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John Locke's Second Treatise On Government

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Recommended: Locke’s Essay concerning Toleration

phrase has been defined to mean the prohibition of any religious faith to have an influence on or in the government, its original intent and meaning were to prevent the government from controlling or influencing the free exercise of religion or religious expression.
The relationship of church and state, or religion and politics, mirrors the interplay of ecclesiastical and governmental institutions in society in the Judeo-Christian tradition, between religious officials and state authorities, and in the Islamic tradition, between the imam-caliphs and sultans. In the West, this interplay has occasioned some theological and philosophical formulations on the relative authority of church and state. Christian theology at one time and place or another …show more content…

Rather, the Founders’ ideas about church-state relations came principally from the works of Enlightenment and Whig writers. John Locke, author of the highly influential Second Treatise on Government (1690) and A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), refuted the doctrine of the divine right of kings and replaced it with a theory of a “social contract” by which people the ultimate sources of authority delegated to the government the responsibility to create an ordered society. Locke's theories stood in sharp contrast to the notion that secular law was subject to religious mandates. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke wrote that “the care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate. Thus the civil power ought not to prescribe articles of faith or doctrines, or forms of worshipping God, by civil law.” Rather, “the whole power of civil government is concerned only with men’s civil goods, is confined to the care of the things of this world, and has nothing whatever to do with the world to come.” It is true that Locke did not dispute all forms of government support for religion or advocate disestablishing the Church of England. But Locke’s writings must be viewed within the context of their time when notions of religious toleration and a division of ecclesiastical and civil functions were in their nascent stages. Locke envisioned a situation which would restrict the influence of each on the

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