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LEGAL TOLERATION FOR BELIEF AND BEHAVIOUR
Abstract
While most Christians have come to accept that there should be no attempt on the part of the state to coerce strict matters of conscience, many actively support the state coercively interfering with certain modes of conduct that violate God's moral law. The development of this stance occurred during the seventeenth-century English toleration debates. Then, tolerationists argued that there should be toleration for dissenting Protestant denominations, and eventually for Catholics, heretics and atheists, too. But very few strict biblical Christians, even today, endorse extending legal toleration, for example, to homosexual conduct or same-sex marriage. Two strategies, attributable to Locke, fail to support this asymmetry between religious error and the characteristic types of 'Christian immorality'. The author draws on arguments from the toleration debates to show that the boundaries of legal toleration should be extended to include these violations of divine moral law, and that strict biblical Christians should agree
Is John Locke a legal moralist? In his Letter concerning Toleration, Locke argues that, while the state should not punish people for their private religious beliefs, it is still permissible, indeed desirable, for magistrates to enforce prohibitions against people’s private sexual behavior. This suggests that he countenances moralist legislation. However, I argue that, in spite of his position on sexual liberty, Locke in fact holds a distinctive liberal conception of state power and of its scope in regulating people’s private behavior. I offer an interpretation of his views on sexual liberty that shows them to be compatible with this conception.
There is a long liberal political tradition of marshalling arguments aimed at convincing Christians that distinctively Christian reasons for issuing coercive laws are not sufficient to justify those laws. In the first part of this paper I argue that the two most popular of these arguments, attributable to Locke, will not reliably convince committed biblical Christians, nor, probably, should they. In the second part I argue that even if the Lockean arguments fail, committed biblical Christians should think that God has authorized the state only to fill the same general role that political liberals have identified for it.