Does Toleration Require Religious Skepticism? An Examination of Locke's Letters on Toleration and Essay concerning Human Understanding

Does toleration depend on religious skepticism? This article attempts to answer this question by uncovering a foundational ambiguity in John Locke's theological teaching. In his Letter on Toleration, Locke presents toleration as a Christian duty grounded in man's obligation to search for religious truth. But the argument of the Letter proves to be incomplete, and is itself interwoven with Locke's skeptical epistemological assumptions, which Locke increasingly emphasizes in his decade-long debate with his Anglican critic Jonas Proast as well as in his Essay concerning Human Understanding. This article shows that in his most popularly oriented theological-political work Locke deliberately mutes the obstacles that epistemic uncertainty poses to the quest for religious truth, in order to avoid the promotion of religious indifference and unbelief. Locke pursues this strategy not just for rhetorical but also for substantive reasons, since it makes his political legacy more congenial to a civil religion that can support liberalism.