John Locke Separation Between Church And State
Wilfredo Alvarez Piera
Separation Between Church and State
One of the earliest modern liberals was John Locke, who in 1690 published Two Treatises following the conclusion of a major, and Locke would think senseless, religious sectarian war between Catholics and Protestants. In his manuscript where he introduced the concept of natural law and argues that faith and government have no business mixing, Locke contends that government should remain small enough not to trample on people’s liberties while offering protection under the law and safeguarding people’s personal rights. Among these rights is the right of freedom of religion. Locke had great foresight; he could see that the religious sectarian strife unfolding in England could spill over again anytime, and so he proposed his concept of separation of church and state because he knew that personal liberties would be much safer in an England without a state religion than with a state religion.
One tenet of liberalism is equality under the law, and Locke …show more content…
He believed strongly that there should be a separation of church and state, arguing the former was a spiritual steward only while the latter was a political and economic steward only. The importance of small government is in its capacity to create the space in society for laws that protect people’s rights and allow them to be equal under the law. This would be much harder to accomplish in a setting where the government was complexed with the Church to exist as a massive dual superstructure. Given the fact that wars were being fought over what would become the state religion, Locke had the foresight to see that if nobody said anything about this soon, religion would become a device of tyranny in England, not because religion itself is tyrannical, but because it was wielded by a tyrant or increasingly tyrannical
Separation Between Church and State
One of the earliest modern liberals was John Locke, who in 1690 published Two Treatises following the conclusion of a major, and Locke would think senseless, religious sectarian war between Catholics and Protestants. In his manuscript where he introduced the concept of natural law and argues that faith and government have no business mixing, Locke contends that government should remain small enough not to trample on people’s liberties while offering protection under the law and safeguarding people’s personal rights. Among these rights is the right of freedom of religion. Locke had great foresight; he could see that the religious sectarian strife unfolding in England could spill over again anytime, and so he proposed his concept of separation of church and state because he knew that personal liberties would be much safer in an England without a state religion than with a state religion.
One tenet of liberalism is equality under the law, and Locke …show more content…
He believed strongly that there should be a separation of church and state, arguing the former was a spiritual steward only while the latter was a political and economic steward only. The importance of small government is in its capacity to create the space in society for laws that protect people’s rights and allow them to be equal under the law. This would be much harder to accomplish in a setting where the government was complexed with the Church to exist as a massive dual superstructure. Given the fact that wars were being fought over what would become the state religion, Locke had the foresight to see that if nobody said anything about this soon, religion would become a device of tyranny in England, not because religion itself is tyrannical, but because it was wielded by a tyrant or increasingly tyrannical