John Perry's study offers a fresh and rigorous exploration of the Lockean inheritance of contemporary politics, focusing particularly on the US political experience. His goal is diagnostic rather than therapeutic: he aims to explicate the way that ‘Johannine liberalism’ – the tradition from Locke to Rawls – has handled (and mishandled) the interrelation of citizens’ religious and civic loyalties. Locke's phrase ‘the pretenses of loyalty’ intends to skewer both a pretence of loyalty to the common good which persecutes in the name of civic order and a pretence of loyalty to God which refuses to give due allegiance to political authority. Perry gives contemporary expression to these pretences by referring, on the one hand, to governments who forbid citizens to wear religious headgear in public office or even public places and, on the other, to citizens who decline to pay taxes on the grounds of religious duty. Both are disingenuous and unjust modes of treating fellow citizens. A more difficult case concerns whether governments should demand that Roman Catholic priests divulge in court secrets disclosed in the confessional.
Perry argues convincingly that Locke's chief contribution to toleration is his framing of the question in terms of pretences and that contemporary Western societies are less able both to guard against these pretences and to recognise true loyalties because the quality of public, collective reasoning about religious and civic loyalties has been seriously diminished by a one-sided and distorted approach to toleration. The one side of the Lockean inheritance which has been emphasised is the attention to abstract, neutral respect for individuals. It has been supposed that governmental neutrality concerning comprehensive visions of the good will somehow be enough to ensure civil peace. However, what has been neglected is Locke's own keen alertness to the deeply held, ineradicable loyalties which guide religious citizens. Indeed, the most powerful interpretative gain of Perry's exposition is that Locke emerges as a theologically astute political theorist, much more so than his Johannine descendants, notwithstanding the recent revelations about Rawls’ theological past.
The book's first section recounts how Sandel, Galston and Fish have critiqued Rawlsian liberalism for its failure adequately to recognise the substantive moral obligations by which citizens – especially religious ones – order their lives, often in highly pro-social ways. This pattern of working over a theme through a medley (normally a trio) of contemporary US conversation partners, such as Stanley Hauerwas, Martha Nussbaum and J. Budziszewski, governs the first and last sections of the book. At times the sheer number of voices involved makes it difficult to perceive Perry's own distinctive line. Nonetheless, what becomes clear is that a more positive account of loyalty and a better interpretation of Locke than Rawls’ is required. Perry pays close attention to Locke's First Tract and shows that the early Locke's concerns are more contingent than principled – English Christians have not, as a matter of record, been peaceable in their religious disagreements, even over seemingly indifferent matters. This has disturbed the civil peace which should be, according to Locke's theological reasoning, the primary concern of Christians. Without labouring the historical detail, Perry shows how the continental practice of toleration revealed this contingency to Locke in its true light. En route, Perry lucidly uncovers crucial connections between Locke's thought and that of his contemporaries, Bagshaw and Limborch. In so doing, he makes the innovative argument that the First Tract actually laid the groundwork for the Letter on Toleration which argued for toleration but still for the sake of civil peace. Perry's review of this narrative is theologically rich and even entertaining – Locke's comparison of disputes about the summum bonum with people's diverse palates divides humanity into ‘the applephiles, the plum lovers, and the nutters’ (p. 93).
But Perry will not smile on a peaceful settlement with Locke the political theologian and instead challenges his fellow Christ Church man with a series of skilful parries and ripostes. He strikes particularly at Locke's anaemic view of the influence of Christianity on a citizen's civic life. For it falsely supports the idea that clear boundaries can precisely separate off public from private and therefore fails to recognise the way that multiple allegiances lie within individual citizens, influencing their civic life now in complex ways. If it is to avoid naivety and injustice, toleration can never be a matter of simple government neutrality but must always reckon with Locke's own concern for the harmonisation of loyalties. Such harmonisation is not equivalent to their domestication or moderation into terms which are more palatable for secular elites. To take Perry's example, there are citizens of the US who believe that they are being loyal to their God when they warn against the public acceptance of homosexuality in US law.
In a compelling concluding section, Perry turns to contemporary US political theologians, arguing that, for all Locke's sensitivity, he was unrealistic about the harmonisation of civic and religious (specifically Christian) obligations. In this he was a thinker of his time, facing the Act of Uniformity rather than the public acceptance of homosexuality (which Locke classed as a public affair alongside theft rather than as an example of private adiaphora). But he was a less theologically astute thinker than his present day counterparts, Nicholas Wolterstoff, John Witte and Stanley Hauerwas. Locke was right to pay attention to the harmonisation of loyalties but wrong to believe that such harmonisation has been or can be settled definitively. In this manner, Perry maintains the possibility of religious citizens casting themselves and being cast into the role of Antigone. Retaining such imaginative wisdom requires political theologians to teach the Johannine tradition to understand afresh what Locke understood very well – that religious loyalties cannot and should not be swept under a liberal carpet and trampled underfoot. Never detached from real-life examples, Perry shows that this matters to US politicians and Christians who seem ill-equipped to engage with wisdom in the toleration debate. The custody battle for the founding fathers between secularists, conservative Christians, republicans and Jeffersonians is where Perry focuses his analysis, arguing equally against American Christians and American secularists who, in different ways, miss the turn to loyalty altogether.
After all the excellent exposition and interrelation of thinkers, the book ends in a somewhat inconclusive fashion. Seemingly offering some therapeutic remedies, Perry proposes a turn to rhetoric, persuasion and natural virtue over against a neutralist false rationalisation of loyalties. However, one looks in vain for further directions. Perry's goal has indeed been diagnostic rather than therapeutic. But because of the lack of guidance about therapy, the reader is left wondering whether the diagnosis is sufficiently precise for a therapeutic course of treatment to be prescribed with confidence. Political theory and practice should turn to loyalty. But how? To turn to the loyalties of the diverse societies of the United States or the United Kingdom is to take on far greater challenges than Locke experienced – the difference between kneeling and standing for communion was great enough; how much greater the differences between multiple forms of Islam and between them, the secularised West and other religious groupings. Perry of course knows that contemporary debates about religious loyalties are far more complicated than many suppose. If his exposition of the faults of the Johannine tradition, both ancient and modern, is correct, the outline conclusion must be that Christian political theologians should, alongside others, set about explaining in detail their religious loyalties to their contemporaries who, in ignorance of both their own Lockean tradition and those of Christian believers, despise the loyalties which foster a measure of peace amidst the earthly city while simultaneously summoning its citizens to membership in the city of God.
