Abstract
This chapter argues that the contrast in attitudes among the political classes towards religious freedom and multiculturalism, as witnessed by the recent backlash against multiculturalism, is hard to justify. Those who accept religious toleration but reject multiculturalism deny that the liberal state should permit the formation of self-sufficient cultural groups within society. If there is a relevant and valid distinction to be drawn here, it must rest on the view that minority cultures’ relation to the state is qualitatively different from that of religious groups, amounting to a state within the state – hence the incendiary effect of the claim that certain groups might be able to make law for themselves. Via a re-examination of Locke’s and Hobbes’s arguments for religious toleration, I question the basis for this distinction, arguing that there is no reason why religion, as a comprehensive world-view, should accept that churches must yield to law made by the secular magistrate. This fact poses a fundamental dilemma for the state in dealing with religious malcontents.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
For example, Christopher Howse, ‘Sharia is no law for Britain’, Daily Telegraph, 8 February 2008, at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/christopher_howse/blog/2008/02/08/sharia_is_no_law_for_britain
- 2.
For example, the Conservative Party leader David Cameron described the Archbishop’s remarks as ‘dangerous and illiberal’. A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, remarked that the extension of Muslim law would be ‘disastrous’ and the former Home Secretary David Blunkett said such a step would be ‘catastrophic’.
- 3.
It is worth noting that this clause of Article 9 is immediately followed by a second, which provides that: ‘Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitation as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’
- 4.
Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972). It should be added that subsequent US Supreme Court judgements could be seen as less expansive in their interpretation of religious liberty. In Employment Division v. Smith et al., for example, the Court ruled that Oregon could ban the sacramental use by native Americans of peyote in religious ceremonies and could deny unemployment benefits to a person dismissed from his job for violating the state’s prohibition of drug use. I am indebted to an anonymous reader for pointing this out.
- 5.
The ‘Pastafarian’ religion professes belief in a Flying Spaghetti Monster as the creator of the universe. Its aim is to debunk the claims made on behalf of traditional religions in the US to inclusion in public school educational programmes. Pastafarianism was devised in protest against the Kansas State Board of Education, which had decided to teach so-called ‘intelligent design’ as an alternative to evolutionary theory.
- 6.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/profiles/commentaries/ethnicity.asp. The large number of Jedis is partly explained by an internet campaign preceding the census, which urged respondents to reply to the Census question regarding religion with ‘Jedi Knight’.
- 7.
Christopher Howse. For the context of these remarks, see the Daily Telegraph online at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ukcorrespondents/christopherhowse/february2008/sharianolawforbritain.htm.
- 8.
- 9.
In the academic literature this is a point which was argued strongly by Brian Barry (2000).
- 10.
Needless to say, the Archbishop’s position was more subtle than it was depicted as being by hostile commentators and politicians. The lecture on which hostile reaction focussed was in fact an exercise in political philosophy, which argued on communitarian grounds that the entitlements of religious groups such as British Muslims could be met only by offering them a choice of jurisdictions within carefully-circumscribed areas of law (such as family law).
- 11.
Of course, in the UK the multi-faith position coexists, incongruously enough, with an established Church. While the civic disabilities attached to membership of other churches have long been abolished, Anglicanism remains the beneficiary of state sponsorship. As such, it offers a good illustration of how toleration need not entail equality of treatment.
- 12.
Of course, a simpler route to the same conclusion would note that arguments over multiculturalism often take the form of disagreements about religious differences.
- 13.
Of course, this would still not mean that the ruler must be acting irrationally, so long as he (the ruler) thought it was possible to induce belief in this way. Below I give independent reasons for thinking it is not irrational.
- 14.
Other exponents of this view included writers such as Philipp van Limborch. See Marshall (1994: 647ff).
- 15.
Even this claim needs some qualification, since it is not impossible that someone could set herself, as a long-term goal, the acquisition of the belief that p when she currently believes that not-p. An example is the regimen which Pascal envisaged for the unbeliever who recognises that the wager on salvation requires religious belief (which is then acquired through developing habits of worship, etc.).
- 16.
See Hobbes (1991: Chapter 42, pp. 343–344), discussing the case of Naaman the Syrian. As I interpret him, Hobbes makes of the inviolability of private conviction a ground for religious uniformity, since given this inviolability, nothing the sovereign can do can jeopardise the subject’s chances of salvation insofar as the latter depends on private conviction. See my Hobbes and ‘Leviathan’ (London: Routledge 2008), pp. 151ff.
- 17.
The converse form of the argument – that tolerant regimes will be self-reinforcing – figures prominently in Rawls’s account of stability in the theory of toleration he presents, see Rawls (1972: §34, §35).
- 18.
- 19.
Alex Tuckness has suggested in his ‘Locke’s Main Argument for Toleration’ (Tuckness 2007), that Locke came, in the course of his exchanges with Proast, especially in the Third Letter, to adopt a ‘universalisation’ argument for toleration: since all humans are fallible, there is insufficient ground to believe that God would have authorised earthly rulers to impose what they regard as the true religion by force.
- 20.
‘Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist’ (Locke 1991: 33).
- 21.
‘Is it permitted to worship God in the Roman manner? Let it be permitted to do it in the Geneva form also. Is it permitted to speak Latin in the market-place? Let those that have a mind to it, be permitted to do it also in the church.’ (Locke 1991: 35).
- 22.
For a parallel argument with regard to western discourses on toleration, see Brown (2007).
- 23.
In the course of their polemics Proast uses Locke’s opposition to tolerating atheism in order to gain leverage against his toleration of dissenters, arguing that the latter would lead willy-nilly to the proliferation of atheism. See Locke, Third Letter, pp. 386–387.
- 24.
See Marshall (2006: 19).
- 25.
Locke argues in the Essay that the variation of the Sabbath between Christianity and the Muslim and Jewish religions should not be the subject of civil penalties.
- 26.
For similar remarks on Muslims, see the Third Letter on Toleration, in Locke (1867: e.g., 275).
- 27.
The passage ‘and that those … religious worship’ replaced the manuscript version, which at this point has ‘and that the propagation of these opinions may be separated from their religious worship’.
- 28.
Locke seems to have grappled with the practicalities of enforcing this distinction in respect of Catholics. He is the likely author of The Particular Test for Priests, a manuscript (Locke, Political Essays, ed. Goldie, pp. 222–224, cf. Marshall 2006: 689), devoted to setting out a test which Roman Catholic priests might take to demonstrate their allegiance to a Protestant sovereign.
- 29.
This conclusion is of course the more striking, given that Locke – at least the Locke of the Second Treatise, which was composed five or six years before the Letter – did not believe that civil society should be preserved at all costs.
- 30.
Locke seems drawn to this argument in some passages in the lengthy Third Letter.
- 31.
As already noted, of course, this premise is at odds with the doxastic argument for toleration.
- 32.
Tuckness sees this as the strongest of Locke’s arguments for toleration. In general, it faces problems familiar from other attempts to justify toleration on sceptical or fallibilist grounds (see Newey 1999: Chapter 5); but the point here is that these grounds are not available to Locke, since what drives his arguments about toleration are specific truth-claims about what doctrines, and what groups, pose an unacceptable threat to the state.
- 33.
‘If we consider right, we shall find that for the most part they are such frivolous things as … without any prejudice to religion or the salvation of souls, if not accompanied with superstition or hypocrisy, might either be observed or omitted’ (Locke 1991: 20).
- 34.
I argue that security is such a value in Newey (2009).
- 35.
Liberal theories such as Rawls’s which purportedly work from such a conception make the disposition to accept liberal norms criterial of reasonableness.
- 36.
- 37.
Similar remarks apply to Rawls, whose argument from the burdens of judgement in Political Liberalism is designed to show that it would be unjustifiable to institute a political regime based on any single ‘comprehensive doctrine’, since it is in the nature of such doctrines that they may reasonably be rejected.
- 38.
- 39.
I develop this idea further in my unpublished paper, ‘What Good is Security?’
References
Barry, Brian. 1995. Justice as Impartiality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Barry, Brian. 2000. Culture and Equality. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bou-Habib, Paul. 2006. Locke, Sincerity and the Rationality of Religious Persecution. Political Studies 51: 611–626.
Brown, Wendy. 2007. Tolerance as/in Civilisational Discourse. In Jeremy Waldron and Melissa Williams (eds.), NOMOS XLVIII: Toleration and Its Limits. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1991. In Richard Tuck (ed.), Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Locke, John. 1867. A Letter Concerning Toleration. In John Locke (ed.), Letters on Toleration. Bombay: Education Society.
Locke, John. 1991. Letter. In John Horton and Susan Mendus (eds.), John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus. London: Routledge.
Locke, John. 1997a. Essay on Toleration. In Mark Goldie (ed.), Political Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Locke, John. 1997b. Toleration D. In Mark Goldie (ed.), Political Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1983. The Discourses. London: Penguin Classics.
Marshall, John. 1994. John Locke: Religion, Resistance and Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marshall, John. 2006. John Locke and Early Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Newey, Glen. 1999. Virtue, Reason and Toleration: The Place of Toleration in Ethical and Political Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Newey, Glen. 2001a. Is Democratic Toleration a Rubber Duck? Res Publica 3: 315–336.
Newey, Glen. 2001b. After Politics: The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Newey, Glen. 2008. Hobbes and Leviathan. London: Routledge.
Newey, Glen. 2009. What Good Is Security? In Melissa Williams and Glyn Morgan (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Proast, Jonas. 1690. A Letter Concerning Toleration Briefly Considered and Answer’d. London: Theatre for George West and Henry Clements.
Rawls, John. 1972. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Rawls, John. 1999a. The Law of Peoples. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rawls John. 1999b. The Idea of Public Reason and The Idea of Public Reason Revisited. In Samuel Freeman (ed.), Rawls’ Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Scanlon, Tim. 1998. What We Owe to Eachother. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schwartzman, Micah. 2005. The Relevance of Locke’s Religious Arguments for Toleration. Political Theory 33: 678–705.
Tuckness, Alex. 2007. Locke’s Main Argument for Toleration’. In Jeremy Waldron and Melissa Williams (eds.), NOMOS XLVIII: Toleration and Its Limits. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Waldron, Jeremy. 1991. Locke, Toleration and the Rationality of Persecution. In John Horton and Susan Mendus (eds.), John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus. London: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Newey, G. (2011). How Not to Tolerate Religion. In: Mookherjee, M. (eds) Democracy, Religious Pluralism and the Liberal Dilemma of Accommodation. Studies in Global Justice, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9017-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9017-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9016-4
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9017-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)