Toleration's limits: do the exclusions of atheists and Catholics in the Letter follow from the toleration argument's own logic, or contradict it?

John Locke, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The toleration argument grounds religious tolerance in three structural claims. The care of souls is not committed to the magistrate (whose commission concerns life, liberty, and outward goods).¹ Religious belief cannot be coerced — the magistrate may compel outward conformity but cannot produce inward faith, which is the only thing of religious value.²

The church is a voluntary society for the worship of God, distinct in kind from the civil commonwealth. The exclusions follow from the structural argument, not from theological hostility. Atheists are excluded because the bonds of human society — promises, covenants, oaths — depend on belief in divine sanction beyond civil sanction, and atheism dissolves the foundation on which civil oaths rest.

Those whose religion entails allegiance to a foreign sovereign are excluded because they cannot be loyal subjects (the Letter names no specific sect; the structural form fits the Roman Catholic case in 1689 England, but the argument is institutional, not doctrinal).³⁴

Sources

1. "by the Consent of the People": alternatively, "by men" (ab hominibus). 25. "All the Life... believing": alternatively, "It is faith that gives force and effi - cacy to the true religion that brings salvation." is bounded and confi ned to the only care of promoting these things; and that it neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the Salvation of Souls; these following Considerations seem unto me…

   A Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 7, pp. 13–14

2. The Question is, Whether the Magistrate has any power to interpose Force in Matters of Religion, or for the Salvation of Souls? The Argument against it is, That Civil Societies are not constituted for that End, and the Magistrate cannot use Force for Ends for which the Commonwealth was not constituted.

   Excepts from A Third Letter for Toleration, p. 69, pp. 70–71

3. While Locke is absolutely emphatic that coercion is not a legitimate means, the Letter remains an essay in evangelical tolerance, penned by a devout Christian, albeit one whom contemporaries suspected of theological heterodoxy and who thereby himself needed—or, in his enemies' eyes, did not deserve— the blessings of toleration.

   Introduction, p. ix, p. xii

4. "Impunity... Licentiousness": alternatively, "licence for their immorality and impunity for their misdeeds." > 21. "Civil Interests": alternatively, "civil goods" (bona civilia). > 22. "Indolency of Body": alternatively, "freedom from pain." > 23. "established... things": added by Popple.

   A Letter Concerning Toleration, p. 7, pp. 12–13

Where the argument is made

• A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689 — Latin Epistola de Tolerantia, English translation by William Popple): the foundational argument that the care of souls is no part of the magistrate's commission
• the structural separation of civil and religious authority
• the church as voluntary society
• the exclusion of atheists ('Promises, Covenants, and Oaths, which are the Bonds of Humane Society, can have no hold upon an Atheist')
• the exclusion of those whose religious allegiance entails allegiance to a foreign sovereign. The Second Letter for Toleration (1690) and Third Letter for Toleration (1692) against Jonas Proast

How the argument was received

The most-litigated passages of the Letter. Waldron's "Locke, Toleration, and the Rationality of Persecution" (1988) argues that the "religious belief cannot be coerced" argument is structurally weak (Proast had identified the weakness in the original 1690 exchange). Waldron's later God, Locke, and Equality (2002) accepts the structural defense of the Catholic exclusion as institutional rather than doctrinal. The atheist exclusion is harder; modern liberal-philosophical readers (Mendus and others) charge that it sits uneasily with the toleration argument's own logic.