“I NO sooner perceived myself in the world,” wrote English philosopher John Locke, “than I found myself in a storm.” Locke was referring to the maelstrom of religious fanaticism and intolerance that was tearing apart the social fabric of post-Reformation Europe. Born in 1632, Locke’s life encompassed one of the most turbulent periods of European history. The problem was not only the enmity and power struggles between Protestants and Catholics. Despite an official end to the wars of religion with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, militant Christianity could still destabilize governments, provoke mob violence, persecute religious dissenters and create a refugee crisis in the heart of Europe.

We can hardly ignore the parallels between Locke’s world and our own: the Syrian Civil War, the rise of the Islamic State, the horrific assaults on religious minorities, the massive flow of refugees from the Middle East, and the widening conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. The repression and violence in the wake of the Arab Spring has exposed the fundamental crisis in modern Islam: a culture of intolerance reminiscent of Europe’s legacy as a persecuting society.

When President Obama addressed Muslims worldwide in his celebrated 2009 speech in Cairo, he praised Islamic history for demonstrating “the possibilities of religious tolerance.” Speaking before the United Nations five years later, his mood was considerably darker. Though denying that America was at war with Islam, Obama warned of “the cancer of violent extremism that has ravaged so many parts of the Muslim world.” Even President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt speaking at Al Azhar University in January 2015, made an impassioned plea for “a religious revolution” to stymie extremist Islam that has “antagonized the entire world.”

 

THE CAREER of Locke is central to the story of how the West accomplished a similar revolution to defeat two of the most intractable problems of European society: militant religion and political absolutism. The problems were inextricably linked—as they are today—and Locke produced seminal and radical responses to both.

Against the deepest prejudices of European culture, Locke defended liberty of conscience for people of all faiths—including pagans, Jews and Muslims. Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), with its singular persuasive power, ranks as the most important defense of religious freedom ever written. Against the assumptions enshrined in centuries of political rule, Locke insisted that governments that trample the natural rights of their citizens forfeit political legitimacy. His Two Treatises on Government, published in 1690, became a catalyst for revolutionary movements dedicated to human equality, freedom and government by consent. Taken together, they form the pillars of the liberal-democratic tradition.

Locke’s ambitions as a political and religious reformer are often misunderstood. He lived during a period when Christian norms and observances were still infused with Europe’s political and civic life. He watched with dismay as attempts to enforce religious orthodoxy inflamed sectarian hatreds and criminalized entire categories of religious believers. Locke composed his Two Treatises against political despotism when anti-Catholic hatreds threatened to plunge England into another civil war. His Letter Concerning Toleration was a direct response to Catholic absolutism in France, where the revocation of the Edict of Nantes sparked a violent crackdown on Protestant Huguenots, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee for sanctuary.

No progress toward a more liberal and tolerant society was possible, Locke reasoned, without a revolution in the theological outlook of political and religious authorities. Thus he began with a radical reinterpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus—“the Captain of our salvation”—to argue for a new kind of political commonwealth. “The sum of all we drive at,” he wrote, “is that every man may enjoy the same rights that are granted to others.” Like no thinker before him, Locke forged an alliance between liberal political theory and a gospel of divine mercy.

 

LOCKE IS largely ignored, however, as Western thinkers confront the contemporary problem of religious extremism—dismissed by conservatives for his alleged Enlightenment skepticism and by liberals for being insufficiently progressive in his politics. Jonathan Israel, professor emeritus of modern European history at Princeton University, argues that Locke’s defense of toleration was hobbled by narrow theological premises. In the end, Israel says, Locke produced “an ungenerous, defective, and potentially menacing theory.”

Meanwhile, a growing number of liberal-minded Muslims see Locke as an intellectual ally: a deeply religious believer and reformer whose political theology could help them confront the crisis of modern Islam. In Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, Nader Hashemi praises Locke for retaining the moral authority of scripture as he advanced his agenda for political reform. Hashemi, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver, argues that Locke’s entire effort “was rooted not in a rejection of Christianity but rather in a reinterpretation of it.” The Lockean campaign for religious reform, he concludes, was a “critical precondition” for a more progressive political order.

Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol, author of Islam Without Extremes, argues that an “Islamic liberalism” that rejects secularism provides the strongest basis for individual freedom. In a column for the New York Times, Akyol—in a nod to Locke—offered “A Letter Concerning Muslim Toleration.” He believes that a Lockean tradition has long existed in Islam, and points to an early school of Muslim thinkers who viewed faith as “a marifa, an inner knowledge of the heart”—beyond the coercive reach of mosque or state. “If Islamic thought is to liberalize today,” he predicts, “It must take a Lockean leap.”

What might such a leap of faith involve? It might begin, paradoxically, with an appeal to reason. Ever since the Enlightenment, educated people have been taught to regard religious belief as an enemy of rationality; there is no intellectual bridge between Athens and Jerusalem. Locke, one of the fathers of modern philosophy, rejected this view as a misunderstanding of the nature of biblical religion.

The entire first part of the Two Treatises is a Bible-based assault on Robert Filmer’s apologia for absolute monarchy. Mixing careful scriptural exegesis with relentless logic, Locke denies the claim that most men are destined to live in subjugation to others: “Scripture or reason I am sure do not anywhere say so, notwithstanding the noise of divine right, as if divine authority hath subjected us to the unlimited will of another.” Only after demolishing the rationale for unchecked power in the First Treatise does Locke make his famous natural-rights argument for liberty and equality in the Second Treatise.

In his Letter, Locke takes authorities to task for imagining that authentic faith could be produced by threats and coercion, rather than through reason and persuasion. Despite a strict Calvinist upbringing, Locke rejects a determinist view of faith; human agency retained a crucial role in the act of believing. “But true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God,” he writes. “And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of any thing by outward force.”

Locke understood his audience. With the advent of the scientific revolution, Protestant leaders had embraced the concepts of “right reason” and a “reasonable Christianity,” which emphasized the rational basis for faith. Locke pushes these ideas toward their logical conclusion, namely, that the responsible use of reason in apprehending religious truth is within the reach of every person. I call this Locke’s “democratic conscience,” the private realm of belief, informed by reason, experience and the moral sense.

Indeed, throughout the Two Treatises and the Letter, Locke assumes the universal quality of reason. Nowhere is there any distinction made between individuals in their basic competence to discern moral and spiritual truths; the king has no decisive advantage over the cobbler. “Those things that every man ought sincerely to inquire into himself and by meditation, study, search, and his own endeavours, attain the knowledge of, cannot be looked upon as the peculiar profession of any one sort of men.”

Next to the Bible, human reason was for Locke the most important source for discovering truth, including the ideas of equality and man’s natural rights. The faculty of reason, as assuredly as the Bible, “teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Likewise, both sources of knowledge—reason and revelation—exposed the fallacy of religious intolerance to any honest seeker.

Toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.

The boldness of Locke’s challenge to the social structures of seventeenth-century European society is breathtaking. To occupy a lower social order implied a diminished or impaired ability to grasp religious knowledge. At the same time, European church establishments claimed for themselves monopoly rights to interpret all significant matters of faith and conscience. Locke’s appeal to the individual conscience—informed by the Bible and endowed with the “light of reason”—defied their cultural authority and political prerogatives. In the intensely hierarchical society of Locke’s day, here is a thoroughly, radically egalitarian view of human capacities.

It is often assumed that Locke, as an early Enlightenment figure, sought to reduce Christianity to a moral code. His presumed aim was to downplay its supernatural claims, especially the contentious doctrines of sin, judgment and redemption. For this reason Christian conservatives tend to suspect Locke of deism, unitarianism or worse. Liberal interpreters of Locke, on the other hand, approve his attempt to tame the passions of religion by making Christianity more earthly minded—they just don’t believe that he went far enough.

Consider the counsel of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim turned agnostic, to the advocates of liberal Islam. She argues that Islam’s “fixation on the afterlife” has “pernicious” consequences for religion and politics. In her book Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, Hirsi Ali says it’s time for Muslims to learn from the story of Christianity’s transformation into a more tolerant faith. “Only when Islam chooses this life can it finally begin to adapt to the modern world.”

The history of religiously inspired violence gives her argument a certain resonance, at least to secular-minded intellectuals. Whether pious Muslims will welcome it, of course, is another matter. But there’s a problem with this account of the development of religious toleration in the West: It ignores the moral narrative that ultimately helped to defeat the opponents of toleration.

Locke’s contempt for coerced religion did not grow from the soil of skepticism or unbelief. Rather, it was born of the conviction that militant religion threatened the eternal souls of its victims. “Every man has an immortal soul,” he writes in the Letter, “capable of eternal happiness or misery.” Thus it is man’s “highest obligation” to seek God’s favor “because there is nothing in this world that is of any consideration in comparison with eternity.” The argument appears often in Locke’s many writings on toleration, and he deploys it repeatedly in the Letter, like a battering ram to smash the base motives of the advocates of coercion. “A sweet religion, indeed,” he writes, “that obliges men to dissemble, and tell lies both to God, and man, for the salvation of their souls!”

Rather than downplaying the doctrines of divine judgment and salvation, Locke raises the stakes:

Although the magistrate’s opinion in religion be sound, and the way he appoints be truly evangelical, yet, if I be not thoroughly persuaded thereof in my own mind, there will be no safety for me in following it. No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed. I may grow rich by an art that I take not delight in, I may be cured of some disease by remedies that I have not faith in; but I cannot be saved by a religion that I distrust, and by a worship that I abhor. . . . Faith only, and inward sincerity, are the things that procure acceptance with God.

Here is the voice not of a rationalist who doubted the efficacy of coercing people to believe, but rather a moralist offended by the attempt to do so. For Locke, the ultimate objective of religious worship is the attainment of eternal life. His insight is to use this religious premise to support a political conclusion: that the only state worthy of political loyalty is one that permits every citizen to pursue this spiritual goal on his or her own terms.

Probably every reform movement in Christian history has justified itself with appeals to the example of Jesus. This was true of the sixteenth-century Christian humanists, such as Desiderius Erasmus, whose “philosophy of Christ” exerted a profound influence on Locke’s conceptual approach to toleration. Erasmus, a leading Catholic scholar, made the life and teachings of Jesus the fulcrum for social change. “What else is inculcated by his precepts, his parables, and his practice, but peace and mutual charity?” he wrote. The faithful Christian, Erasmus explained, was the person “who piously reflects on these writings, praying rather than disputing, and seeking to be transformed within rather than armed for battle.”

Locke stands firmly in this humanist tradition. Just as in the Two Treatises, his opening argument in the Letter is not aimed at political authorities or to individuals as political actors. Instead, he addresses the community of Christian believers. They were the custodians of the European political conscience. Their values and beliefs help shape the civic and political culture. It is to religious believers that Locke must first make the moral case for freedom of conscience.

Locke begins by declaring, unequivocally, that toleration is the chief mark of the “true church.” Appeals to theological orthodoxy are meaningless, he insists, without this virtue visible in personal and corporate life. “Let anyone have ever so true a claim to all these things,” he writes, “yet if he be destitute of charity, meekness, and goodwill in general towards all mankind, even to those that are not Christians, he is certainly yet short of being a true Christian himself.”

Though Locke enlists the Bible only sparingly in his Letter, we know from his private journals that during this time he was studying the Bible carefully for principles that he believed supported toleration. A journal entry under the heading “Tolerantia Pro,” dated 1688, a year before the publication of the Letter, lists twenty-one passages from the Hebrew and Christian Bible. Included is a climactic scene from the gospel of Luke, which records the remarkable prayer of Jesus at the cross, asking God to forgive his executioners: “Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’” The unifying theme of these passages is unambiguous: near the heart of Locke’s Christology is the concept of charity and forgiveness, even toward the most debased and violent of sinners.

Thus in his Letter, Locke interprets the moral life of Jesus as a bracing defense of religious toleration:

If, like the Captain of our salvation, they sincerely desired the good of souls, they would tread in the steps and follow the perfect example of that Prince of Peace, who sent out his soldiers to the subduing of nations, and gathering them into his church, not armed with the sword, or other instruments of force, but prepared with the Gospel of peace, and with the exemplary holiness of their conversation. This was his method.

The phrase “Captain of our salvation,” taken from the Letter of Hebrews in the New Testament, was a popular metaphor among the preachers of Locke’s day. It communicated an image of Christ as one who would not answer violence with violence, but suffered patiently to win salvation for God’s people. Likewise, the expressions “Prince of Peace” and “Gospel of Peace” are scriptural references emphasizing the themes of reconciliation.

Locke’s opening salvo, embedded in biblical idioms, argues that the only means approved by Jesus for spreading his message are those of preaching, dialogue and debate. Such efforts would be characterized by their “exemplary holiness,” in other words, by calm, gracious and rational persuasion. If Jesus did not employ force to win converts, neither could his followers, whether through the institutions of church or state. Cynics, heretics, pagans—they must be allowed to go their own way. Here is the theological basis for a pluralistic society.

 

THE CORE concepts underlying Locke’s thought—the universal gift of reason, the belief in eternal life and the moral example of Jesus—now combine toward a political end. Together they support the political theory for which Locke is rightly famous: the doctrine of consent, the idea that all legitimate political authority is rooted in the consent of the governed.

The revolutions in the Arab world that began in 2011, though varied in each country, shared at least one trait: they paid homage to this concept of the social contract. In each case—whether in Tunisia, Libya, Syria or Egypt—they began as a protest against arbitrary or absolute rule. In each case, the revolutionaries believed the contract between ruler and ruled had been violated. The Arab Spring initially bore the marks of a Lockean revolution.

Why have nearly all of these revolutions failed? Why have they devolved into a Hobbesian “perpetual war” of “every man against every man”? The reasons are complex, but among them is a deficit in the political culture of modern Islam: the failure to see the vital bond between religious freedom and democratic self-government. Locke understood their mutual relationship. Though modern scholars mostly ignore the connection, it is clear that Locke’s political principle of consent owed a great debt to its religious counterpart, the consensual nature of faith.

A voluntary faith must be worked out in a voluntary society, i.e., the church of one’s choice. “The hope of salvation, as it was the only cause of his entrance into that communion, so it can be the only reason to stay there,” Locke writes in his Letter. “No member of a religious society can be tied with any other bounds but what proceed from the certain expectation of eternal life.” Here is Locke’s decisive break with the prevailing view of religious identity as being rooted in family, geography or political regimes. Unlike property or wealth, he argues, an individual’s faith cannot be inherited; it must be appropriated through judgment, choice and consent. The same holds true for membership in a community of believers: the church must be understood as a “free and voluntary society.”

A more direct rebuke to the supposedly divine and exclusive origins of the Church of England—or any other national church—could hardly be conceived. At the same time, Locke’s reputation as a radical individualist is misplaced. Voluntary participation in a faith community is not an evasion of one’s moral duties. Rather, the public worship of God, according to the dictates of conscience, is the means by which these duties are to be carried out.

Locke’s commitment both to voluntary religion and voluntary, contractual government are mutually reinforcing. Just as people join and remain in religious communities by their consent, so they enter and sustain political communities. “Men being, as has been said, by Nature all free, equal, and independent,” Locke writes in the Second Treatise, “no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent.” If the members of a faith community believe their church is failing to uphold its spiritual responsibilities, they have a right to leave—without fear of reprisal. Likewise for a political society: If its members believe the political authority is failing to safeguard their natural rights—their “lives, liberty, and estates”—it forfeits the right to govern.

There is no daylight between the positions staked out in A Letter and The Two Treatises over the obligations of a just government toward its citizens. “It is the duty of the civil magistrate, by the impartial execution of equal laws,” he writes, “to secure unto all the people in general, and to every one of his subjects in particular, the just possession of these things that belong to this life.” Political rulers who ignore this duty and violate the natural rights of their subjects—including the liberty to worship God according to conscience—lack legitimacy. After a “long train of abuses,” they “put themselves into a state of war with the people.” Once that happens, the people may withdraw their consent. No wonder the American Founders ranked Locke as among the greatest of modern philosophers.

The ongoing turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa has confirmed Locke’s insight many times over. A groundbreaking 2002 Arab Human Development Report, written by a group of Arab intellectuals, admitted that a “freedom deficit” in Muslim societies threatened the development and stability of the entire region. That deficit remains, and repression and violence on the basis of religious identity lie near the heart of the problem. Blasphemy laws, anticonversion laws, laws restricting freedom of worship, institutionalized discrimination, mob violence against religious minorities—these are the norms in many Muslim-majority countries. Shia and Sunni Muslims are most often the victims, but Jews, Christians, Baha’is and Alevis face increasing threats against their communities, even extinction.

In Locke’s world—as in much of ours—religion and politics were deeply intertwined. Thus Locke sought to reform the Christian church as a prelude to a social revolution that would curb the hatreds inspired by militant religion. “It is not the diversity of opinions which cannot be avoided,” he writes, “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.”

Locke also sought to reform the state, so that it would protect the right of every individual—regardless of religious identity—to pursue his obligations to God according to the dictates of conscience. Locke’s vision of a just society would extend political equality and religious freedom to all Christian sects, as well as to religious believers of all kinds:

But those whose doctrine is peaceable, and whose manners are pure and blameless, ought to be upon equal terms with their fellow-subjects. Thus if solemn assemblies, observations of festivals, public worship be permitted to any one sort of professors, all these things ought to be permitted to the Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers, and others, with the same liberty. Nay, if we may openly speak the truth, and as becomes one man to another, 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.

On Locke’s list are some of the most despised religious minorities of seventeenth-century Europe. Unlike his contemporaries, he does not regard them as threats to civic peace. Thus the anti-Semitism that kept Jews on the margins of European society is rejected. “If a Jew does not believe the New Testament to be the word of God,” he writes, “he does not thereby alter any thing in men’s civil rights.” Elsewhere in the Letter, Locke disparages English laws prohibiting the construction of synagogues and limiting the Jews to private worship.

If we allow the Jews to have private houses amongst us, why should we not allow them to have synagogues? Is their doctrine more false, their worship more abominable, or is the civil peace more endangered, by their meeting in public, than in their private houses?

Not even Muslims, whose status among Europeans was always problematic, should be denied basic civil liberties. If we recall that Muslim-Christian relations hit a new low after the Battle of Vienna in 1683—two years before Locke wrote his Letter—we discover in Locke a remarkable egalitarianism. In his groundbreaking work, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, John Marshall draws attention to Locke’s unconventional aims: “In most Christian eschatological schemes of the seventeenth century,” he writes, “the Jews were to be converted and ‘the Turks’ destroyed.”

Locke is often accused of sharing the anti-Catholic hatreds typical of English Protestants, but a careful reading of his Letter suggests otherwise. In explaining why religious beliefs should not come under the jurisdiction of the magistrate, Locke uses Catholicism as a test case: “If a Roman Catholic believes that to be really the body of Christ, which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbor.” Provided they did not try to subvert the political order, Catholics deserved equity under the law.

How did Locke hope to bring about a more tolerant society? Civil law was important, but unable by itself to establish a more generous political regime. Locke believed that religious leaders played a critical role in changing cultural norms; they must use their pulpits to promote a spirit of mutual regard in civil society.

In Locke and Modern Life, political scientist Lee Ward emphasizes the cultural task of religious communities under Locke’s vision. The churches, Ward writes, must “place the great incentive of divine judgment behind the cause of toleration rather than against it.” In his Letter, Locke admonishes church leaders against offering only a grudging toleration toward those with different religious views. “We must not content ourselves with the narrow measures of bare justice: charity, bounty, and liberality must be added to it,” he writes. “This the gospel enjoins, this reason directs, and this that natural fellowship we are born into requires of us.”

Europe’s coercive policies to achieve religious conformity had run their course; they failed to produce either social unity or authentic faith. Rather, government’s abusive treatment of unpopular religious groups turned citizens into lawbreakers and worshippers into hypocrites. “No peace and security, no, not so much as common friendship, can ever be established or preserved amongst men, so long as this opinion prevails . . . that religion is to be propagated by force of arms.” Locke turns Hobbes’s Leviathan on its head. Political absolutism—and the suppression of dissent that went with it—was far more likely to produce chaos and social disintegration than a “just and moderate government.”

The social consequence of Locke’s defense of toleration is religious pluralism. Under a system of impartial justice, it will become the key to civic peace and political stability.

It is often forgotten that beneath Locke’s plea for a more just and tolerant society flowed a river of rage: a fierce resentment at the hypocrisy and violence that had scandalized the Christian church. Locke’s strategy was to reinterpret the Christian faith—to leverage the moral authority of Jesus—to instigate a massive restructuring of political and ecclesiastical life.

 

COULD SOMETHING like this take root in Muslim societies? There are hopeful signs: a growing sense of outrage among Muslims at the atrocities being committed under the banner of Islam. This helps to explain the remarkable influence of Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai, the teenager shot in the head by the Taliban for her crusade to allow women to go to school. She not only survived the attack but also refused to remain silent about women’s rights—and in her defiance has created a mass movement of like-minded reformers.

“There are hundreds of human rights activists and social workers who are not only speaking for their rights, but who are struggling to achieve their goal of peace, education and equality,” she told a spellbound audience at the United Nations.

So here I stand, one girl among many. I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard. . . . We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back. We call upon our sisters around the world to be brave, to embrace the strength within themselves and realize their full potential.

Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, Yousafzai has attracted millions of followers to her cause, a spiritual campaign rooted in a belief in the natural equality of every human being. TIME magazine recently named her one of the “one hundred most influential people in the world,” and a major motion picture about her life was released in late 2015. Yousafzai has launched an education movement—call it a revolution for rationality—as egalitarian as anything the Muslim world has seen in centuries.

The success of this movement, of course, is by no means assured. In the early days of the Arab Spring, there was much talk of a “new social contract” among the Arab states. The toppling of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak seemed to portend a Lockean-style revolution. “The concept of ‘the consent of the governed’ is now operational in Egypt,” declared Rami Khouri, a scholar at the American University of Beirut. Charles Freeman, writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was similarly optimistic: “The governed in this region have discovered that they can, if necessary, take back their consent to be governed and thereby compel regime change.”

Religious zeal may topple dictatorships, but it has been far less effective at creating stable and democratic societies in their place. The task of writing constitutions guaranteeing the rule of law, political equality and human rights—including the rights of conscience in matters of faith—remains largely left undone. The collapse of the political revolutions in the Middle East has many causes, but none more important than this: the failure of modern Islam to reconcile its deepest beliefs with the core doctrines of liberal democracy.

Like European Christianity on the eve of the Enlightenment, the Islamic world must find a religious justification for political reform. It must anchor this rationale in the teachings and example of Muhammad—or condemn itself to an endless winter of human suffering and cultural decline.

The West avoided this outcome, but only after enduring a long season of religious violence and political absolutism. There was nothing inevitable about the conversion of European society from despotism to liberal democracy. Many actors played a role in this drama, but few were as consequential as John Locke. No one reflected more carefully on the nature of Christian faith and its relationship to political societies. No one else produced works that became as transformational in the debates over church and state, freedom and tyranny.

A modern thinker, Locke nevertheless helped to retrieve one of the gifts of historic Christianity: a narrative of grace and freedom that can defeat a culture of bigotry and oppression. “Locke was able to break the reigning consensus in his society and advocate a new political philosophy without alienating his entire political constituency,” concludes Nader Hashemi. In the Muslim world today, he says, a similar rethinking of religious ideas has emerged. “Atheists, agnostics, and French-inspired secularists are not driving this process.”

If this new mode of thought hopes to shatter the old consensus, then modern Islam will need a John Locke, or someone like him, in its own hour of crisis.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at The King’s College in New York City, where he teaches courses on Western civilization and U.S. foreign policy. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West.

Image: Men reading the Koran in the Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, Syria. Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons/Erik Albers