“Neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion. The Gospel commands no s

Tuesday, August 7, 2007 by CommonDreams.org | A Christian Nation? | by Carol Hamilton

On August 6, 2007, the New York Times reported on an interesting dispute between the campaign of Sam Brownback and that of Mike Huckabee. According to Times reporter Sarah Wheaton, the following remark set off the dispute:

“‘I know Senator Brownback converted to Roman Catholicism in 2002,” Mr. Rude wrote. “Frankly, as a recovering Catholic myself, that is all I need to know about his discernment when compared to the Governor’s.” The message struck some as an attempt to highlight Mr. Brownback’s Catholicism in a state with a large Protestant electorate.
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What about the influence of John Locke? I asked them. Locke, himself a devout Christian from a Puritan family, inspired Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom written in 1777 and passed, thanks to James Madison, in 1786. Jefferson’s statute is particularly indebted to Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), which you can read in its entirety here. In it Locke declared, “Neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion. The Gospel commands no such thing.”

As Locke knew, religious strife-not only between Catholics and Protestants, but among Protestants-had resulted in “factions, tumults, and civil wars,” causing the death or exile of thousands of Europeans. “It is not the diversity of opinions (which cannot be avoided),” Locke wrote, “but “the refusal of toleration to those that are of different opinions (which might have been granted) … that has produced all the bustles and wars that have been in the Christian world upon account of religion.” The only way to avoid such conflicts was to separate Church and State, he concluded, because

“If each of them [Church and State] would contain itself within its own bounds - the one attending to the worldly welfare of the commonwealth, the other to the salvation of souls - it is impossible that any discord should ever have happened between them.” ...