Letter Concerning Toleration

Quick Facts

• Author: John Locke
• Written: 1685-1686, while Locke was in exile in the Dutch Republic
• Published: 1689, first in Latin as Epistola de Tolerantia and then in English translation
• Main subject: religious toleration, freedom of conscience, and the limits of government
• Core claim: the state should protect civil peace and civil rights, not force people into one official religion

The Problem

Locke is writing in a world where religion and politics keep blowing each other up. England had a state church. Catholics and Protestant dissenters faced legal penalties. The Test Act kept many non-Anglicans out of public office. Across the Channel, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, stripping French Protestants of protections they had previously held. So this was not an abstract seminar question. It was a live political problem: what should a government do when people in the same country disagree about God, worship, church authority, and salvation?

The old answer was uniformity: pick the official religion and use law to pressure people into it. Locke thinks that answer fails twice. First, it gives government power over something government is not built to handle. Second, it does not actually produce sincere faith. It can make someone show up at the official church, recite official words, or hide their real beliefs. But it cannot make the mind genuinely believe.

So the problem of the Letter is simple: how can a society stay peaceful when people deeply disagree about religion? Locke's answer is not "religion does not matter." He thinks religion matters a lot. His answer is that civil power and religious persuasion do different jobs, and mixing them corrupts both.

In One Minute

A Letter Concerning Toleration argues that government should not use force to decide religious belief. The state exists to protect "civil interests": life, liberty, health, property, public peace, and the ordinary safety of people living together. Churches exist for worship and salvation. Those are different tasks.

Locke's most famous move is the church/state distinction. A government can punish theft, assault, fraud, and public disorder because those harm civil life. But a government cannot save a soul by law. It cannot make baptism, communion, prayer, or doctrine spiritually meaningful by threatening fines, prison, or loss of rights.

The Letter is a classic source for liberalism, religious liberty, and limited government. It also has limits that matter. Locke does not defend unlimited modern pluralism. He excludes atheists and groups he thinks threaten civil society or owe political loyalty to a foreign power. That part is ugly and important: Locke helps build the liberal case for toleration, but he does not carry it all the way to equal liberty for everyone.

The Main Argument

Locke starts by narrowing the job of government. A commonwealth is not a machine for making people holy. It is a political society built to protect earthly goods: bodies, property, legal security, and peace. That means civil rulers have real power, but their power has a boundary. They can use force where force makes sense: stopping violence, protecting property, enforcing public law. They should not use force to settle questions about grace, sacraments, church ceremonies, or which doctrine leads to heaven.

Then Locke defines a church in a very important way. A church is a voluntary society. People join it because they think its worship and teaching help them serve God and seek salvation. If a church thinks someone is teaching false doctrine, it can remove that person from membership. But it cannot take their land, jail them, or call the police on them just for believing differently. Church power is persuasion, teaching, discipline, and exclusion from that religious body. It is not civil punishment.

The deepest reason is conscience. For Locke, real religion requires inward conviction. If you only kneel because the magistrate told you to kneel, that is not faith. If you say the official creed because you are afraid of losing your job, that is not belief. Force can move your body. It can make you perform. It cannot make your mind see something as true. A forced conversion is basically religious theater.

This is why Locke thinks persecution is both wrong and stupid. It is wrong because the state has stepped outside its proper business. It is stupid because it cannot achieve the religious goal it claims to serve. If salvation requires sincere belief, then threats are the wrong tool. They produce fear, hypocrisy, resentment, and civil unrest, not genuine faith.

Locke is not saying every religion is equally true. He is not a modern relativist saying, "Whatever, everyone has their truth." He still thinks there is religious truth. His point is narrower and stronger: even if one religion is true, the state cannot make people truly believe it by force. Truth has to be taught, argued for, preached, and accepted by the mind. It cannot be beaten into someone.

The Letter also connects to Locke's broader political philosophy. In Two Treatises of Government, Locke limits government by rights and consent. In the Letter, he limits government by the difference between civil interests and spiritual salvation. The same basic instinct is there: political power is not absolute. It has a job, and when it goes beyond that job, it becomes tyranny.

Locke's toleration still has boundaries. He says the state may act when a religious group threatens civil peace, claims a right to break ordinary law, teaches domination over others, or owes political obedience to an outside ruler. Historically, this is where his suspicion of Roman Catholics enters, because he feared allegiance to the pope as a foreign jurisdiction. He also excludes atheists because he thinks oaths and promises depend on belief in God. Modern readers usually see these exclusions as failures in Locke's own theory. If conscience should not be coerced, then atheists and Catholics should not lose civil rights simply because of belief. Still, the exclusions show what Locke was really doing: not defending absolute freedom, but drawing a political line between tolerable religious diversity and what he thought threatened civil society.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Toleration: Toleration means allowing people to worship and believe differently without using law to punish them for it. It does not mean agreement. An Anglican can think a Baptist is wrong, and a Baptist can think an Anglican is wrong, but neither should use the state to ruin the other person's life.

• Civil interests: These are the earthly goods government exists to protect: life, liberty, health, property, and public peace. If someone steals your house, the magistrate should act. If someone refuses your church's communion service, that is not the magistrate's business.

• Conscience: Conscience is a person's inward judgment about what they owe to God and what they honestly believe. Locke thinks this cannot be outsourced to the state. If a law says "believe this doctrine," your mouth may obey, but your mind may not.

• Church as voluntary society: A church is a group people join for worship and salvation. It can set rules for membership. For example, a church may say, "If you deny this doctrine, you cannot be a member here." But it cannot fine you, imprison you, or take away your civil rights.

• Coercion versus persuasion: Coercion uses force or threats. Persuasion uses reasons, preaching, teaching, and example. Locke thinks religion belongs to persuasion. A sermon might change your mind. A prison sentence can only make you pretend.

• Separation of church and commonwealth: Locke does not mean religion must disappear from public life. He means church authority and state authority have different purposes. A minister can argue that a doctrine is true. A magistrate should not turn that doctrine into a civil penalty.

• Limits of toleration: Locke does not think toleration covers actions that harm civil society. If a group says its members may break contracts, attack outsiders, or ignore ordinary law, the state can intervene. The tricky part is that Locke applies this limit too narrowly for modern standards, especially in his treatment of Catholics and atheists.

Why It Matters

The Letter matters because it gives one of the cleanest early modern arguments for religious liberty. It does not just beg rulers to be nicer. It explains why forced religion misunderstands both politics and religion. Government protects civil peace. Religion requires inward conviction. Once those two points are clear, persecution starts to look not only cruel but conceptually confused.

It also helped shape the liberal habit of asking, "What is the proper scope of state power?" That question sits behind later debates about free speech, conscience, minority rights, and constitutional limits. Locke's answer is not the whole modern answer, but it is a major starting point.

The page is also useful because it shows liberalism in its unfinished form. Locke defends toleration powerfully, then withholds it from people he thinks cannot be trusted. That tension is part of the history. Later liberals, radicals, secularists, and religious minorities push the argument further than Locke did.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Proponents and descendants include Protestant dissenters, later liberal defenders of religious liberty, and Enlightenment writers who treated persecution as a political disaster. Voltaire especially admired English arguments for toleration and helped popularize anti-persecution ideas in France.

The main early opponents were defenders of religious uniformity. Jonas Proast, an Anglican critic, argued that moderate force could push dissenters to consider the true religion. Locke replied in later letters that force still cannot create sincere belief and that giving magistrates this power invites abuse.

Modern critics usually focus on Locke's exclusions. His refusal to tolerate atheists, and his suspicion of Catholics, look like failures of his own best argument. If belief cannot be forced, and if civil rights should not depend on church membership, then those protections should extend beyond the Protestant world Locke cared most about.

The deeper opponent in the background is Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes wanted strong sovereign control over public religion because divided religious authority could fracture the state. Locke agrees that civil peace matters, but he thinks the state becomes more dangerous, not more stable, when it tries to command conscience.

Related Pages

• John Locke
• Two Treatises of Government
• Liberalism
• Enlightenment
• Voltaire
• Thomas Hobbes