A God of One's Own by Beck Ulrich; Livingstone Rodney;

Author:Beck, Ulrich; Livingstone, Rodney; [Beck, Ulrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780745646183
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2014-08-21T18:13:14+00:00

John Locke's model of tolerance

Is one's own personal God a public God? What attitude does the religious individual adopt towards the commandments of the church, the laws of the state or the norms of society? The answer given by John Locke in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) is based on the Protestant conviction that true religion is inward, it consists in faith, in conviction; for the foundation of religion and of church identity lies in the sovereignty of subjective belief – and not outward forms of behaviour and their consequences. To put it somewhat colloquially, Locke's principle of tolerance is: ‘Believe what you will, but do not impose your beliefs on others!’

In other words, the space in which the individual's religious freedom can unfold is one where the private realm is marked off from the public one. And this is achieved by mutual agreement between the state and its citizens, whatever their religious, secular or even anti-religious convictions happen to be. In Locke's view the state that is neutral on religious matters may not impose restrictions on its citizens' beliefs. The corollary of this, however, is that rules that have not been promulgated with a particular religious community in mind and that represent universal social norms must be binding on everyone. What is vital to a religion and what is superficial emerges from the separation of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. Matters that are irrelevant to individual belief include, for example, road-building or the food supply, and so on. The fact that the state organizes such externals involves no ‘genuine’ restriction on religious liberty because that liberty lies in subjective belief not in outer circumstances. Nothing that concerns the supra-individual public can impugn the authentic, true, private, inward individual religion of a God of one's own. Thus a compromise is struck between the freedom of all citizens as far as public activity is concerned and their religious freedom. This compromise does not mean that the plurality of religions can run riot in the private sphere, but that it can run riot only in the private sphere.

Admittedly, in the context of the headlong onrush of industrial capitalism, this acts as a ‘functional’ brake on the de-restriction of religiosity. What it means is that by effecting the definitive separation of private and public and by resolutely keeping his or her distance from science and the economy, from public affairs and politics, the Christian surrenders the world to the modernization process. This spells the end of any resistance on the part of the religions to advances in science and research or in general to the global expansion of capitalism and the risks and costs associated with that expansion. Religion is confined to the religious sphere, and that sphere is to be found in the private realm. In short, systems are differentiated functionally and the entire process has a green light!

Locke's hedging round of religion aspires to a neutral definition of religious tolerance and liberty. In actual fact, however, as the child of his age, what Locke sees is the variety of Protestant sects in England.

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