Locke vs. Proast on Religious Toleration Debate

Introduction: The Core Dispute

Proast's main criticisms of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration are that the government does have a right — and, indeed, a duty — to use moderate force in order to compel its subjects to adhere to the one true religion, which in Proast's view is the religion of the Anglican Church. This was in response to Locke's contention that by attempting to regulate religion the state fosters conflict, whereas by adopting a policy of religious tolerance for religions that themselves promote tolerance (thus ruling out the Catholic Church in his view), the state could avoid promoting conflict. Locke also argued that the state had no mandate from God to oversee religion or religious development, and that therefore religious toleration was the only moral principle for the state to follow.

Proast disagreed, asserting that the magistrate did have a duty to oversee the religious development of its people and to keep the spread of false religion to a minimum, so as to prevent spiritual and social harm from coming to the populace. Moreover, the magistrate's mandate was evident in the Anglican Church's own constitution, which recognized the king as its head. With Anglicanism recognized as the true religion in England, the state thus had a clear mandate to support it and to prevent false religions — namely Catholicism — from gaining an advantage.

Proast's Defense of Anglican Authority

These criticisms are only justified if one agrees with Proast's claim that Anglicanism is the true religion. If one follows the scholastic conception that truth has rights and error has none, then it follows that the Anglican Church, as the church of the true religion, has the right to exert moderate force in its defense. Such a strategy is consistent with the idea of militancy in defense of a doctrine or a culture and way of life. Without defenses, a culture, a way of life, or a religion can be attacked, undermined, and eventually subjugated or eliminated altogether. Proast's argument is valid on this point because his aim is one of preservation.

It is not, however, consistent with Locke's aim, which is not preservation but prevention. Locke's idea of religious toleration is meant to prevent the Catholic Church from spreading or gaining a foothold in Protestant England. The idea is that because Catholicism represents itself as the one true religion and does not promote religious toleration — at least, it did not in the seventeenth century — it has no right to exist in a state that enforces religious toleration. According to Locke, the principle to be enforced is religious liberty, which equates to no church asserting itself as the one true church. The problem for Proast is that he believes the Anglican Church is, and should assert itself as, the church of the true religion. Proast therefore cannot support the doctrine of religious toleration as promoted by Locke, because ultimately Locke's conception of toleration would undermine the authority that the Anglican Church should seek to cultivate. In this sense, if one accepts the premise that the Anglican Church is the church of the true religion — as Proast does — Proast's argument is completely valid.

But if one does not accept that premise — and Locke does not appear to accept it, since he asserts that the state has no right to make determinations about the truth of religion, this being a matter for religious institutions rather than civil or secular ones — then Locke's argument may lay a claim to validity, to an extent. Locke promotes the notion of the separation of church and state, and this is not something that can be reconciled with a church like the Anglican or the Catholic Church, or any church that views itself as the custodian of true religion.

Locke's Separation of Church and State

For Locke, the matter of religious truth is not of great importance as far as the state should be concerned. For Proast, by contrast, the state and its form of government are an extension of the religion of its people; the state should protect and guide religious truth as vigilantly as it guards and defends its borders. Truth in religion demands as much militancy as the nation's resources do in terms of protection and support. For Locke, this is not the case — but that is only because his aim is not preservation. The purpose of his treatise is to undermine the Catholic Church; if the Anglican Church must also suffer as a kind of collateral damage, so be it. Thus, Locke's argument is only partially valid in the sense that if one's aim is to dismantle all religious bodies that seek to assert themselves as custodians of true religion, then enforcing religious toleration ensures that no single religion is permitted publicly to proclaim itself as true and thereby fulfill its missionary activities as a propagator of the faith. Religious toleration has a crippling effect on the idea of religion being true. It supports the civic notion that truth in religion simply does not matter and is not worth fighting over — and that anyone who chooses to fight over it shall be banished, outlawed, or suppressed.

Locke's arguments can therefore only be defended against Proast's criticisms if one's premise is that truth in religion is superfluous and irrelevant. If it is relevant and not superfluous, it should bear upon the state, as Proast suggests, to uphold it — just as authority in any country upholds other important institutions, resources, or laws. Truth, according to the Greek philosophers who pursued it most rigorously — Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle — was of prime importance in society, and religious truth was of equal importance, since all truth, regardless of the sphere in which it is found, is interconnected.

Conclusion: Validity, Premises, and the Limits of Toleration