Poor liberalism. Everyone likes the blessings of liberty, but not everyone seems to like the principles that have secured those blessings. This includes John Perry, who has written a rich, complex, and provocative critique of liberalism's understanding of the “theopolitical problem”—the conflict “between good citizenship and faithfulness” to God (p. 3).

Perry's study is divided into three parts. Part I (Chapters 1–2) discusses the place (or absence) of religion in the political theory of John Rawls, and articulates the “theopolitical” critiques of those who oppose Rawlsian liberalism in particular (Michael Sandel, William Galston, Stanley Fish) or liberalism in general (Leo Strauss and Stanley Hauerwas). Part II (Chapters 3–5) returns to John Locke's theory of toleration, which Perry finds superior to Rawlsian liberalism. Part III (Chapters 6–7) deals with attempts by political thinkers and theologians in America to address the problems apparently unsolved by Locke's theory. The figures range from Lockean natural lawyers (Thomas West) and Jeffersonian separationists (Isaac Kramnick) who deny any essential tension between religion and Lockean politics, to Catholic (Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus), Reformed (Nicholas Wolterstorff and John Witte), and Jewish (Martha Nussbaum) thinkers who try to overcome the tension through “cultural republicanism” (Novak and Neuhaus), “ordered pluralism” (Wolterstorff and Witte), or “fidelity to conscience” (Nussbaum) (p. 167).

While Perry's book includes a big cast of characters, Locke is clearly the central figure. Locke's seventeenth-century England was riven by “pretenses of loyalty” to God or sovereign, and so he understood that politics must grapple with citizens' deep religious loyalties. Perry calls this “Locke's turn to loyalty” (p. 203, emphasis in original). To secure “civil peace” (p. 64), Locke realized that he had “to reinterpret political theology and political theory so that (1) genuine loyalties would be harmonized (preventing conflicts of duty) and (2) genuine loyalties could be distinguished from pretense” (p. 8). Locke does this by “two steps” that are “necessary to securing toleration in a Lockean framework. I call these toleration as a harmonization of loyalties and toleration as a governmental policy of neutrality” (p. 8, emphasis in original).

Perry tells the story of how Locke arrived at his strategy as he moved from his early antitoleration Tracts (1660–61) to his pro-toleration Letter (1690). By 1667, Locke had seen toleration work in Cleves in the Rhineland (p. 98), and published his more pro-toleration Essay on Toleration. But he still needed to find “a principled (not ad hoc) limit on government's authority and scope” so that toleration would not dissolve all claims of political authority (p. 100). This task required him to develop “[h]is heretofore-absent rights theory, which is the basis of his mature political thought” (p. 101).

While Perry praises Locke for realizing that liberalism cannot ignore citizens' religious loyalties, he thinks that Locke's strategy ultimately has failed to meliorate the tension between politics and religion. Perry's most important criticism seems to be that by making toleration depend on respect for the rights of “abstract persons,” Locke tries to make each citizen leave out “one's vision of the good, one's conception of honor and excellence, and the purpose of social institutions” (p. 212). But “[w]e cannot succeed in leaving these out (even if we try), and we should not leave them out because it is both unjust and counterproductive” (p. 212, emphasis in original). This is because human beings are constituted, at least in part, by the duties derived from the conception of the good implicit in their particular religious, moral, and ethnic loyalties. They cannot set aside these duties unless they give up their loyalty, which they cannot do without ceasing to be who they are. Demanding that they do so in exchange for religious toleration is wrong because there is a certain nobility in “loyalty” to one's religion, for which liberalism needs to make space (p. 45).

This is a powerful argument, but it would have been more persuasive if Perry had more directly engaged the content of Locke's thought, along the lines of Adam Wolfson's (2010) Persecution or Toleration: An Explication of the Locke-Proast Quarrel, 1689–1704. Perry spends only 14 of 216 pages interpreting the text of the Letter Concerning Toleration itself, and he does not bring in Locke's Questions concerning the Law of Nature or his Essay concerning Human Understanding. In a footnote, Perry justifies this omission by saying that it “would be too great a tangent” to get into Locke's “underlying epistemology”, and refers us to Nicholas Wolterstorff's (1996) John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (n. 62, p. 235). But we need to understand Locke's “underlying” argument if we are going to know whether he was wrong to be so confident that he had solved the “theopolitical problem.”

In the Essay, Locke turned from the question of how politics could deal with claims of religious loyalty to the more fundamental question of how we know the “Principles of morality, and reveal'd Religion” themselves. If Locke could understand that, he could know what claims of religious loyalty are illegitimate and therefore need not be tolerated.

What he discovered revolutionized his “theopolitical” thinking. We have no innate ideas and so get our ideas from sensation and reflection. If God is not cruel (as Locke concludes in the Questions), then He does not give us revealed commands that contradict the conclusions of our minds (it “very ill suits the Notion of a Deity,” as Locke says in the Letter). So no one could be authorized to act on a revelation that contradicts what we know by reason. Thus, no matter what religious loyalties a person inherits or chooses, he or she cannot make a claim to carry out a “duty” that violates the moral conclusions of reason—that is, “natural rights” (p. 150).

In his conclusion, Perry derides Locke's “deductive” approach (p. 211), arguing instead that we should secure toleration not by denying the tension between liberalism and religious loyalties or trying to overcome it, but by persuading one another to tolerate using “wisdom and prudence rather than deductively applied principles” (p. 208). But has Locke's argument so clearly failed?

Consider an example Perry discusses: slavery (p. 158). Before the Civil War, there were many claims of a biblical duty to support slavery. After the war, theological arguments for slavery ended because once Americans constitutionally enshrined the truth that slavery violates natural rights and is therefore unjust, they could no longer believe that God supports slavery. The same happened to segregation of the races, and is happening again in “theopolitical” contentions over gay marriage and even abortion. While nonliberal religious loyalties remain, they are being reordered toward the rights of “mere persons.” What those rights are, of course, depends on a conception of the human good, which Locke provides: It is good—even noble—for all human beings to be “Industrious and Rational” beings who “order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds” of what reason authorizes (Second Treatise, secs. 34, 4).

Whether Locke ultimately solves the theological-political problem may depend less on whether Perry is right about Locke's strategy and more on whether Locke has in truth met revelation on its own ground: the experience that Augustine had of the true God whose transcendent beauty is anchored in His perfect justice (p. 216). But even if he has not, are the blessings of Lockean liberalism to be despised? Millions of those who come to know and enjoy them do not seem to think so.

Poor liberalism indeed.