meanwhile, silently stand by and laugh to see with what inhuman cruelties Christians rage against Christians”.

It can be argued that toleration should be part of the essence of Islam in much the same way as Locke places it in Christianity. “There is no compulsion in religion” says the Quaran (2:256). The theologian Muhy al-Din al-‘Arabi sounds like Locke when he says, “It is vain to quarrel about religion. Everyone praises what he believes; his God is his own creature . . .” But all religions contain contradictions: Islam is also the religion of Jihad and the sort of vision of a struggle between doctrines that Locke wants us to reject. And it seems in my lifetime to have moved more towards a Jihadi mentality. The Muslim countries In North Africa which I first knew as a hitch-hiker in the 1960s now seem more hostile to western ways than they did then, perhaps because those ways seem more threatening. I have been in more than half the predominantly Muslim countries of the world over the years and I think the picture is mixed: my previous claim seems more true in Egypt and Tunisia, for example, than it does in Morocco while Malaysia seems to have evolved into a genuinely tolerant society where the women of the non-Muslim minority, mainly of Chinese heritage, wear some of the shortest skirts and shorts to be seen on the planet. Despite pessimistic expectations in the early years of independence in the 1960s the settlement of Malaysia looks like that of eighteenth century England in some ways with Chinese commercial power in a complex interaction with Malay political power.

Finally and most importantly there is the question of secular intolerance. It is evident that Locke thought the problem with an irreligious society would be a lack or moral standards. He could not envisage that humanism and the later enlightenment would be capable of developing its own theology based on dogmas like equality and human rights. A naive Whig might wish to think that we progress from toleration to “respect”, but I think the reality is the contrary: a culture in which we are “cancelling” people and correcting texts and refusing “platforms” for certain kinds of opinion is one in which toleration is in decline. Toleration lets homosexuals be; it tolerates them but it must also tolerate homophobes. The requirement to respect all others is too big an ask for humanity.

Lincoln Allison April 2025