Is Religious Freedom Possible Without Capitalism?

John Locke and the Commercial Roots of Religious Tolerance

Today, we take the value of tolerance as a given. But there was a time when tolerance had to be argued for. There was a time when tolerance was, as it were, a disruptive “social technology.” When examining past thinkers, we find that the great formulators of the value of religious tolerance mixed their arguments with sentiments that we might find “intolerant” today. Yet, as Derrida might put it, only that which is intolerable can be meaningfully tolerated.

Here is John Locke’s argument:

Shall we suffer a Pagan to deal and trade with us, and shall we not suffer him to pray unto and worship God? If we allow the Jews to have private houses and dwellings 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? But if these things may be granted to Jews and Pagans, surely the condition of any Christians ought not to be worse than theirs in a Christian commonwealth.

You will say, perhaps: Yes it ought to be; because they are more inclinable to factions, tumults, and civil wars." I answer: Is this the fault of the Christian religion? If it be so, truly the Christian religion is the worst of all religions and ought neither to be embraced by any particular person, nor tolerated by any commonwealth. For if this be the genius, this the nature of the Christian religion, to be turbulent and destructive to the civil peace, that Church itself which the magistrate indulges will not always be innocent.

Locke employs the form of a Talmudic kal v’chomer, extrapolating the easy case from the difficult one. If “we” tolerate pagans and Jews for the sake of commerce, how much the more so should we tolerate our fellow Christians’ varieties of religious belief?! But Locke also does a bait and switch with the rhetorical form. If we allow Jews to be Jewish in their private domain, why not also in the public domain? This is more of a slippery slope argument. Locke seems to be saying that one should be consistent. If you find Judaism and paganism intolerable, it shouldn’t matter whether they are allowed in public or in private. Since we are inconsistent on this point, likely due to pragmatic business needs, we might as well err on the side of greater tolerance.

If one of the great motives for religious tolerance, and tolerance, more generally, is commerce, we might expect that arguments against the primacy of commerce will probably diminish the standing of tolerance. Anecdotally, and culturally, this seems to hold up—with critics of big business and big tech on the left and the right arguing that we should privilege other values besides profit. Yet Locke grasped commerce to be an alignment technology that could overcome religious difference. Can anything take the place of business—or must the rejection of capitalism necessarily entail the rejection of the freedom of religion?

For better and worse, is there anything other than a desire to trade with one another, that can align our incentives, across ideological difference?

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