John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration

Perhaps one of the earliest thinkers on religious freedom was John Locke. Everyone remembers Locke for his treatises on government, but he was also instrumental to the evolution of religious conscience protections with his Letter Concerning Toleration. During Locke’s time, he was caught in a frenzy or religious wars and conflicts that regularly forced dissidents into hiding. As such, Locke was devoted to trying to solve the turmoil in England and the rest of Europe through his political teachings. While his contributions to the philosophical underpinnings of religious toleration are undeniable, that is not the focus of this paper. Instead, it is much more important to look at how Locke views the relationship between the limits of the church and the limits of government, and how those two limits interact.
One of the foundational aspects of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration is the separate sphere philosophy of the church and state duality. Much like the separate sphere philosophy of gender that arrived in the 19th century, both spheres of the church and the state are supposed to remain relatively separate. The goal of the magistrate is to make earthly life better through the preservation of our natural rights, whereas the goal of the church is to secure the good life of its congregation by promoting eternal salvation. Despite the idea that

First, Locke establishes a broad equal protection standard for religious liberty. If a particular action is permitted in the normal course of life, then it should also be allowed in a religious setting. In the modern debate, this principle manifests itself clearly in the equal access principle that has arisen in various Supreme Court cases like Mergens v Board of Education and Good News Club v Milford Central School and laws like the Equal Access Act. The Equal Access Act, in line with the aforementioned Supreme Court decisions, simply states