John Locke: Letter on Toleration

Reading is good!

Hail and welcome to another week in the Word Emporium

A) The Swirl of thoughts from Rome to the Glorious Revolution and 2TKs Britain!

This past few weeks I have been slowly reading John Locke’s Letter on Toleration. As in: a couple of evenings a week slow and a few pages at a time slow.

Normally at the bar at a local hotel, with a Martini on the side at the weekend (Thursday or Friday evening). So there am I seated on a high stool at a small hotel bar, surrounded by Arabs drinking their lagers and wine, smoking cigars and watching football: whilst I have my phone propped up against a Stella Artois tap and reading John Locke on toleration. It seems all perfectly natural and everyone seems happy enough in their discourses and life.

I am gearing up to re-read Lockes Treatise on Government. I decided I needed a primer as it were. A way into how he writes and how he develops themes. This Letter on Toleration is the perfect primer. Really accessible to readers. A great introduction to Locke if you have not come across him before nor read his more famous works.

Of course readers will already know that I recently read the Life of Cato by Rod Goodman and Jimmy Soni. This I really enjoyed as well. It got me thinking about political dissension and breakdown and civil war.

I thought to myself following Cato, where next? A work of fiction perhaps? Something light after the mental image of Cato taking his own life? Even as they tried to apply stitches to his sword wound, he ripped them apart: and died at his own hands and will.

It was John Locke and not a Jane Austin that popped into my head as the next step. So here I am. Journeys, even ones of reading and the inner life, are worth pondering.

The reason I chose Locke is that I know he wrote that it is acceptable, under particular circumstances, for a people to remove a Government. The Roman Civil war in effect overthrew the Roman Republic as a functional entity. The English Civil Wars removed a head from the shoulders of a monarch.

Ironically it seems that Cato, that stalwart defender of The Republic who yet by his intransigence, unbending political view, arguably precipitating the very Civil War that would end the Republican ideal he cherished so highly.

I just could not remember the principles and the points that Locke made in a different context but with an English Civil War very much in recent memory for him. So it is time to refresh my memory and go deeper hopefully than I have done before.

Then there is a third era on my mind. The one that is unfolding before my own eyes in current day Britain of 2025. Mass immigration, mass censorship, two tier justice, identity politics, a minority Government that holds unduly excessive power in a Parliament that seems woefully and wilfully out of step and even in opposition to the common will that it purports to govern. The bureaucracy reflecting its own elitist agenda, equally out of step with the people.

You can see that after Cato and Pompey and Caesar, I wanted something more. Gosh, looks like I am in rebellion! Well, at least in my reading! I do not advocate violence or a civil war. Yet I can sense it coming. Even in the UK. I need to be mentally prepared.

B) John Locke, Letter on Toleration.

So the Letter on Toleration is most apt. I am, as usual not here to give you a commentary. I am here to encourage you to go and read it for yourself as well. Make your own conclusions! Be impressed in ways that perhaps I miss! Talk to me later about how it changed, amended or cemented your views. We want discourse to follow. Discourses to be open.

The first thing that struck me is the context that Locke is writing in. It is a Christian context. He is talking about the roles of Church and State. It struck me not so much that Locke is engaged in his time and context and that his readers in 1685 were being presented with his argument with this religious context to the fore. Not that.

Instead it struck me just how much modern Britons do not even know what Christianity actually is let alone understand the structures of governance and differences between an Episcopalian and a Presbyterian forms would be, for example. In my lifetime we have actually accelerated the disavowal of Christian religious conversation and experiences. Even the acquisition of knowledge, for its own sake, regarding humanities many forms of connecting to Deity since the dawn of humanity is somehow seen as suspect.

Removing Christianity on purpose from our contemporary experiences and of many of our cultural rituals. There is never a vacuum in nature. We have created one in modern Britain. What will sweep into to replace it? The atheistic dream or the humanist wish? Or a new or different religion that may well have very different social, political views and principles that would be alien to any principles that a Locke would be advocating?

You might object that Christmas is still a huge event. Yet look at what it is become: a consumer event with very little connection to ideas of Nativity. Or the essential Christian ritual of Crucifixion and Resurrection now reduced to chocolate and bunnies and borrowing a Pagan Goddesses name to wrap it up in.

You might object further and say, “ Syre! You are a pagan! What has this lament about the passing of Christianity got to do with you? Surely you have little or no stake in this! You romantic old fool! If the era of Locke has now passed almost completely what then? The History of Humanity is littered with such rise and falls?”

Modern Druidry did not itself arise in a vacuum either. It arose in the very broadly speaking tolerant cultural context of Britain in the centuries after Locke. As a Pagan I have benefited from the broadly liberal, democratic process that has gradually allowed freedom of worship for example. Should we let that now erode because we cannot acknowledge the journey that brought these benefits? A journey with religion at his heart throughout. Tested, contested, adversarial arguments that has led to what we still possess today.

Part of that developing English and then British history, is wrapped up with Christianity and Christians ( and others) debating, philosophising about the role of the State. All along the spectrum from theocratic to perhaps at the other end Locke himself in this Letter of Toleration: separation of Religion and State. I am not embarrassed or at a disadvantage to acknowledge it.

What is more, I understand it. How many young British people would have the framework to do the same without presupposing Locke to be either a Totem of a religious past that clouded his world views or anachronistic and thus less valuable to contemporary issues?

My own father's view was agnostic. Whilst he seems to have recognised the deep religious impulse for connection to deity: he personally had none. He did not however say or teach me or my brothers that we should be like him. We were to find our own way, our own path on such matters. That was his particular inheritance and gift given to us. Only possible in a land of toleration. Locke would surely see contemporary Britain as just one possible tolerant outcome of his ideas?

So the next impression left upon my mind was how Locke is making it crystal clear throughout that the Magistrate is a civil power quite separate from a religious one. They fulfil different roles. Lockes argument and presentation of his principles is that a religious leader may well have a ‘commission to admonish, exhort, convince another of error and by reasoning to draw him into truth: but to give laws, receive obedience and compel with the sword, belongs to none but the magistrate’.

One is to point to eternity and the care of your soul as it were. Whilst ‘’all the power of civil government relates only to mens civil interests and is confined to the care if the things of this world and has nothing to do with the world to come’.

What is more Locke makes it very clear that the Magistrate must stay in his lane as we might say today. Locke writes that ‘the 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’. No force or power on earth can force a person to be saved ‘’and therefore, when all is done, they must be left to their own consciences.” . How religious persons want to congregate and create structures for their mutual, one assumes benefit, is unto them.

Then Locke sums up in the next quote a statement that I found so awesome, as soon as I read it I shared with my friends;

“If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbour. If a Jew does not believe the New Testament to be the Word of God, he does not thereby alter anything in mens civil rights. If a heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to be punished as a pernicious citizen’.

I think I could not agree more.

Locke also very shortly after that awesome summation continues, “ the business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety of the commonwealth”. Something I think that the modern body politic definitely should revisit and insist upon in Britain with our ever increasing government regulation and opposition to free speech.

Lastly in an age that thinks that feelings and experiences are the defining characteristics of a worthy life, Locke has a very simple principle;

“Every one is to be accountable for his own actions”.

Actions, what you do and choose not to do, your choices of behaviours and tangible treatment of others are what define you. These are what Civil laws seek to regulate and if necessary punish when you go beyond the boundaries. For toleration is not licentiousness. It has clear boundaries for Locke.

If we don’t have them or do not know them or are now unable to discern them that is because we have lost the essence of toleration itself. Replacing it with identity, status, productivity and thinking that wealth is the only guarantor of freedom for example. Or that a Government is the answer. A series of ideas and views that enslave minds in fact.

As you can tell, this Letter on Toleration has made a mark. To recap it made me think about how much Britain has thrown away in its culture and heritage in a desire to be ‘vanilla’ I think is the modern parlance. We are the beneficiaries of a system of separated powers (not as explicitly drawn as the USA however).

We are also faced with a significant alternative ideology that is diametrically apposed, on principle, to Lockes ideas. A religion that is the very symbiosis of State and Religion with direct coercive powers. With advocates amongst us more than willing to use violence to advance their particular version. Indeed its name means, Submission and some are intent on making the rest of us do so.

I think our society needs more discourses about Locke.