What Locke Knew About Elites
How liberals learned to stop worrying and love the establishment.
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In early September 2019, the former Prime Minister of Belgium tweeted: “This week, the most important event was … the discovery of an unkown [sic] text by the Father of Liberalism, John Locke, on tolerance.” That the text in question—a 1667 manuscript memorandum entitled “Reasons for Tolerating Papists Equally with Others”—was not, in fact, a defense of tolerance towards Catholics, but rather a systematic outline of Locke’s reasons against it, didn’t seem to matter. For the purposes of social media, what the “Father of Liberalism” actually had to say about tolerance, or its limits, was beside the point.
Of course, understanding who Locke was, or what he actually believed, has always been more difficult than proclaiming what he represents. Despite his qualms about Catholics—and atheists, too, as we shall see—Locke is still commonly celebrated as the inventor of the modern liberal approach to tolerance, understood as a commitment to separating church and state and protecting individual rights.
For Americans, especially, “Lockean” toleration implies a principle of disestablishment, according to which the state has no business telling citizens what to believe, let alone publicly favoring or disfavoring any particular religion. Accordingly, “Locke the Liberal” has long been credited in the United States as an unofficial author of the opening clauses of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
And yet, if one looks more closely at Locke’s famous 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration—and the peculiar circumstances in which it was produced—what emerges is an unfamiliar vision of “Lockean” toleration as a project of religious and political establishment, one focused on accommodating some (albeit limited) dissent from public orthodoxy, while also promoting a more reasonable, liberal, and tolerant approach to religion supported by the state.
Recovering this alternative vision matters for more than just historical reasons. Specifically, it sheds light on the curious way in which modern democracies have continued to generate liberal “establishments” of their own. In universities, the law, journalism, and the arts, we have seen the rise of institutions populated by a class of highly credentialed (if not always well-educated) individuals fluent in the language and ideological assumptions of liberalism—not only with respect to tolerance, but also personal autonomy, diversity, and “reasonable” dissent. Contemporary liberals would thus do well to recognize that when populists and demagogues rail against the “liberal elites,” they often have this authentically Lockean form of establishment in mind.
Locke Is Not Who You Think He Is
So important is the supposedly “Lockean” principle of disestablishment to modern tolerance that American liberals are often surprised to discover that some form of state-involvement in religion remains the rule in Western Europe, not the exception. In Belgium and Luxembourg, for example, public funding for recognized religions is raised through general taxation, while established national churches remain a going concern in many Nordic countries, as well as the United Kingdom.
An American studying abroad at Oxford or Cambridge will not be alienated by the sacred architecture, copied countless times at home; yet the centrality of Anglican chapels to college life in a public university cannot help but seem strange. Even worse: Locke’s own Oxford college, Christ Church, doesn’t have a chapel, it has a cathedral, and its “Dean” remains an ecclesiastical appointment.
This fact, among others, ought to remind us that the historical context in which Locke originally wrote his Letter was an emphatically establishmentarian one. Take the so-called Toleration Act of 1689, which passed shortly before the Letter’s publication. Officially entitled “An Act for Exempting their Majesties Protestant Subjects dissenting from the Church of England from the Penalties of certain Laws,” this legislation did exactly what it said on the tin: namely, suspend some (but not all) of the existing English laws criminalizing dissent from the established church… but only for Trinitarian Protestants. Catholics, Quakers, and so-called “Socinians” or non-Trinitarian Christians were intentionally left out.
The continued dominance of the Church of England meant that Locke and other proponents of toleration in the period generally had two policy options in view. The first, known as “indulgence,” proposed to repeal or otherwise suspend the laws punishing non-attendance at public worship, as well as banning private religious meetings. The second, known as “comprehension,” proposed to accommodate diversity within the established church by paring back its doctrinal orthodoxy in order to welcome many (if not most) Protestant dissenters back into the fold.
Needless to say, neither form of toleration proposed to disestablish the Church of England. Rather, both presupposed the continued existence of an established church.
Given this, one might wonder whether the rigidly disestablishmentarian vision of tolerance attributed to Locke by modern liberals comes anywhere near to being his own. We know, for instance, that despite his well-attested heterodoxy, Locke remained a communicating member of the Church of England throughout his life. Moreover—and much like his fellow patron saint of modern liberalism, John Rawls—it appears that Locke originally intended to take Holy Orders while at Oxford, although he later sought, and received, an exemption from this academic requirement.
How to square these facts with the more radical sections of his Letter? Take its preface “To the Reader,” which explicitly rejected the establishmentarian policies of indulgence and comprehension as insufficient:
It is neither Declarations of Indulgence, nor Acts of Comprehension, such as have yet been practiced or projected among us, that can do the Work … Absolute Liberty, Just and True Liberty, Equal and Impartial Liberty, is the thing that we stand in need of.
This passage is often cited as evidence of Locke’s own disestablishmentarian commitments. The only problem is that Locke didn’t write it—nor, indeed, did he compose the English text of 1689 still routinely published under his name.
Locke had written his original Epistola De Tolerantia in Latin for a European audience while in the Netherlands, where he had taken refuge as a political exile. The celebrated English Letter published four years later was, in fact, an unauthorized and somewhat loose translation of this Latin text, along with an entirely new preface, written by an obscure Yorkshire wine merchant named William Popple. Although they would later become friends, Popple evidently undertook his translation of Locke’s Epistola without the author’s knowledge or permission—and with his own recent experience of persecution in France in mind. By then, Popple was already on record as viewing the establishmentarian policies of indulgence and comprehension as insufficient, in a way that Locke was not.
In other words, the plain-speaking and commonsensical English voice of the Letter begging to “speak the Truth, as becomes one Man to another” and pleading for “Absolute Liberty” in matters of religion was not Locke’s—it was Popple’s. And the latter has yet to receive his due from intellectual historians.
But what of the Letter’s other famous declarations, for instance that “no body is born a Member of any Church,” and that “there is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel, as a Christian Commonwealth”? Certainly, a separation of church and state is implied here, but in what sense?
Such statements might, I think, be understood to imply a principle of “nonestablishment,” as the political theorist Cécile Laborde puts it—for instance, in a colonial context where there was, as yet, no established church. But they do not seem to me to imply the necessity of disestablishment in cases where there was already an established church—certainly not in the way that Popple’s preface suggests. Indeed, Locke would later praise the Toleration Act directly in a private letter addressed to the Epistola’s original dedicatee as laying “the foundations … of that liberty and peace in which the church of Christ is one day to be established” (emphasis mine).
Recognizing that the historical Locke’s preferred approach to toleration was less radical—and indeed less tolerant—than is often assumed can, in turn, help us to make sense of some of the Letter’s less comfortable features, including its notorious exclusion of Catholics and atheists. Both exclusions suggest that while Locke was straightforwardly opposed to penal laws of the kind that had hitherto afforded the Church of England a monopoly on public worship, he nonetheless accepted the continued use of civil oaths and Test Acts as a way of ensuring that only those who were sufficiently supportive of the newly tolerant status quo could participate fully in political life.
That Locke envisioned a continued role for the state in policing religious doctrine is clearest, perhaps, in the Letter’s insistence that only those churches that “own and teach the Duty of tolerating All men in matters of mere Religion” could themselves claim to be tolerated. Here, Locke’s emphasis on a minimal, but necessarily creedal, kind of conformity complemented his conviction that an established church and its clergy might still play an important role in a tolerant society—specifically, by serving as ethical exemplars and modeling a more tolerant and civil approach to Christianity for laypeople.
Locke’s largely cultural approach to religious establishment was thus dependent on the training of “reasonable” clergymen who would “own and teach” the duty of toleration to others, while also acting as moral censors from their institutional perches in parish churches and (more importantly) the universities. Under this system, Oxford and Cambridge would continue to function as they had done for centuries—namely, as the key credentialing bodies for the state-sponsored clergy, among other educators. (Locke’s notorious 1697 Essay on the Poor Law likewise argued that children caught begging should be sent to “working schools” and forced to attend church to improve their morals.)
Here, we encounter a much broader understanding of establishment—or better yet, “The Establishment”—than the one usually at work among contemporary liberals. On this more authentically “Lockean” understanding, a high (but not unlimited) degree of nonconformity should be made not only legal, but socially acceptable. At the same time, however, there should also be an established clerisy, firmly ensconced in public institutions, around whom others might conform, thereby setting the moral tone for society at large.
A New Liberal Establishment
Taking a step back: What might my admittedly unorthodox reading of Locke’s Letter tell us about tolerance today?
First, I think it should alert us to the ways in which the assumptions of established religion continue to shape not just how American liberals think about tolerance, but how we speak about it, here and now. One finds tell-tale traces of this influence in our vocabulary—for instance, “dissent” and “nonconformity”—as well as our persistent preference for the term “disestablishment” (as opposed to the more accurate “nonestablishment”) when describing places like the United States, where there was never any national church to be disestablished in the first place.
Secondly, it may help us recognize that the public governance of morality in America has long relied on a largely informal cultural establishment of the kind envisioned by Locke. Today, this “liberal establishment” has taken root not just in churches, but across increasingly broad sectors of society. Universities, in particular, have continued to perform the same credentialing function that they performed in 17th-century England, for instance by making sure that the nation’s elite are—or at least profess to be—orthodox on questions of public morality. In other words, they must be sufficiently “tolerant,” in the increasingly narrow sense of being supportive of racial and cultural (but not necessarily intellectual) diversity, minority rights, sex and gender nonconformity, and so on.
And so I don’t think liberalism’s critics, whether on the left or on the right, are wrong when they complain that a liberal ideological impulse has taken root in the halls of higher education, nor when they link this impulse with John Locke. As the historian Claire Arcenas has shown, Locke’s works took especially deep root in American colleges and universities starting in the 18th century—and there, until recently, they’ve stayed.
The political philosopher Leo Strauss once described Locke as “the chief and perhaps sole idol in the temple of liberalism, and whoever questions that idol is guilty of what the liberals themselves call ‘unorthodoxy.’” Without endorsing Strauss’ reading of Locke, I think his language of “orthodoxy” captures something important.
Critical and postcolonial theorists used to argue that the United States and other supposedly secular liberal democracies had an established religion after all—namely liberalism—even if they didn’t have an established church. But I think it may be more accurate to say that liberalism in America functions less like a religion and more like an established church in the Lockean sense: as a set of publicly privileged institutions charged with transmitting and maintaining a public creed, while also cultivating a common culture and moral sensibility among the nation’s elites.
On this view, 20th-century liberal academics were emphatically rooted cosmopolitans: their “parish” bounded not geographically, but institutionally and ideologically, through the shared texts, conceptual vocabulary, and social networks of elite universities. Those universities, in turn, taught successive generations of students to think—and speak—in terms of individual rights and personal autonomy, and to valorize anti-establishment attitudes like dissent and nonconformity as essential political virtues. But even as these universities encouraged young people to rebel against “The Establishment,” they also launched their graduates into influential careers—not just in governmental institutions, but perhaps more importantly in non-governmental ones like law, journalism, the arts, and academia.
And from their institutional perches, those students continued to preach the liberal individualism and social justice gospel they had learned at university—not as an official orthodoxy, or even a self-conscious one, but as a broad, and often unarticulated, moral consensus about what counts as a “reasonable” belief or socially acceptable opinion. Within this informal cultural establishment, dissent of the right kind is not only permissible, but admirable—as long as it knows its place. (As an erstwhile campus conservative myself, I have experienced this process firsthand.)
No wonder, then, that conservatives and leftists alike complain about the liberal establishment and its particular entrenchment in American universities. It remains to be seen whether this establishment can survive ongoing attack from both the left and right with any of its historic social, cultural, and economic privileges intact. In particular, conservative critics of the university are now (with state support) establishing their own institutional footholds on campus, from which they hope to shape undergraduates in their own image and reform the country’s Lockean establishment from within.
How tolerant this newly conservative cultural clerisy will be of ideological dissent or nonconformity, it’s too soon to tell. Either way, the debates that shaped Locke’s arguments remain closer to our current predicament than many modern liberals like to admit. As Locke knew well from personal experience, universities have long played an important role in the politics of establishment. Why should it be otherwise today?
Teresa M. Bejan is Professor of Political Theory and Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford.
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