(Mis)understanding John Locke on reason and religion

This blog takes its name from a work by John Locke defending Christianity from the misuse of reason alone without the requisite foundation in Revelation (see  my review of The Reasonableness of Christianity). Thus, it is disheartening to see various writers in recent years mischaracterizing John Locke as one of those Enlightenment Rationalists who helped form Modernity by elevating reason to a pedestal and rejecting religion from the public discourse. 

This supposed legacy of John Locke has been portrayed as incredibly destructive or as foundational to the American way. On the negative side, in an article at VoegelinView, Henry George discusses the “dark paths we can travel when we revere reason to the exclusion of all other moral influences,” asserting that “Liberals from Locke to Rawls hailed reason alone as the means by which we can ascertain the correct answers on how to live.” George cites Yoram Hazony who also associates of Locke with the nihilism of “reason alone.”

On the other hand, Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth characterizes Locke as one who advocated for intellectual freedom, pluralism, and “expelling from intellectual respectability … claims which are not checkable … includ[ing] most of the theological and metaphysical disputes over which the wars of religion were ostensibly fought.” For Rauch, this makes Locke a “m[a]n of genius,” and “germinal figure” in the development of the modern rationalist liberal order.

Before I go on, let me say that I agree with the main premise of both parties. I agree with Henry George that the rejection of religious morality is dangerous for society. I also agree with Rauch that Locke’s idea of intellectual pluralism was central to what made the West thrive, and I’m grateful for it. 

What I disagree with is the suggestion from both writers that a pluralist and rational “Lockean” Enlightenment society is inherently antithetical to religious beliefs and religious morality. I also disagree with the way both writers place John Locke at the center of the expulsion of religious belief and morality from intellectual respectability. Locke was a deeply and publicly religious man, attested by his writing multiple works containing theological claims based on Christian scripture - both The Reasonableness of Christianity and A Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695, and in 1707 a treatise called A paraphrase and notes on the Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians. 

One of Locke’s main purpose in The Reasonableness of Christianity was to demonstrate that reason alone is insufficient. Locke stated unambiguously that for reason to be effective for human happiness it must be founded on revelation, which is 100% the opposite of “reason alone” from George’s mischaracterization. Also, Locke wrote The Reasonableness for an educated intellectual audience, and he definitely expected his arguments from the words of Christ to be taken seriously by other thinkers, given his vigorous response to criticisms in A Vindication. This is 100% the opposite of Rauch’s assertion that Locke’s intent was to expel religious claims from intellectual respectability. It is much more reasonable to associate Locke with the opposite idea - that a pluralistic rational liberal order can and should be built on Christian beliefs - and in fact that our pluralistic rational liberal order was actually built on Christian beliefs. 

What is also true, of course, is that religious ideas have been banished from respectable academic discourse, and that religious belief has suffered at various stages of Modernity - including in the generations prior to the Great Awakening and in recent generations. But whether you think these are positive or negative developments, it is absolutely a misreading of Locke to attribute these developments to his work and philosophy. 

Joseph Loconte gives some background on the origins of this common misreading of Locke. Citing The Political Thought of John Locke, by John Dunn (1969), Loconte puts the blame on Leo Strauss (famous for identifying supposed hidden meanings in historical thinkers) and Marxist scholar C. B. Macpherson. According to Loconte, most recent scholarly work on Locke tends to disavow the Straussian reading in light of the overwhelming and unambiguous Christian content of Locke’s work. 

[Update June 12, 2022]: I didn’t realize it when I originally posted, but a new book by Yoram Hazony, Conservativism: A Rediscovery was released last month and is getting significant press, with reviews by notables such as Rod Dreher, Peter Thiel, Dave Rubin, Dennis Prager, and Michael Knowles. I haven’t read it yet, but according to a review by Donald Devine at Law & Liberty, this book continues Hazony’s misunderstanding of Locke:

Locke [and a list of other “Rationalistic liberals”] all supposedly believe in the sufficiency of reason, in fully free and equal individuals, and in moral obligations as merely personal choices rather than as morally binding. Hazony does concede that some “liberals” believe in God but that none can derive their beliefs from God. 

Devine notes the error and tries to correct the record, even citing The Reasonableness of Christianity, as I did, to clarify Locke’s position:

Both Locke and Jefferson explicitly relied upon a Creator in their Declaration and Second Treatise to justify freedom. In his The Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke even emphasized that the ancient philosophers attempted to rationalize their ideals on speculations alone and therefore their teachings of virtue had no bite. “The philosophers showed the beauty of virtue” but they “left her unendowed,” so that “few were willing to espouse her” until an empirical “immortal weight of glory” that was the Incarnation changed it all.

As a fan of Locke’s example of a Christian Enlightenment worldview, I am skeptical of the sort of “post-liberal” conservatism represented by thinkers like Hazony and Patrick Deneen, but maybe I’ll give Conservatism: A Rediscovery a read of my own to see if maybe I’m missing something.

[Update June 13, 2022]: I just saw another Donald Devine essay that was posted yesterday at The Imaginative Conservative that touches on some of the same concepts while addressing a different question. (In fact some of the text is cut and pasted from the Hazony review, not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Devine suggests there were two different strains of influence on the Enlightenment, only one of which emphasized reason alone (aka “monistic rationalism”): 

As early as 1945, Hayek had distinguished between monistic rationalists of the “French and Continental” type, such as René Descartes and Voltaire, and pluralists like Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Tocqueville as providing very different bases for understanding reality.

… [The latter group] employs multiple reasoning methods—rationalism, empiricism, intuition, and traditional common sense.

… Hayek characterized “constructivist rationalism” as the assumption that the methods of pure reason and physical science can answer all social questions through abstraction, and “critical rationalism” as that which takes better account of complexity and unpredictability in the physical and social worlds through synthesizing different elements. As Hayek explained, critical rationalism “is a view of mind and society which provides an appropriate place for the role which tradition and custom play” in the development of science and societies. It “makes us see much to which those brought up on the crude forms of rationalism are often blind.”

Now I want to read Hayek too!