Recovering American Civil Religion
In a recent article at American Reformer, Cole Simmons argued that John Locke’s politics cannot be considered the source of the modern civil rights regime or Washington’s managerial bureaucracy. While the lazy and indolent will regurgitate the “poison pill” thesis of liberalism as a diagnosis for all modern ills and American decline, Simmons’ article demonstrates that the truth is more complicated.
In this piece, I aim to recover and clarify Locke in a similar manner, but this time regarding his understanding of the essence of Christianity—not just for personal faith and piety, but primarily for its public and political potential. Scholarship on Locke’s religious beliefs tends in two directions: first, it seeks to deny Locke as a Christian because of his supposed heresies (anti-Trinitarianism, wavering on the divinity of Christ, denying atonement theory); and second, it seeks to deny Locke as a Christian because of how he supposedly elevates reason over revelation (which is taken as a sign of the influence of continental Enlightenment philosophy and his esoteric atheism). Both of these impulses are negative, claiming that Locke was a corrosive force upon Christianity—and by implication, that any American founder, statesman, or minister who read and appropriated Locke were likewise contributing toward Christianity’s decline. Yet this is a misreading of Locke, as there are many positive and good things to be said of Locke’s Christianity.
In addition, recovering Locke’s Christianity can help answer the questions that always arise when someone declares that politics must include religion: whose religion, what God? To this, Locke clearly and forcefully answers: the Christian God and the religion of the gospel. In his Letter on Toleration, Locke had admitted that each man is orthodox unto himself, a problem not only for Christian unity but also for civil peace and justice. In the Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke sets out to demonstrate the minimum standards of Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy for the pious believer. Each man might be orthodox to himself, but this does not make him orthodox.
What, then, did Locke believe Christian orthodoxy minimally included?
The Reasonableness of Christianity
To understand Locke’s project in The Reasonableness of Christianity, we must first start with his Letter on Toleration. There, Locke had made three arguments (among others) regarding the nature of the true Church: first, that the essential purpose of the Church was to save souls; second, that this relegated debates over church polity and hierarchy, worship and ceremony, and doctrinal minutia to secondary matters that different sects should tolerate; and third, that the Church was neglecting Christian ethics in its pursuit of political power and so tolerating all kinds of immorality.
The main purpose of Reasonableness is to provide evidence for these points that Locke had only briefly elaborated on in the Letter. Locke does this by primarily focusing on the first and third issues: what one must believe and then how one must live in order to be a Christian. By showing that Christian faith and obedience transcend the debatable matters in the second point, Locke provides the grounds for his contention in the Letter that these disputable doctrines and practices cannot be used as litmus tests for Christian faith or excuses for persecuting “unbelievers.” In addition, a secondary—but still central—purpose of Reasonableness is to show that Locke’s understanding of Christian faith and obedience is conformable to reason and so can be embraced by all men—both the “illiterate bulk of Mankind” and the wise and knowledgeable.
The central and longest chapter in Reasonableness is chapter 9, where Locke presents evidence for Jesus’ teaching about the law of faith, or the gospel. However, this subject takes up the bulk of the entire book, chapters 4-12. The main question Locke is trying to answer in these chapters is, what must one believe in order to be saved unto eternal life (i.e., to be a Christian)? His answer is that one must believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, the Son of God. Locke immediately qualifies this answer, insisting that while believing in Christ is necessary, it is not sufficient. Instead, repentance and obedience to Christ’s commands are also necessary for a person to be a genuine Christian. This answer to what one must do to gain salvation and eternal life is how Locke summarizes his doctrine of justification, what he calls “the subject of this present Treatise.”
Although the main burden of chapters 4-12 is to provide an explanation and textual proof for his doctrine of justification, Locke addresses a number of questions or objections that threaten to upend his assessment of the gospel. For example, if Jesus really wanted people to believe that he was the Messiah, why did he try so hard to hide his identity? Locke answers this beginning in chapter 7 and continues a running commentary on the problem through chapter 11. Locke’s answer is that Jesus would not have been able to fulfill his mission to die on the cross and rise again if he had boldly and directly proclaimed himself to be a divine Messiah come to deliver his people from Roman oppression. The Jewish leaders were looking for every opportunity to put Jesus to death, and the Jews themselves expected a political messiah whom they would have crowned king. Jesus could not reveal himself too soon, or in a way that got him into trouble with the Jewish and Roman authorities (i.e., being a rival king to Caesar).
Locke uses Jesus’ concealment of his identity to explain Jesus’ interaction with Pilate and why Pilate found him innocent, as well as why Jesus chose the disciples he did (“a company of Poor, Ignorant, Illiterate Men”) who were able to keep Jesus’ messianic identity a secret precisely because they were not of noble birth or more intelligent. Locke contends that this proves “the Admirable Contrivance of the Divine Wisdom, in the whole Work of Redemption,” which, he claims, condescended to “Humane Reason” instead of overpowering the natural course of things. The point Locke is making by answering these objections is to show that Jesus’ actions were reasonable and in no way detracted from the central truth that the articles of faith boil down to believing in Jesus as the Messiah and obeying his commands.
In chapter 3, Locke explains the context of the law of faith by contrasting it with the law of works. Locke divides the law of works into the law of nature, or the eternal law of right and wrong that can be known by nature, and the law of Moses (for Locke, the law of nature included all positive laws given by God). Both of these works require perfect obedience if one is to be righteous before God. Locke describes the law of Moses as containing the ceremonial, judicial, and moral law. The law of faith, however, only carries over the moral aspects of the Mosaic law, and faith supplies the defect of full obedience required by the law of Moses. The moral emphasis is important because Locke is arguing that Christianity is not primarily a ceremonial or state religion devoted to external ritual or ecclesiastical polity (as the law of works was), but an inner faith and moral transformation—the “oblation of an Heart”—that leads to a virtuous life.
In the first two and last three chapters, Locke deals with rational objections to Christianity that often cause doubt and skepticism. Locke cares to answer these doubts because he wants the vulgar masses to accept Christianity due to its moralizing effect that contributes to a peaceful, orderly, and moral civil order, and because he wants to show how reason and revelation cohere. On the latter, Locke’s position is twofold. First, because of the frailty and weakness of human reason to establish an objective and self-evident moral law with its due rewards and punishments that is acceptable to all, the revelation that came through Christ is a superior source of the knowledge of God and moral law. This is because the Messiah both reveals what the complete moral law is and the Messiah provides the moral authority and the obligation necessary for obedience. In this manner, Locke was following his Christian forebearers in arguing that grace perfects nature, instead of destroying it.
Second, despite the superiority of revealed religion, revelation must be made conformable to reason because the law of faith was communicated through evidence meant to be grasped and known by reason. This is why, earlier in the work, Locke had focused on the three ways the Messiah had declared himself: (1) through miracles, (2) in phrases and circumlocutions, and (3) by plain and direct words. Had these means of communication and evidence been confused, contradictory, or impenetrable by human reason, the law of faith and obedience never would have been believed.
Locke’s desire to show how Christian revelation is conformable to reason explains the objections he addresses at the beginning and end of the work (and even in the middle). In the first two chapters, Locke begins with Adam’s fall and the subsequent curse, death, and loss of immortality that were a precondition for redemption. Yet how could God punish Adam’s posterity for his sin, an idea that goes against “the Justice or Goodness of the Great and Infinite God”? Locke answers that each person will only be judged for what they did, and since immortality is not something anyone who has broken God’s law even once has a right to, denying it to Adam’s posterity cannot be called punishment. Additionally, the death that comes to all as a consequence of sin cannot be eternal conscious torment since that goes against the very concept of death as the end of life and would require a state of necessary and perpetual sinning that would violate God’s justice and honor. Instead, death is a cessation of being when a person is annihilated.
Finally, in the last three chapters Locke answers three final objections: (1) what about those who lived before Christ and so did not hear the gospel; (2) what about those after Christ who never have a chance to hear the gospel; and (3) why were the Epistles written if all that was necessary for faith can be found in the Gospels? Locke answers the first by claiming that the essence of faith is belief in the promises of God, and points to the saints listed in Hebrews 11 who lived by faith and were commended by God. Here Locke implies, but he does not explicitly argue, that it is possible to be saved apart from hearing the gospel preached. However, with the fullness of God’s promises now revealed in Christ, such occurrences today would be rare, according to him.
To the second, Locke argues that God will only judge each man according to the amount of revelation God has given him. If this is no more than what can be known by the light of reason, then God will judge that person according to how well they use their reason (the “Candle of the Lord”). To the third, Locke argues the Epistles were written under specific circumstances to address non-essential matters, and so they did not add anything to the fundamental articles of the faith but elaborated the fullness of faith and the nature of Christian obedience and communal life. While the essentials of the faith are the same for all, God alone holds the prerogative to require more from some than others as part of the covenant of faith—as he did with the rich young ruler.
Locke’s conclusion is that no human has the right to add or subtract from the fundamental articles of faith: that all must believe that Jesus is the Messiah, and they must repent and obey his commands. This is what is necessary to be a Christian, and thus it is false that God “cannot accept any who do not believe every Article of their particular Creeds and Systems.” In this way, Locke exposes the false religion and hypocrisy of the warring Christian sects of his day that made their particular beliefs the standard of universal faith. Locke not only provides evidence and grounding for his religious claims in the Letter, but he ultimately defends Christianity as a reasonable religion that is intrinsically amendable to, consistent with, and supportive of a political society of peace, justice, and toleration.
Christian Religion, True and Civil
Recovering Locke’s understanding of the Christian faith rebuts the skeptics’ arguments that Locke was a heretic or closet atheist. Locke, of course, was accused of being a Socinian (which he denied), an anti-Trinitarian heresy. Locke’s definition of the essence of Christianity in the Reasonableness does not mention the Trinity, nor does it explicitly make an argument for the divinity of Christ. Yet neither does the Reasonableness deny either of these doctrines (and Locke is fully comfortable using Christological titles like Messiah and Son of God). In fact, in terms of presenting the essence of the gospel, Locke follows the Apostle Paul, who, in Romans 10:9-10, argued that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and thus has righteousness, and with the mouth one confesses and thus has salvation.” Locke can hardly be accused of adding or subtracting from this gospel message.
Locke’s presentation of Christianity is also his answer to whether there is a true religion and if so, what it is. Locke does not deny to the various Christian traditions their creeds, confession, sacraments, and ceremonies; but he does make a distinction between them and the essence of the Christian faith, arguing that the two should not be conflated. In this, and in other regards, Locke’s Christianity is essentially Protestant. Where, in his time (i.e., pre-Vatican II), the Catholic Church held that there was no salvation outside of the Church—extra ecclesiam nulla salus, affirmed by the Lateran IV council and the Council of Florence and strictly interpreted until Vatican II—Locke claimed that there was. Anyone who believed in Jesus the Messiah and sought to obey him was a Christian, regardless of their ecclesiastical scruples.
While it would be anachronistic to call Locke a “Christian nationalist,” and Locke himself probably would not subscribe to the label, Locke’s Christianity can nonetheless serve as a solid and ecumenical foundation for American Christian Nationalism. As James Baird has persuasively argued in his recent book, King of Kings, Protestant political theology has traditionally argued that the civil magistrate must promote and support “true religion” as part of the common good. Locke’s Christianity is not only true and sufficient for civil religion but can be embraced by all Christians while avoiding the usual infighting. Proclaiming that the essence of Christianity is believing in Christ as the Messiah and repenting and obeying all his commands can overcome the differences among the many Protestant denominations, and also between Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy.
A Congress or President, not to mention state legislators, governors, and city councils, that proclaim and support this true religion could marshal an unstoppable coalition of politically active and discerning Christians to take America back from the forces of godlessness and idolatry currently assaulting her. Even so, this project is primarily a Protestant one, and it must be led by generous and magnanimous, albeit self-confident, American Protestants. Protestants have long espoused justification by faith, not by rite, ritual, or ecclesiastical communion; their belief in many true churches (instead of the one true Church in Rome or Constantinople) principally deposes Protestants toward Christian inclusiveness and charity; and America’s distinctively Protestant history means that this work must be spearheaded by American Protestants. Locke’s Christianity may be imperfect in many ways, but it need not be orthodox unto the reader in order for the Christian Nationalist to find in the Lockean Christian a friend and co-laborer in the Kingdom of God.
