A Renewed Christian Politics

Abstract

Despite more than two decades of revisionist scholarship, Locke’s political theory remains most often associated with the Western liberal constitutional state. His major statement on politics, the Two Treatises of Government, exercised significant influence during the eighteenth century, especially in Britain’s American colonies where ideas of natural rights, popular sovereignty, contractual government, the legitimacy of revolution and of religious toleration together provided some of the intellectual background to the war for colonial independence.1 Locke continues to be read as the defender of Whig principles, the key spokesperson for government exercising legislative, executive, and federative powers based upon known laws, not the will of men, for the autonomy of the individual and the moral propriety of property ownership. Thus to argue that his was a distinctly ‘Christian’ politics, particularly in light of the fact that the Two Treatises precludes the involvement of the magistrate in the religious affairs of his subjects, in effect transforming the state into an exclusively terrestrial organization, may seem peculiar. Even in light of the argument, initially made almost three decades ago, that one cannot fully appreciate Locke’s politics without first coming to terms with his religious convictions and his reflections on community, one is still obliged to make explicit the precise connections between Locke’s Christian faith and his anti-authoritarian formula for civil society.