Joseph Loconte's Blog

THE APPROPRIATION OF LOCKE

On the Enlightenment Thinker’s Religious Convictions.

October 2021

By Joseph Loconte

More than fifty years ago, the Cambridge political scientist John Dunn shook the academic world by the collar when he argued—contrary to the secular account of the origins of liberal democracy—that the intellectual father of the liberal project was an essentially Christian thinker. A chief complaint in his Political Thought of John Locke (1969) was the absence of any serious treatment of the relationship of Locke’s political philosophy to his religious beliefs. “It is an astonishing lacuna,” he wrote.

Dunn’s work, an exploration of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) in its historical context, did much to fill it. “Locke saw the rationality of human existence, a rationality which he spent so much of his life in attempting to vindicate, as dependent upon the truths of religion,” Dunn declared. Indeed, Locke’s entire intellectual enterprise depended upon “the axiomatic centrality of the purposes of God.” Dunn’s bracing conclusion: Locke’s conceptual approach to political society “is saturated with Christian assumptions.”

If Dunn is correct, then the liberal order owes a profound debt to the biblical tradition with respect to its ideas about freedom, equality, and our capacity for self-government. Indeed, the argument now being waged over the legitimacy of the American political order—coming from both the ideological Left and the religious Right—is really an argument over Locke’s moral vision of a just society.

No seventeenth-century thinker, after all, exerted more influence over the American Revolution and the Founding generation. Outside of the Bible, no writings were more widely read or cited in the revolutionary period than Locke’s. It is not too much to conclude that the American experiment in self-government was originally and substantially Lockean in its political and religious outlook, which is to say, following Dunn, that it was “saturated” with Christian beliefs about human freedom and human responsibility. If so, then any debate over the character and future of the American project must take into account the relationship between Locke’s political ideals and his religious convictions.

Two of the chief targets in The Political Thought of John Locke were C. B. Macpherson, a Canadian political scientist, and Leo Strauss, the German immigrant to the United States who helped to revive the study of classical political theory. Taking a Marxist approach, Macpherson regarded material property as the central concept in Locke’s political thought. He accused Locke of using natural law as a “façade” to justify the “unlimited accumulation” of property in a capitalist society. Strauss, famous for distinguishing between the explicit and supposedly hidden meaning of historical texts, persuaded a generation of political theorists that Locke was a closet Hobbesian who used biblical language to cloak a radically individualist, anti-religious agenda.

Despite their differences, Macpherson and Strauss both regarded Locke as an Enlightenment skeptic who rejected Christianity’s supernatural claims, moral precepts, and belief in the immortality of the soul. Locke’s attachment to the individual’s right of appropriation is so uncompromising, wrote Macpherson, that it “overrides any moral claims of the society.” Likewise, Strauss claimed that Locke elevated the lone individual “as the center and origin of the moral world.” His damning conclusion: “Locke is a hedonist.”

This criticism of Locke’s liberalism as the great solvent of tradition, virtue, and religious belief continues to influence political scientists, educators, and public intellectuals. For the ideological Left, it has nurtured the progressive assumption that liberal values emerged only as societies became more secular and dispensed with religious belief. More recently, Macpherson and Strauss have been enlisted by those among the religious Right who accuse Locke of transforming the classical and Christian conceptions of freedom into a license for personal liberation.

Yet the image of Locke as a postmodern hedonist has not held up well under scholarly scrutiny. Since the publication of Dunn’s Political Thought of John Locke, we have had decades of Locke scholarship exploring not only his political philosophy, but also his lifelong religious beliefs and concerns. Though differences of opinion remain over the contours of Locke’s religious faith, there exists broad agreement about Dunn’s essential thesis: in Locke’s writings we encounter not only a severe critic of authoritarian religion, but also a fierce defender of Christianity’s moral precepts who considered himself an orthodox believer.

There are many places in the corpus of Locke’s writings where he articulates his beliefs about God, human nature, and the moral obligations owed to God and neighbor. In the opening lines of Two Treatises of Government, for example, Locke presumes the natural freedom of mankind in rebuking political absolutism: “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.” The remainder of the First Treatise is a careful, biblical refutation of patriarchal absolutism. Locke builds upon this theme in the Second Treatise, in which he declares God’s proprietorship over all mankind:

For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one Sovereign Maker, sent into the world by his order and about his business, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.

Neither Strauss nor Macpherson paid much attention to Locke’s proclamation that a trustworthy political theory must be rooted in religious anthropology. Many in Locke’s audience, no doubt, would have recognized his allusion to a passage from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).

The theology expressed in the Two Treatises forms the conceptual core of Dunn’s analysis of Locke’s political philosophy. “Men were owned by God. They were vessels sent on a voyage by him,” Dunn writes, and they were thus obligated “not to rob their owner of their services.” For Locke, legitimate political authority must respect the divine prerogative.

A succession of scholars have reached similar conclusions about Locke’s beliefs. At a 1982 Carlyle Lecture in Oxford, the political theorist Jeremy Waldron experienced the stirrings of a Lockean epiphany. The speaker, Alasdair MacIntyre, observed that Locke’s arguments for equality and individual rights in the Two Treatises of Government were so imbued with religious content that they could not be taught in America’s secular public schools. Waldron balked, assuming that “the theology could be bracketed out of Locke’s theory.” Nevertheless, after re-examining Locke’s political and religious works, he concluded that Locke’s claims about human equality were inseparable from his belief in man as a creature subject to the commandments of his Creator. “The theological content cannot simply be bracketed off as a curiosity,” Waldron writes in God, Locke, and Equality (2002). “It shapes and informs the account through and through.”

The Cambridge historian Mark Goldie rejects attempts to turn Locke’s view of liberty into libertinism. Locke, he explains, did not believe in freedom of action in a moral vacuum. “We are put on earth to fulfill our best nature; we are here to do God’s business,” Goldie writes in his edition of Locke’s Two Treatises (1993). “Accordingly, political freedom consists in a lack of impediments to conducting a godly life.” Elizabeth Pritchard, a professor of religion at Bowdoin College, insists upon “the centrality of theism” to Locke’s liberalism. “Locke’s workmanship argument is emphatic that each human is the property of God,” she writes in Religion in Public: Locke’s Political Theology (2014). “Locke’s political theology is predicated on a consensus on the sacrality of humans qua property of God. It is this consensus that grounds human rights, more specifically, the liberty and equality of all human beings.”

Another pillar of Locke’s political theology is what some scholars have called “the democratic intellect.” They emphasize Locke’s belief in the universal capacity of human reason: the ability of every person to understand that God exists and what he requires. As Locke declares in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), whatever differences exist among people of different economic or social backgrounds,

they have Light enough to lead them to the Knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own Duties. . . . It will be no Excuse to an idle and untoward Servant, who would not attend his Business by Candle-light, to plead that he had not broad Sun-shine. The Candle that is set up in us, shines bright enough for all our Purposes.

Writing in The Cambridge Companion to Locke (1994), Hans Aarsleff, a professor of English at Princeton, explains that, although Locke was a “pious believer in scriptural revelation, . . . his public philosophy was directed toward God’s manifest revelation in creation because it, by being open to the reason and senses of all, allows for equality of knowledge for all.” Locke’s anthropology legitimized, without moral distinction, the rational capacities of every human being. Here is an unashamedly religious rationale for political equality: the proposition that God has constituted human nature so that every individual, by virtue of his or her humanity, possesses both the capacity and the obligation to seek after God and to discern his moral law.

Since Dunn’s work, a large and growing community of scholars has explored how Locke’s political philosophy was embedded in the religious beliefs and assumptions of post-Reformation Europe. In The Mind of John Locke: A Study of Political Theory in Its Intellectual Setting (1994), the Cambridge historian Ian Harris explains that, for Locke, the task facing man was not an amoral quest for self-preservation or a Hobbesian struggle for survival. Rather, Locke conceives of God “not merely as creator and preserver of mankind, but as setting purposes fundamental to human life.”God was for Locke the “binding force” of natural law.

In Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1986), the political theorist Richard Ashcraft observes that Locke first developed his thinking about man’s moral duties to God in his Essays on the Law of Nature (1666), published early in his career. These duties, Locke writes, are bound up with the law of nature and derived “from the right which the Creator has over His Creation.” Though self-preservation is an essential attribute of humankind, it cannot be the basis for the moral laws that govern men and nations. Instead, building upon the divine prerogative declared in Genesis, Locke argues that political absolutism is incompatible with God’s “grand design” for humankind. “The political message of Locke’s commitment to creationism is starkly clear,” writes Ashcraft. “Neither monarchs nor fathers have a right to destroy God’s workmanship, since such a right belongs to the maker of the property.” Ashcraft calls this the “primary axis” upon which Locke rejects political absolutism.

If the absolute sovereignty of God precludes absolutism among men, another basis for political society—accessible to all—must be proposed. But what? This was Locke’s great objective in his Second Treatise, where he cited the Bible sparingly, relying on natural law and natural rights to make the case for human freedom and equality:

The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone, and reason, which is that law, 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.

Scholars widely agree that Locke rooted this “law of Nature” in the divine will and that it was upon this theistic foundation that he based his argument for consensual government. In John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (2005), the political theorist Greg Forster writes that, for Locke, the only kind of natural or moral law worthy of the name was divine in origin. “To be a moral law properly so called, a law need not be revelatory—it can be discerned in nature instead—but it must bear God’s authority.” In John Locke: Essays on the Law of Nature (1988), the philosopher Wolfgang von Lyden writes that Locke rejected the doctrine of Thomas Hobbes, which makes self-preservation and self-interest the basis of natural law. Instead, God was for Locke the “binding force” of natural law. “He derives natural law from man’s rational nature and this, in turn, from God’s wisdom and eternal order that prevails in the universe.” Kim Ian Parker, the author of The Biblical Politics of John Locke (2004), observes that Locke himself drew out the political implications of a divinely ordained natural law: those who violated the law of nature faced punishment from political authorities “for seeking to destroy others who are, in effect, God’s property.”

Many see a strong connection between Locke’s theological basis for consensual government and his argument for the rights of conscience in matters of faith. Locke’s interest in the debates over liberty of conscience began during the Restoration (1660–88), a period of intense religious persecution. A broad defense of religious liberty—grounded in both natural rights and revealed religion—became one of his lifelong pursuits. “In one form or another,” writes the political scientist Gordon Schochet, “religious toleration constitutes the single strand that unites his entire intellectual and political career.”

Here again a consensus has emerged. Like his political radicalism, Locke’s advocacy for religious liberty was framed and motivated by a set of firmly held religious beliefs. Scholars debate Locke’s orthodoxy, but there is little doubt that he maintained a lifelong belief in the divine authority of the Bible, in Jesus as the Messiah, in the hope of eternal life, and in a final judgment.

Dunn was one of the first scholars to take seriously Locke’s convictions on these matters. Contrary to materialist interpretations, Dunn insisted that Locke’s belief in eternal life shaped his politics and drove his appeal for the rights of conscience. For Locke, only genuine faith, based on the “inward persuasion of the mind,” could be acceptable to God. As Dunn explained:

The right of freedom of conscience in Locke’s eyes is fundamentally a right to worship God in the way one judges that God requires: a right which follows from, and is barely intelligible without the duty to do just that. . . . It is a grotesque impertinence for any human political authority to intrude its inept and irrelevant pretensions into this overwhelmingly important individual preoccupation.

Most scholars have come around to this view. In their edition John Locke: An Essay Concerning Toleration (2006), J. R. Milton, a philosopher at King’s College London, and his brother Philip Milton, a lecturer in law at the University of Leicester, examine nearly all of Locke’s writings on religious freedom from 1667 to 1683. As they see it, Locke’s individualism was severely constrained in that every person was accountable for his own soul—for the integrity of his life and faith—before a holy God. “[Locke’s] starting point, the foundation on which everything rests, was that everyone has two destinies, one in this world and the other in the next,” they write. “Of these the latter is by far the most important . . . and religious considerations must take priority over secular ones.”

Locke’s views on the subject of religious reform can be situated roughly within the Protestant tradition of Martin Luther. “As nobody else can go to heaven or hell for me,” Luther wrote, “so nobody else can believe or disbelieve for me.” As Locke put the matter himself: “The one only narrow way which leads to heaven is not better known to the magistrate than to private persons,” he wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration, “and therefore I cannot safely take him for my guide.”

There are plausible reasons to view Locke not only as a religious believer, but also as a Christian reformer. In John Locke: Writings on Religion (2002), the philosopher Victor Nuovo argues that Locke took the Christian doctrine of redemption deadly seriously because the prospect of eternal happiness “was for Locke not an idle hope but an assurance beyond doubt.” His rejection of militant Christianity “does not put him outside the Reformation, but, together with his fidelity to the Protestant principle of sola scriptura, arguably places him within it as one of its advocates.”

In recent years, no scholar has explored with more care the sources of Locke’s thinking about religious liberty than John Marshall, an historian at Johns Hopkins University. In his magisterial John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (2006), Marshall places Locke in the company of reformers who championed the “primitive Christianity” of the early church over the use of force in winning converts. Locke collected virtually everything written about toleration he could get his hands on: the works of Desiderius Erasmus, Sebastian Castellio, Jeremy Taylor, William Chillingworth, Philipp van Limborch, and others in the Christian-humanist tradition. All were Trinitarian, orthodox Christians; all sought a more tolerant form of Christianity. Like them, according to Marshall, Locke believed that “God himself required a voluntary or consensual worship which could not proceed from force” and that “the duties of equity and charity in imitation of Christ and the apostles required the toleration of others.”

In the opening pages of A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), his most sophisticated defense of religious freedom, Locke repeatedly appeals to the teachings and example of Jesus and his disciples as the moral lodestar for a more liberal political order. “The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion, is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the genuine reason of mankind,” he wrote, “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.” It is beyond question, Marshall writes, that for Locke “the duty of charity was a crucial argument for toleration, as charity was the most important duty of Christianity.”

The Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff warns that it is a mistake to isolate Locke’s religious beliefs from his political philosophy: “For a striking feature of Locke’s thought is that religious considerations enter into all parts of his thought; Locke’s philosophy as a whole bids fair to be called a Christian philosophy.” Against Macpherson and Strauss, J. R. Milton argues that Locke’s Christian vocabulary “cannot be interpreted either as a pious façade or . . . as a mere residue in a mind already fundamentally secular but either reluctant or unable to acknowledge itself as such.” Mark Goldie concurs: “Locke’s philosophy was profoundly imbued with Christian convictions: he was no secular thinker.”

Thus, over the last half century, scholars from all disciplines have repudiated the profile of Locke created by Macpherson and Strauss: Locke as a Hobbesian, hedonist, materialist, deist, and an opponent of traditional religion. Indeed, we have learned that Locke sought to anchor his entire approach to politics in one of the central doctrines of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures: the concept that God has marked out a noble calling for every human being, a purpose that was not intended to be realized in a political order based on slavery.

What, then, explains the secular interpretations of Locke that continue to be propagated? In his own day, Locke was attacked as an atheist; one contemporary critic compared him to “one of those Locusts that arose out of the smoke of the bottomless Pit.” Today Locke is hailed by much of the Left as a champion of the radical Enlightenment and pilloried by much of the Right as a tool of the devil to dissolve mankind’s obligations to God and neighbor.

George Kateb, a professor of politics at Princeton, argues—somewhat bizarrely—that only in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding is Locke truly sincere in his arguments for God’s existence. “When he invokes God elsewhere he is not sincere,” Kateb wrote in 2009, without offering any criteria to evaluate Locke’s sincerity. “What is more, nothing moral or political follows from his sincere theological arguments.” As we have seen, quite a bit follows from Locke’s religious convictions. Nevertheless, Kateb claims that Locke “made an unequaled contribution to the emergence of secularism in general and political secularism in particular.” In Why Liberalism Failed (2018), the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen parrots the Marxist critique and condemns Locke’s liberalism as “a catastrophe for the ideals of the West,” based upon a “false anthropology” that exalts “the unleashed ambition of individuals.” Still others have imbibed the materialist narrative and applied it to the American Founding. The result is a view of liberal democracy as having been steeped in an anti-religious, radically individualistic ethos from its birth.

We are thus faced with a profound conceptual mistake involving one of the most consequential minds in the Western political tradition. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government became a catalyst for the American Revolution and for other revolutions dedicated to human equality, freedom, and government by consent of the governed. His Letter Concerning Toleration transformed the debates over the rights of conscience and ranks as the most important defense of religious liberty ever written. These works stand at the heart of the liberal-democratic canon.

Locke’s achievements are best appreciated in their historical setting, the time that Paul Hazard called “the crisis of the European mind.” Born in 1632, Locke lived during one of the most turbulent periods of English history: the English Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. He witnessed firsthand the devastating results of religious persecution. Political absolutism and religious authoritarianism were ravaging European civil society; deeply intertwined, both relied upon eccentric interpretations of the Bible.

Locke met them head on. Whatever the precise content of Locke’s religious beliefs, no serious account of the body of his work can fail to detect a set of religious convictions that functioned as the motive force behind his political philosophy. Locke returned often to the life of Jesus as the model for private and civic behavior. “It is not enough to believe him to be the Messiah,” he warned in The Reasonableness of Christianity, “unless we also obey his laws and take him to be our king to reign over us.” Locke’s aim was to instigate a revolution in the theological outlook of European society: a return to historic biblical teachings that would give rise to a more just, tolerant, and pluralistic society.

This conclusion comes as no surprise to scholars who have studied not only Locke’s published works, but also his unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, and letters. Locke’s extant correspondence consists of about 3,650 letters. Spanning more than five decades, they reveal, among other things, a man of heartfelt faith grappling with the gulf between the moral demands of Christianity and a society lacerated by sectarian strife.

While in political exile in the Netherlands, for example, Locke wrote to his friend, Philipp van Limborch, the leader of a dissenting church in Amsterdam. Limborch had sent Locke a manuscript of his Theologica Christiana, a defense of Christian orthodoxy and a plea for religious toleration. “If you wish me to speak openly and sincerely,” Locke wrote, “nowhere have I found opinions more clearly set forth, better supported by reasoned arguments, further removed from party feeling, and in all points more conformable to the truth” (italics added).

For anyone who cares to examine it, the scholarship offers a stunning rebuke not only to Macpherson and Strauss, but also to the entire secularization thesis. Funeral services for this great myth are long overdue. The roots of the most cherished values of liberalism—its emphasis on human dignity, equality, freedom, and pluralism—grew in the soil of religious belief. Put another way, liberal democracy emerged not because of secularization, but because of a fresh and dynamic application of the principles of biblical religion.

Many actors played a role in the triumph of these concepts in the West, but none was more influential than John Locke. Consequently, any scheme for democratic renewal that remains either ignorant or contemptuous of this history is surely a fool’s errand. Indeed, the recovery of Locke’s singular moral vision is one of the most urgent cultural tasks of our day.

***

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War. His forthcoming book, THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945, will be released on November 18, 2025 by HarperCollins.

BY THE BOOK

By Joseph Loconte

At a dinner party hosted by Sir John Walsh, a wealthy friend of Henry VIII, a young humanist scholar and preacher caused a stir by insisting on the supreme authority of the Bible and that it be translated into vernacular English—a crime in Catholic England. “We were better to be without God’s law than the Pope’s,” declared one of the guests.

The scholar reputedly delivered one of the greatest rebuttals in history:

I defy the Pope and all his laws and if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.

Displaying almost reckless courage, William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536) embarked on a campaign to translate the entire Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into English. Nothing like it had been attempted since the fourth century, when the Catholic Church adopted the Latin translation from Jerome. In the summer of 1525—five hundred years ago—Tyndale’s English New Testament began to take shape in a print shop in Cologne. Published a year later and smuggled into England, it was the cultural equivalent of the splitting of the atom.

Indeed, the political and social consequences of Tyndale’s achievement, touching nearly every aspect of our modern lives, are incalculable. His dissent in the face of autocratic power and oppression is a standing rebuke to the illiberal impulses of our own age.

No one could have foreseen it. Elsewhere in Europe, the Catholic Church had permitted some vernacular translations of the Bible—but only from the Latin Vulgate and only under close supervision. In England, the Constitutions of Oxford of 1408 had outlawed any unauthorized translation of the Scriptures into English, under pain of punishment for heresy. As the biographer David Daniell summarizes it: “The prejudice that maintained that the Latin Bible was the original was deep and bitter enough to cost lives.”

Tyndale therefore left for the Continent and found safe haven in Martin Luther’s Germany, where the Protestant Reformation was in its early stages. But he lived as a fugitive with a price on his head. The formidable Sir Thomas More, one of the most powerful Catholic leaders in England, led the hunt. To More, Tyndale was “a serpent,” a “son of iniquity,” and a “hell-hound in the kennel of the devil.”

By the summer of 1526, the influx of “Tyndale Testaments” into England—thanks to profit-minded printers—prompted an emergency meeting of bishops. The bishop of London denounced Tyndale’s translation for corrupting the Holy Scripture “with cunning perversities and heretical depravity.” All available copies were to be seized and burned. A bonfire was lit at St Paul’s Church, and copies of Tyndale’s New Testament were tossed into the blaze.

Within a decade, Tyndale himself met the same fate. But not before he produced the text that has formed the basis for all subsequent English Bibles. As such, it has anchored virtually every argument in the English-speaking world for expanding human liberty. Even Christopher Hill, a Marxist historian of seventeenth-century England, could not deny its influence: “The availability of the Bible in English . . . was a cultural revolution of unprecedented proportions, whose consequences are difficult to over-estimate.”

It arose in troubled times. When King Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, he unwittingly created an opening for Tyndale’s transformative text. Supporters of a vernacular Bible got appointments under his reign, in part because they had the backing of the new queen, who possessed a copy of Tyndale’s New Testament. As the historian Brian Moynahan puts it, “Anne had no hesitation in reading banned books.” In 1534, Henry’s bishops urged the king to authorize a new English translation of the Bible. Miles Coverdale, who had assisted Tyndale in Hamburg, was given the task of completing the English translation of the Old Testament that Tyndale had begun.

The eventual result, “the Great Bible,” was printed in 1539 and, by royal decree, was authorized to be read aloud in England’s Protestant churches. The English Reformation was in high gear.

It was Tyndale’s grasp of the “linguistic marriage” of Hebrew and English, though, that guided his successors, who completed the work after his execution in 1536. “And the properties of the Hebrew tongue,” Tyndale wrote, “agree a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin.” Daniell, the editor of Tyndale’s Old Testament (1992), argues that “all Old Testament English versions descend from Tyndale.” The same must be said of his New Testament, translated from the original Greek: until the twentieth century, every English version drew largely from that of Tyndale.

These facts were to have a profound effect on the American story. Central to that story is the King James Bible—the chief beneficiary of Tyndale’s work—which played a decisive role in the political revolutions that transformed Britain and, subsequently, Britain’s most important colonial possession.

After the death of King Edward VI, Mary Tudor’s attempt to return England to the Catholic fold backfired. Her violent crackdown on dissenters deepened the Protestant community’s attachment to the English Bible and the right of individuals to interpret it for themselves. Thus, when Elizabeth, Mary’s successor to the throne, walked in procession to assume the crown, she paused to kiss a copy of the Bible in English and pledged “diligently to read” the Scriptures.

After the death of Queen Elizabeth, the Church of England faced multiple sources of religious division. The new monarch, James I—ostensibly motivated by a “zeal to promote the common good”—commissioned a group of scholars to produce a fresh translation of the Bible. Almost immediately upon its appearance in 1611, the King James Bible (also known as the Authorized Version) was hailed as a literary masterpiece.

The extraordinary quality of Tyndale’s original translation is an essential reason why the King James Version has had such a catalytic effect on the politics and culture of the West. Tyndale did much more than find the English equivalent of the ancient languages of the Bible. His masterly and poetic ear for the rhythm of the modern English language, then in its infancy, imbued his translation with a vigor, charm, and clarity that have never been surpassed. Almost the entirety of his New Testament, and most of his Old Testament, were incorporated into the King James Bible.

Consider a few lines from his translation of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3–8):

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

With Tyndale’s translation, anyone could read the Christmas story—or hear it read aloud in church—in stunningly vibrant English, for the first time.

Be not afraid. For behold I bring you tidings of great joy that shall come to all the people: for unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior which is Christ the lord.

The God of the Bible was no longer confined to speaking in a language—Latin—that no one outside of an educated elite could understand. The immediacy of divine grace quickened a deep-seated spiritual hunger that could no longer be suppressed.

Prior to Tyndale, much of the priesthood in England was as ignorant of the Bible as the laity. Propelled by the burgeoning printing industry, Tyndale’s achievement ensured the democratization of Bible ownership: an act of individual empowerment that proved irresistible. Martin Luther had launched this revolution with his German translation of the Scriptures. With the arrival of the King James Bible, placed on display in every Protestant church in England, there was no turning back.

As the historian Mark Noll explains, by achieving hegemony over all other translations, the King James Bible penetrated cultural and political discourse and thus occupied the “central conceptual space for the entire civilization” of the English-speaking world. This singular English Bible, largely dependent on Tyndale’s translation, became the authoritative religious text for Britain and her colonies. As such, the great political debates in seventeenth-century England—about natural rights, government by consent, and religious liberty—were not only framed by biblical assumptions; they were also awash in the language and imagery of the English Bible.

Herein lies a paradox. Although the Catholic medieval project had been shattered by the Reformation, many of its fundamental assumptions about political and religious authority remained. Advocates of absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings, and the necessity of national churches—Protestants as well as Catholics—all drew on the Bible to support their versions of Christendom. Modern progressive theorists and historians assume that it was the forces of secularization that discredited these medieval beliefs about political life. In fact, it was the arrival of the English Bible—and the democratic outlook it nurtured—that assured the total defeat of Christendom and the triumph of the conceptual pillars of liberal democracy.

John Locke, the intellectual father of the liberal-democratic project, had the King James Bible close at hand as he drafted his indictment of political absolutism, his Two Treatises of Government (1690). Taunting his opponent, Robert Filmer, Locke dared him to “show me the Place and Page” from the Bible that upheld the idea of absolute monarchy. Scholars often neglect the fact that the First Treatise is an exacting biblical refutation of patriarchal absolutism.

And even Locke’s Second Treatise, regarded as a natural-law argument for government by consent, draws upon biblical concepts. Locke’s defense of man’s natural rights—life, liberty, and property—is rooted in the language of the New Testament:

For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker . . . they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not another’s pleasure.

Locke’s audience would have recognized his allusion to a passage in Paul’s letter to the Ephesian church: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).

Thanks to Locke’s ability to combine natural-law arguments with biblical teachings, he exerted a profound influence over the American mind—a dissenting Protestant mind that was even more saturated in biblical language than Protestant England’s.

In Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers, Daniel Dreisbach observes that the King James Bible served as the primary textbook for education, law, letters, and civil government during the colonial era. “The Bible was the most accessible, authoritative, and venerated text in early colonial society,” he writes. “Indeed, no text provides richer insight into the world of the founders and their experiment in republican self-government and liberty under law.” In America—like nowhere else in the Western world—the Bible was deployed as an agent of democratic resistance and revolution. “The genius of the authors of the United States Constitution,” writes Tom Holland in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, “was to garb in the robes of the Enlightenment the radical Protestantism that was the prime religious inheritance of their fledgling nation.”

Biblical phrases and allusions animated the discourse of the colonial Patriots in the years leading up to the American Revolution. It was not only the nation’s evangelical ministers, though, who cast the struggle against British “slavery” and “tyranny” in biblical terms. In July 1776, in their proposed design for the Great Seal of the United States, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin—sons of the Enlightenment—both suggested the Exodus story of God delivering the Jewish people from the bondage of the Egyptian pharaoh.

It is thus unsurprising that Thomas Paine, a religious skeptic, drew heavily on the Bible to denounce the British monarchy in his explosive missive for Independence, Common Sense (1776):

As the exalting of one man so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature, so neither can it be defended on the authority of scripture; for the will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings.

After delivering several pages of biblical exegesis on the topic, Paine concludes, “That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the scripture is false.” According to Mark Noll, Paine’s treatise “propelled scriptural argumentation into the center of Revolutionary consciousness.”

The success of Common Sense reveals the unique character of American Protestantism: armed with the King James Bible, colonial Americans advanced radical reinterpretations of the Scriptures to underwrite virtually every facet of their democratic journey.

John Adams was typical among the founders in describing the Bible as “the most republican book in the world.” Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration and a surgeon in the Continental Army, argued that inculcation in the teachings of the Bible was essential for creating virtuous, self-governing citizens:

We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible; for this divine book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal virtues which constitute the soul of republicanism.

Nowhere is this outlook more powerfully on display than in the American commitment to religious liberty. William Penn and Roger Williams, for example, drew heavily from the Bible to establish their colonies of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island as havens of religious freedom. Pennsylvania’s constitution, the Charter of Liberties and Frame of Government (1682), is awash in scriptural citations. “For the history of the Bible in what became the United States,” writes Noll, “it was of first importance that Penn carried out his experiment as an exercise in scriptural Christianity.”

The subversive use of the Bible to demolish Anglican establishments and make the case for religious liberty became a ubiquitous feature of colonial rhetoric. It formed part of the brief for independence against the “popish” tendencies of England. More importantly, even before the Constitutional Convention, the framers took it for granted that biblical Christianity supported freedom of conscience, religious pluralism, and the separation of church and state. In his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” for example, James Madison rejects government support for the Christian religion because “every page of [the Bible] disavows a dependence on the powers of this world.”

The enduring influence of Tyndale’s literary achievement appears in the wealth of expressions in our modern English prose: am I my brother’s keeper?; seek and ye shall find; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak; the salt of the earth; let not your hearts be troubled; for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. “An astonishing quality of Tyndale’s translations,” writes Daniell, “is that so much has not only survived, but has permanently enriched the language.”

In theology, politics, literature, education, the arts: over the last half millennium, no book has exerted a greater influence over the direction of Western civilization than the King James Bible. It is not too much to say that, without it, there would have been no Glorious Revolution of 1688 and no American Revolution of 1776. Without it, there would have been no Shakespeare, no Paradise Lost, no Pilgrim’s Progress, no Handel’s Messiah, no Gettysburg Address, and no Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Without Tyndale, there would have been no King James Bible. In his determination to translate the Scriptures into English, Tyndale allowed no obstacle—exile, shipwreck, poverty, imprisonment—to stand in his way. In the end, it cost him everything.

Betrayed by a friend at a safe house in Antwerp, Tyndale was arrested and sent to Vilvoorde prison—modeled after the hated Bastille in Paris—where he spent sixteen dreary months in isolation. He was to be executed as a heretic because, based on his reading of the Bible, he taught that justification could not be earned by good works but rather was “a free gift of God.” It was only by faith, he insisted, that “the love of him who overcame all the temptations of the devil shall be imputed to us.”

On October 6, 1536, William Tyndale was strangled to death and his body burned. Yet his achievement survived the flames: the democratization of the Word of God, arguably the most liberating event in Western civilization for more than a thousand years, was at hand.

To the authoritarianism of his age, Tyndale was unflinchingly defiant. “Has not God made the English tongue as well as others?” he asked. Using all of his remarkable gifts, Tyndale effectively gave God an English voice, one that resonated throughout England’s colonies, especially among the rebellious Protestants of colonial America. “It was a vernacular Scripture that liberated the English voice,” writes the biographer David Teems, “and the English conscience along with it.”

If so, then perhaps no other figure in modern history has done more to awaken the conscience of the West: to stir a yearning for political and spiritual freedom that resounds in our own day.

***

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He hosts the YouTube channel History and the Human Story His forthcoming book, THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945, will be released in November 2025 by HarperCollins.

In the throes of the Second World War, Oxford University scholar C. S. Lewis published an essay called “On the Reading of Old Books.” One might assume from the title that the essay was written by an ivory tower academic comically out of touch with the crisis of the moment: the struggle between Western civilization and fascist barbarism.

In fact, Lewis offered a moral and intellectual antidote to the totalitarian temptation: a return to ancient truths to help defeat the lies of his own day, and of ours.

Every age has its own outlook, he wrote, its distinctive values and ideals. It may be successful at recognizing and upholding these ideas. But it is just as likely to be blind to the dangers of other ideas — such as white supremacy or the eugenics movement, for example — and to make tragic decisions as a result. “We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period,” he explained, “and that means the old books.”

As for the old books, Lewis was a scholar of classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature. The plays of Aeschylus, the poetry of Ovid, and the epic works of Homer and Virgil were lifelong companions. “The descent to the Underworld is easy,” wrote  Virgil in the Aeneid. “Night and day the gates of shadowy Death stand open wide, but to retrace your steps, to climb back to the upper air — there the struggle, there the labor lies.”

Virgil might have been describing the nightmare years of 1939–45, when the world descended into an abyss of grievances, falsehoods, propaganda, and state-sanctioned terror. The war on the battlefield had an ideological counterpart: a war of ideas that threatened to destroy the foundations of civilized life. The West had lost its moorings, and its modern books — often drenched in cynicism — lacked the one thing desperately needed: historical perspective, grounded in moral seriousness.

This is one of the qualities that Lewis treasured about the old books, which included the Christian literature that he absorbed during his student days at Oxford. Aquinas, Dante, Milton, Bunyan, Hooker, Pascal: Even when he was an atheist, Lewis explained, he found something solid, stirring, and “inexhaustible” about these authors. “They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one.”

It was a conviction that Lewis expressed repeatedly in his writings and lectures during the war. It appears, for example, in his Space Trilogy, a science fiction series about a cosmic struggle between good and evil. In the final novel of the series, That Hideous Strength (1945), the chief protagonist, Mark Gainsby Studdock, is lured into a totalitarian project to subvert a university community under the guise of egalitarian policies and “scientific” planning.

“It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging,” Lewis writes. “His education had been neither scientific nor classical — merely ‘Modern.’” Studdock was “a man of straw,” ignorant of the wisdom from ages past and thus unable to resist the present darkness.

The theme appears again in Lewis’s diabolical satire, The Screwtape Letters (1942), consisting of the imaginary correspondence between a senior demon and his apprentice in their efforts to lead a human soul into perdition. The idea for the book came into his mind after hearing a triumphant address by Adolf Hitler over the BBC.

As Screwtape, the senior devil, explains to Wormwood, they have successfully created an intellectual climate in which “only the learned read old books and we have now dealt with the learned that they are of all men least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so.” The reason, Screwtape explains, is that modern scholars are no longer interested in whether a work from an ancient author contains moral or spiritual truth; they care only about secondary questions, such as the course of academic criticism about it.

“To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge — to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior — this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded . . . it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.”

The classics were indispensable, Lewis believed, because they captured universal truths about the human condition. With the near death of the humanities in our colleges and universities, however, most Americans are no longer nourished — or chastened — by the ancient writers. It is naïve to imagine that this intellectual deficit plays no role in the brutal and propagandistic flavor of our politics. Lacking any historical perspective, we catastrophize the present.

Lewis might direct our minds back to Virgil: Next to the Bible, he considered the Aeneid one of the most important influences on his professional life. It is a story of courage and perseverance in the face of terror and hardship: about a reluctant hero, and his band of brothers, who submit their own desires to a noble quest. “These men are not fighting for their own land like Homeric heroes; they are men with a vocation, men on whom a burden is laid,” Lewis wrote in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). “No man who has once read it with full perception remains an adolescent.”

Whether in the realm of politics, education, or mass media, we seem to have entered a self-absorbed, adolescent age. Indeed, the absence of what the Romans called gravitas — denoting dignity and responsibility — may be the most distinguishing feature of our supposed leaders and “influencers.” Many Americans are thus adrift in what Lewis called “the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone” of our age.

Lewis was never taken in by it. In his essay, written in 1943, he cites the reputation of the fourth-century theologian, Athanasius — “Athanasius against the world” — to criticize those who abandon religious truths only to be swept along by the ravaging tides of their culture. “It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.”

The same may be said of C. S. Lewis. Even before the start of the Second World War, he assailed the ideologies — eugenics, Nazism, communism, and militant nationalism — that were deluding millions in the West. With the onset of war, this Oxford professor insisted that the renewal and ultimate survival of Western civilization depended upon the recovery of its classic texts. “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds,” he wrote, “and this can be done only by reading old books.”

The clean sea breeze of the centuries: If the modern American mind — conflicted, angry, anxious, disillusioned — is to find a measure of moral health, perhaps this is the place to begin.

***

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is the author of the New York Times bestseller “A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.” His forthcoming book, “The War for Middle-Earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945,” will be released in November 2025. He hosts the YouTube channel History and the Human Story at https://www.youtube.com/@JoeLoconte

REASON, REVELATION, AND REVOLUTION

Reclaiming John Locke from modern critics.

Joseph Loconte

Published July 18, 2025

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, colonial leaders enlisted several authoritative sources in their complaints against King George and the British Parliament: the Bible, the English constitution, and Enlightenment philosopher John Locke.

In fact, it is not too much to say that Locke’s political outlook framed nearly all of the core arguments for American independence. Some revisionist scholars, such as J.G.A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment (1975), have tried to marginalize Locke’s presence from the American story. But more recent works—including The Reception of Locke’s Politics, edited by Mark Goldie, and Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, edited by Ellis Sandoz—effectively demolish this view. Colonial assumptions about natural rights, human equality, religious liberty, government by consent, the right of revolution: Each drew heavily from Locke’s writings, which were considered mandatory reading for educated Americans.

As we’ll see, the colonists were heirs of the Lockean tradition. As a result, freedom, reason, and revelation formed a conceptual trinity in the American Revolution. The powerful alliance of these ideas helps to explain the astonishing and enduring influence of the American example.

Unfortunately, nonsense talk about the meaning and legitimacy of the American experiment is almost as ingrained in the New Right as in the progressive left. Catholic thinkers such as Patrick Deneen denounce America’s Lockean liberalism as “a catastrophe for the ideals of the West,” based upon a “false anthropology” that exalts “the unleashed ambition of individuals.” Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule claims that the Lockean philosophy of the Founders is so naturally corrosive of the institutions of family and faith that it would “betray its inner nature” if it actually respected them. Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, blames Locke for delivering a “closed system” of secular values antithetical to fundamental beliefs and loyalties. “[T]here is nothing in the liberal system,” he writes, “that requires you, or even encourages you, to also adopt a commitment to God, the Bible, family, or nation.”

To the New Right—especially the advocates of national conservatism and Catholic integralism—Locke is the serpent in the garden: the thinker who unleashed the sins of materialism, expressive individualism, and militant secularism into the West. With no sense of irony, they contribute to the progressive project of delegitimizing the American Revolution and the liberal democratic order it has brought about.  

The crisis years.

To begin to appreciate the staggering confusion of this mindset, let’s turn to the eve of the Revolution. In the 1760s, as tensions with Great Britain deepened, Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1690) was, by far, the most frequently cited source outside the Bible. According to English historian Peter Laslett, Locke established a set of principles for freedom and equality “more effective and persuasive than any before written in the English language.”

That’s no exaggeration. “The sentiments on this subject have therefore been chiefly drawn from the purer fountains of one or two of our English writers, particularly from Mr. Locke,” explained Boston attorney James Otis in his massively influential The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Written in 1764 during the Stamp Act crisis, Otis’ tract follows Locke in anchoring human freedom in the language of both natural law and religious belief.

Paraphrasing at length from Locke’s Second Treatise, Otis insists that “the natural liberty of man” is inviolable and that “this gift of God cannot be annihilated.” He then applies Lockean logic to the American situation.

I can see no reason to doubt, but that the imposition of taxes … in the colonies, is absolutely irreconcilable with rights of the Colonists, as British subjects, and as men. I say as men, for in a state of nature, no man can take my property from me, without my consent: If he does, he deprives me of my liberty, and makes me a slave.

Two years later, after the hated Stamp Act was repealed, the British crown instigated another argument over colonial rights with the Declaratory Act, asserting Britain’s prerogative to make laws binding upon the American Colonies. The act afforded Parliament complete authority over the Colonies, while pronouncing any colonial criticism or opposition “utterly null and void.”

To repudiate British claims, Locke’s authority was again invoked, not only by the colonists—who repeatedly cited the Second Treatise—but also by sympathetic Englishmen. In a speech in the House of Lords on March 7, 1766, Charles Pratt, also known as the Lord Camden, quoted from the Second Treatise to denounce parliamentary overreach:

In short, my lords, from the whole of our history, from the earliest period, you will find that taxation and representation were always united; so true are the words of that consummate reasoner and politician Mr. Locke…His principles are drawn from the heart of our constitution, which he thoroughly understood.

The Declaratory Act confronted Americans with a fundamentally Lockean question: What is the extent of the legislative power? Locke provided a morally persuasive answer: The legislature “cannot take from any man any part of his property without his consent.” Locke’s doctrine of consent is essential not only for understanding his political philosophy: His theory of political consent, of the voluntary nature of government, was reinforced by his belief in the voluntary nature of religion.

This is one of the central themes of Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), probably the most widely read and influential defense of religious freedom in colonial America.

“The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force,” Locke wrote, “but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.” Just as an individual enters a political society by his consent, so, too, does he join the church—“a free and voluntary society”—of his own choosing. “The hopes of salvation, as it was the only cause of his entrance into that communion, so it can be the only reason of his stay there,” Locke wrote.

A faith-based anthropology.

Undergirding Locke’s political philosophy is a concept of human nature that roughly agrees with the biblical view: a belief in the dignity as well as the tragedy of the human condition.

“[F]or men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business,” Locke writes in the Second Treatise. “They are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s pleasure.” Locke’s audience would have recognized his allusion to the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Thus, the concept of government by consent is explicitly linked to an anthropology bound up with belief in God.

“Freedom, reason, and revelation formed a conceptual trinity in the American Revolution.”

In Locke’s defense of religious liberty, the principle of consent is crucial to authentic faith and is similarly grounded in a religious view of the human person. “It is only light and evidence that can work a change in men’s opinions, and that light can in no manner proceed from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties,” he writes in A Letter Concerning Toleration. “God himself will not save men against their wills.” Echoing the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, Locke insists that the salvation of a person’s soul cannot be left to the whims of princes or priests: It demands the conviction, choice, and faith of the individual believer. “No way whatsoever that I shall walk in against the dictates of my conscience will ever bring me to the mansions of the blessed.”

In making these arguments, Locke’s conceptual breakthrough—unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas—was to combine the classical view of natural law with a doctrine of inalienable natural rights.

In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from Scripture, as well as from classical authors like Cicero, to argue that everyone possessed these rights because everyone was born “equal and independent” and shared “all in one community of Nature.” In A Letter Concerning Toler­ation, Locke called freedom of conscience a “fundamental and immu­table right,” ratified by both reason and the ethical demands of the Gospel. “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,” he wrote, “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 Declaratory Act, however, threatened these fundamental rights by not recognizing any limits on the legislative power: It would extend London’s political authority “in all cases whatsoever,” potentially endangering a man’s soul as well as his estate.

Colonial rebels considered Locke to be “an indispensable ally” in their opposition to the crown, writes the political scientist Steven Dworetz, author of The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution. “They knew that the question before them was a Lockean question and that Locke had furnished the only answer consistent with liberty.” In The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America, political scientist Lee Ward observes that by 1776, the idea of popular sovereignty that the Americans had inherited from Locke and other radical Whigs “was in the process of becoming virtually the sole legitimate philosophy of governance in the colonies.”

Religion and the Republic.

In Locke’s most important writings on politics, the colonists discovered a biblical rationale for republican government. In his defense of religious liberty, they found a bracing appeal to the life and teachings of Jesus. All of this was profoundly congenial to the Protestant culture of 18th-century America.

Indeed, preachers quoted Locke as enthusiastically as politicians. In his 1744 tract defending freedom of conscience, “The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants,” Elisha Williams, rector at Yale University, combined the Puritan emphasis on congregational independence with arguments from Locke’s Second Treatise and A Letter Concerning Toleration:

Whenever the power that is put in any hands for the government of any people is applied to any other end than the preservation of their persons and properties, the securing and promoting their civil interests (the end for which power was put into their hands), I say when it is applied to any other end, then (according to the great Mr. Locke) it becomes tyranny.

Finally, colonial leaders also found in Locke a compelling argument for resisting political tyranny and “arbitrary power.” Though initially considered a radical proposition, the case for the American Revolution was ultimately embraced as the moral endpoint of the cascading logic of Locke’s philosophy.

The essential purpose of government, Locke explained, is to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens: men and women endowed with dignity because they bear the likeness of their creator. If the political authority consistently fails to safeguard these natural rights, it violates God’s moral law, forfeits its authority, and “puts itself into a state of war with the people.” Revolutions to depose an unjust regime, Locke insisted, will not occur every time government oversteps its limits, but rather:

…if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was first erected…

Given Locke’s place in the educational curricula of colonial America, most of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence would have encountered his views—directly or indirectly—on government, politics, philosophy, and religion.

In “A State of the Rights of the Colonists,” for example, drawn up by Samuel Adams and 20 other revolutionary-minded Bostonians, the Lockean language of natural law is unmistakable. “When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary Consent. … Now what Liberty can there be where Property is taken away without Consent?” Likewise, the natural rights language of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted by George Mason, was lifted nearly verbatim from Locke’s Second Treatise: “That all by nature all men are equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity.”

The “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence—that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—were echoed in most of the state declarations. Thus, the revolutionaries thoroughly embraced a Lockean vision of human equality and freedom rooted in both natural law and biblical religion. Reason, supported and constrained by revelation, produced the revolution of 1776.

God, Locke, and liberty.

As I have written elsewhere, the contrast with the revolution of 1789 could not be more extreme. The architects of the French Revolution turned reason into an idol, untethered from religion. Their rallying cry—“We will strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest!”—produced the guillotine and the Reign of Terror. Their guiding light was Jean Jacques Rousseau, not John Locke.

The last 50 years of Locke scholarship have obliterated the crude caricature of Locke as a secular hedonist, popularized by Leo Strauss in the 1950s and regurgitated more recently by the New Right. Locke’s religious commitments are evident throughout his writings, especially in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). It is largely forgotten today that Locke not only made the definitive case for government by consent; he also promoted an educational philosophy—anchored in the Bible—that would produce the kinds of citizens fit for self-government.

“As the foundation of this, there ought very early to be imprinted on his mind a true notion of God, as of the independent supreme Being, Author, and Maker, of all things, from whom we receive all our good, who loves us, and gives us all things; and, consequent to this, instill into him a love and reverence of this supreme Being.”

Unlike the cynical, disillusioned, and utopian academics of the 21st century who disparage Locke—and by extension, the American Revolution—the leaders of this political endeavor, along with their principled supporters in Great Britain, understood what Locke’s writings meant in the struggle for a more just and democratic society.

Arthur Lee, who assisted Ben Franklin in negotiating the 1778 treaty with France, viewed the entire American project in Lockean terms. “Representation being in our constitution the mode of giving consent, representation and taxation are constitutionally inseparable,” he wrote in 1772. “This is Mr. Locke’s doctrine, it is the doctrine of reason and truth, and it is, Sir, the unvarnished doctrine of the Americans.”

What other principles of government, we must ask, have made possible the greatest expansion in human freedom and human flourishing in the history of the world? The renewal—perhaps even the survival—of our republican government depends on how we, as heirs of the revolution of 1776, answer that question.

Joseph Loconte, PhD, is director of the Rivendell Center in New York City. He also serves as a presidential scholar at New College of Florida and as the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is the author of God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West.

A Forgotten Lesson of the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’

It has passed into history as proof of Christian America’s ‘war on science.’ Less remembered is that it’s an example of Christianity standing against eugenics.

By Joseph Loconte

August 3, 2025

A hundred years have elapsed since one of the most famous trials in America — the Scopes “Monkey Trial” — and the liberal establishment has still not understood one of its central lessons.

On July 10, 1925, 24-year-old high school teacher John Scopes was put on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution, a crime under state law. The two opposing attorneys, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, immediately became symbols of an epic battle: science and rationality vs. religion and superstition. Thus, writing recently in the New York Times, historian Michael Kazin calls the trial “a momentous clash between modern science and traditional Christianity.” Opining in the Chronicle of Higher Education, John K. Wilson insists that the event represents “the conflict between politics and academic freedom.”

Liberal commentators always fail to mention, however, an inconvenient fact about the actual textbook at the center of the trial, a fact that helps explain why Tennesseans found it so morally offensive: It presented a defense of eugenics wrapped in pseudo-science and Darwinian biology.

William Hunter’s A Civic Biology (1914) — the best-selling text in its field — argued unapologetically for eugenics as the obvious social implication of Darwinian evolution. Referring to families that produced “feeble-minded” and “criminal persons,” Hunter rendered this judgment:

Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. . . . Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. . . . If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.

A Civic Biology, in fact, reinforced a host of illiberal impulses: racism, white supremacy, and contempt for the poor and those with disabilities. The end goal, Hunter wrote, was to prevent the perpetuation of those who “take from society” but “give nothing in return.” The means: asylums, restrictive marriage laws, and the forced sterilization of undesirables.

Darwin himself had speculated about the desirability of eugenics-based social engineering. “Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind,” he complained in The Descent of Man (1871). “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” Anthropologist Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics — from the Greek for “good birth” — openly argued that scientific techniques for breeding healthier animals should be applied to human beings. Those considered to be “degenerates,” “imbeciles,” or “feebleminded” would be targeted for elimination.

And, by the 1920s, targeted they were — by academics, politicians, activists, and scientists. Indeed, the eugenic idea seized the imagination of the medical and scientific communities in the early 20th century. Premier scientific organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History, and institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, promoted sterilization laws and preached the eugenics gospel through lectures, conferences, and research papers.

Progressives led the drive for eugenic policies on all fronts, and the Democratic Party — the party of segregation and the Jim Crow South — became their chief political sponsor. By the end of the 1920s, 33 states passed eugenics laws and carried out thousands of forced sterilizations.

Tennessee never passed a compulsory sterilization law. Dennis Sewall, author of The Political Gene, acknowledges that the rural folk of Tennessee may not have had a sophisticated grasp of Darwinian evolution. “But they knew the progressives who preached Darwinism in the cities despised country people, called them ‘imbeciles’ and ‘defectives’ and would sterilize them if they got half a chance.”

The pattern of resistance to eugenics was plain: It came from those religious communities — Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish — deeply attached to the authority of the Bible. It is of course true that “Bible belt” states such as Tennessee, known for their religious conservatism, approved of segregation and other racist policies. Nevertheless, those who opposed the eugenic agenda of the social Darwinists believed the Bible was the Word of God, and that men and women were created by him and carried his divine image.

William Jennings Bryan, the prosecuting attorney at the Scopes trial, was a Democrat, a populist, and a political progressive who nonetheless considered himself a Bible-believing, evangelical Christian.

“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals,” he said. “It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.” Bryan objected to the ruthless, militant materialism — “survival of the fittest” — that the advocates of evolution and eugenics seemed to represent. “Let no one think that this acceptance of barbarism as the basic principle of evolution died with Darwin.”

In this, the defenders of the biblical story of man’s origins proved prophetic. Writing a few years before the Scopes trial, Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton predicted an unholy alliance between government and scientific elites. “Hence the tyranny has taken but a single stride to reach the secret and sacred place of personal freedom,” he wrote, “where no sane man ever dreamed of seeing it.”

An authoritarian mindset had indeed taken hold of the cultured elites. In 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a progressive and committed eugenicist, wrote the infamous majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, which upheld the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he wrote. The eugenics movement was in high gear.

Twenty-first-century progressives, apparently without a twinge of conscience, ignore this side of the story. For them, the Scopes trial proved that religion is the enemy of science, rationality, and intellectual freedom. Just so today: Recent attempts to post the Ten Commandments in public schools are met with derision. “Religiosity is once again being imposed on education,” complains John K. Wilson. “When religious dogma is required in schools, creationism won’t be far behind.”

In fact, it was the attempt by government to indoctrinate children with a secular, materialist worldview that lay near the heart of the controversy. Indeed, in his companion textbook, Hunter reminded teachers that “the child is at the receptive age and is emotionally open to the serious lessons here involved.” Yes, lessons in barbarism, trumpeted in the classroom.

Nevertheless, the progressive outlook — still championed by the Democratic Party — remains stubbornly secular and contemptuous of traditional religion. Complaining about “right-wing” groups that seek to prevent new attempts at ideological indoctrination in public schools, Kazin could hardly be more condescending. He derides Bryan, and his modern counterparts, for believing that “the people” have the right to control the educational system supported by their tax dollars. “Democratic politicians will have to figure out how to work around such wrongheaded notions.”

We already have seen what happens when this suffocating ideology is given a free hand. When the United States indoctrinated its citizens in the dogma of eugenics, the results were catastrophic: a widening and deepening of institutional racism, xenophobic anti-immigration policies, and the coercive sterilization of “the unfit.” And it was all justified in the name of “progress,” supported by the scientific and academic establishments.

“Could any doctrine be more destructive of civilization?” Bryan asked. The answer arrived soon enough: The event that brought all of it to a screeching halt was the Holocaust. It is well known that the Nazis based their 1933 sterilization laws on the work of American eugenicists such as Harry Laughlin, who received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for his efforts to promote “race hygiene.” Hitler’s death camps were the horrific yet logical result of the militant rejection of the God of the Bible.

“If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene,” Bryan warned. “His teachings, and His teachings, alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world.”

If the teachings of Jesus the Nazarene had prevailed against the scientific establishment a century ago, we may have been spared the greatest horrors ever unleashed upon the human race. With new and fearsome threats to humanity on the horizon, we could use more of that old time religion.

The government of the United States traces its roots back to ancient Greece, Rome and historic philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Considering their extraordinary influence on modern political systems and especially democracy, it couldn’t be timelier to reconnect and reconsider the early origins of our government. This is especially relevant now as increasingly we are seeing evidence of countries slipping towards authoritarianism, a risk that some fear for the United States.

The eyes of the world are focused on Rome right now because of the death of the pope, but they should also be directed at Italy’s increasingly influential prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

Last week, the Italian prime minister was in Washington, D.C., meeting with the president of the United States. There, Prime Minister Meloni delivered a subtle yet profound message to Donald Trump and his administration: The future of the American project is bound up with the future of Western civilization.

“When I speak about the West, I don’t speak about the geographical space,” said Prime Minister Meloni during last week’s White House meeting. “I speak about the civilization. And I want to make that civilization stronger.”

Better than any other European leader, Giorgia Meloni understands what lies at the core of the cultural legacy of the West — and of the American political order. In accepting the 2024 Global Citizen Award from the Atlantic Council, she implored her American audience to stand up for Western political ideals now under assault. “The West is a system of values in which the person is central, men and women are equal and free, and therefore the systems are democratic, life is sacred, the state is secular, and based on the rule of law,” she said. “Are these values we should be ashamed of?”

Meloni’s description of Western values, of course, is a description of American values.

Thanks to the degraded condition of primary and secondary education, however, most Americans never learn about the remarkable achievements of Western civilization in elevating the dignity and freedom of the individual. They never learn that our civilization is the product of the centuries-long interaction of Greek and Roman culture, adopted and transformed by the Jewish and Christian traditions, and transformed again by the scientific, democratic, and intellectual revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the United States.

What we call “the Western tradition” is really a story of tragedy and triumph: of oppression, exploitation, inquisitions, slavery, racism, and war — as well as a story of liberation, discovery, creativity, justice, freedom, and peace.

Surely it is no accident that Meloni — an Italian — is standing up for this cultural inheritance. For it is difficult to overstate Italy’s decisive role in the formation of Western civilization. In politics, philosophy, science, literature, art, music, religion — and food — the Italians reached heights of human achievement that laid the foundation for the most dynamic and consequential civilization in human history.

Behind many of these achievements was the Christian faith. And as a believing Catholic, Meloni is unafraid to say so.

“Above all, we need to recover awareness of who we are,” Meloni explained. She said that we are the heirs of a “synthesis born out of the meeting of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian humanism.”

In other words, take away Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Locke, and Western civilization disappears from the history books.

In this, Italy’s first female prime minister shares the outlook of the first female prime minister of Great Britain: Margaret Thatcher.

In 1988, in her first trip to communist Poland as prime minister, Thatcher challenged her hosts to reform their political system and rejoin the European democratic community. “We want to see the barriers which have divided Europe for the last 40 years dismantled,” she said, “so that Poland and other Eastern European countries can once again share fully in Europe’s culture, Europe’s freedom and Europe’s justice—treasures which sprang from Christendom, which were developed through a rule of law and found their expression in democracy.”

Thus, Meloni has been called the Margaret Thatcher of today’s Europe: a relentless advocate for the political and religious concepts that brought liberal democracy into existence. Like Thatcher, she is the leading political voice against authoritarian rule. Like Thatcher, she is the most articulate defender of European civilization, which she describes as “a civilization built over the centuries with the genius and sacrifices of many.”

The great “existential” threat to human freedom — coming from within the West — is progressivism. Meloni understands that. The cancel culture “tries to upset and remove every single beautiful, honorable and human thing that our civilization has developed,” she writes in her autobiography. “It is a nihilistic wind of unprecedented ugliness.” Meloni made it clear during her political campaign that “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am Italian, I am Christian. You can’t take this away from me!”

She has no patience for modern identity politics.

All of this sends the radical left into apoplexy. Meloni’s tough stance on illegal immigration is called xenophobic. Her defense of the traditional family and rejection of the transgender movement is denounced as a revival of fascism. Shortly before Meloni’s election as prime minister, Jason Horowitz, Rome bureau chief for the New York Times, wrote ominously of Meloni’s youthful attraction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. According to Horowitz, Meloni fraternized with “a fellowship of militants” who view Tolkien’s story as “a fertile shire for nationalists.”

In fact, Meloni’s ongoing attachment to Tolkien’s mythology reveals a moral seriousness that is wholly absent from her infantile detractors.

Two themes stand out: First, as Tolkien himself once described his book’s central message, The Lord of the Rings is “about power, exerted for domination.” Meloni has said explicitly that her view of power and its capacity to ruin the human soul was “closely tied” to Tolkien’s view. “I consider power very dangerous,” she says. “I consider it an enemy and not a friend.”

No fascist in the history of fascism would ever say or think such a thing.

Second, there is the Tolkienian emphasis on every person’s obligation, regardless of her strength or circumstances, to battle the malignant forces in our world. For Meloni, brave but ordinary people — not abstract global institutions — will determine the direction of Western civilization. As she told her New York audience: “The time we live in requires us to choose what we want to be and what path we want to take.”

As in Tolkien’s story, so in our actual lives. Resignation in the face of difficulty, evasion of individual responsibility, cowardice when moral courage is demanded — herein lies the road to perdition.

“We can continue to fuel the idea of the decline of the West, we can surrender to the idea that our civilization has nothing more to say, no more routes to chart,” said Meloni. “Or we can remember who we are, learn also from our mistakes, add our own piece of the story to this remarkable walk, and govern what happens around us, to leave our children a better world. Which is exactly my choice.”

Whether or not other democratic leaders — including those in the United States — will make the same resolute choice is a decidedly open question. In the meantime, Viva Italia!

—

Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the author of the forthcoming book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. Check out his new YouTube history channel, History and the Human Story.

This article was originally posted at The American Spectator.

The eyes of the world are focused on Rome right now because of the death of the pope, but they should also be directed at Italy’s increasingly influential prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

Last week, the Italian prime minister was in Washington, D.C., meeting with the president of the United States. There, Prime Minister Meloni delivered a subtle yet profound message to Donald Trump and his administration: The future of the American project is bound up with the future of Western civilization.

“When I speak about the West, I don’t speak about the geographical space,” said Prime Minister Meloni during last week’s White House meeting. “I speak about the civilization. And I want to make that civilization stronger.”

Better than any other European leader, Giorgia Meloni understands what lies at the core of the cultural legacy of the West — and of the American political order. In accepting the 2024 Global Citizen Award from the Atlantic Council, she implored her American audience to stand up for Western political ideals now under assault. “The West is a system of values in which the person is central, men and women are equal and free, and therefore the systems are democratic, life is sacred, the state is secular, and based on the rule of law,” she said. “Are these values we should be ashamed of?”

Meloni’s description of Western values, of course, is a description of American values.

Thanks to the degraded condition of primary and secondary education, however, most Americans never learn about the remarkable achievements of Western civilization in elevating the dignity and freedom of the individual. They never learn that our civilization is the product of the centuries-long interaction of Greek and Roman culture, adopted and transformed by the Jewish and Christian traditions, and transformed again by the scientific, democratic, and intellectual revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the United States.

What we call “the Western tradition” is really a story of tragedy and triumph: of oppression, exploitation, inquisitions, slavery, racism, and war — as well as a story of liberation, discovery, creativity, justice, freedom, and peace.

Surely it is no accident that Meloni — an Italian — is standing up for this cultural inheritance. For it is difficult to overstate Italy’s decisive role in the formation of Western civilization. In politics, philosophy, science, literature, art, music, religion — and food — the Italians reached heights of human achievement that laid the foundation for the most dynamic and consequential civilization in human history.

Behind many of these achievements was the Christian faith. And as a believing Catholic, Meloni is unafraid to say so.

“Above all, we need to recover awareness of who we are,” Meloni explained. She said that we are the heirs of a “synthesis born out of the meeting of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian humanism.”

In other words, take away Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Locke, and Western civilization disappears from the history books.

In this, Italy’s first female prime minister shares the outlook of the first female prime minister of Great Britain: Margaret Thatcher.

In 1988, in her first trip to communist Poland as prime minister, Thatcher challenged her hosts to reform their political system and rejoin the European democratic community. “We want to see the barriers which have divided Europe for the last 40 years dismantled,” she said, “so that Poland and other Eastern European countries can once again share fully in Europe’s culture, Europe’s freedom and Europe’s justice—treasures which sprang from Christendom, which were developed through a rule of law and found their expression in democracy.”

Thus, Meloni has been called the Margaret Thatcher of today’s Europe: a relentless advocate for the political and religious concepts that brought liberal democracy into existence. Like Thatcher, she is the leading political voice against authoritarian rule. Like Thatcher, she is the most articulate defender of European civilization, which she describes as “a civilization built over the centuries with the genius and sacrifices of many.”

The great “existential” threat to human freedom — coming from within the West — is progressivism. Meloni understands that. The cancel culture “tries to upset and remove every single beautiful, honorable and human thing that our civilization has developed,” she writes in her autobiography. “It is a nihilistic wind of unprecedented ugliness.” Meloni made it clear during her political campaign that “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am Italian, I am Christian. You can’t take this away from me!”

She has no patience for modern identity politics.

All of this sends the radical left into apoplexy. Meloni’s tough stance on illegal immigration is called xenophobic. Her defense of the traditional family and rejection of the transgender movement is denounced as a revival of fascism. Shortly before Meloni’s election as prime minister, Jason Horowitz, Rome bureau chief for the New York Times, wrote ominously of Meloni’s youthful attraction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. According to Horowitz, Meloni fraternized with “a fellowship of militants” who view Tolkien’s story as “a fertile shire for nationalists.”

In fact, Meloni’s ongoing attachment to Tolkien’s mythology reveals a moral seriousness that is wholly absent from her infantile detractors.

Two themes stand out: First, as Tolkien himself once described his book’s central message, The Lord of the Rings is “about power, exerted for domination.” Meloni has said explicitly that her view of power and its capacity to ruin the human soul was “closely tied” to Tolkien’s view. “I consider power very dangerous,” she says. “I consider it an enemy and not a friend.”

No fascist in the history of fascism would ever say or think such a thing.

Second, there is the Tolkienian emphasis on every person’s obligation, regardless of her strength or circumstances, to battle the malignant forces in our world. For Meloni, brave but ordinary people — not abstract global institutions — will determine the direction of Western civilization. As she told her New York audience: “The time we live in requires us to choose what we want to be and what path we want to take.”

As in Tolkien’s story, so in our actual lives. Resignation in the face of difficulty, evasion of individual responsibility, cowardice when moral courage is demanded — herein lies the road to perdition.

“We can continue to fuel the idea of the decline of the West, we can surrender to the idea that our civilization has nothing more to say, no more routes to chart,” said Meloni. “Or we can remember who we are, learn also from our mistakes, add our own piece of the story to this remarkable walk, and govern what happens around us, to leave our children a better world. Which is exactly my choice.”

Whether or not other democratic leaders — including those in the United States — will make the same resolute choice is a decidedly open question. In the meantime, Viva Italia!

—

Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the author of the forthcoming book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. Check out his new YouTube history channel, History and the Human Story.

Halfway through the Second World War, Oxford scholar J. R. R. Tolkien found himself inside a storm of discouragement and self-doubt. In 1937, shortly after the publication of his children’s novel, The Hobbit, he began writing a sequel. But by April 1942, the story had ground to a halt. His fantastic tale of the Ring of Power and the struggle for Middle-earth “was growing out of hand,” Tolkien recalled years later, “and I wanted to finish it, but the world was threatening.”

It is difficult to overstate how menacing the world looked to the British people in the spring of 1942. Great Britain had been fighting for its life since the fall of France in 1940. Within a week of the attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Japanese forces had stormed across the Pacific and Southeast Asia in a vast offensive that sent British and American troops staggering in defeat and surrender. Singapore fell after a week of intense fighting, with more than 130,000 British soldiers taken prisoner. By April 1942, the Japanese war in the Pacific was larger, and nearly as devastating, as that of the Nazis in Europe.

Meanwhile, Hitler’s Germany seemed destined to achieve the “living space” demanded by the führer. Germany controlled virtually all of Western and Central Europe, all the major capitals and ports. Following their invasion of the Soviet Union, German forces conquered Crimea and were pushing toward the Caucasus. Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Byelorussia were all in Nazi hands. Crimes against humanity were being committed on a scale for which the civilized world had no conceptual category.

This was the fate that awaited Great Britain, the United States, and their allies if they could not take the fight to the enemy and prevail.

Perhaps Tolkien had this geopolitical nightmare in mind when he wrote of the dire warning from Lady Galadriel, ruler of the Elves, to the Fellowship: “But this I will say to you. Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all.” By his own admission, The Lord of the Rings, with its portrayal of radical evil and existential dread, was not the sequel Tolkien had promised his publisher; it was no bedtime story for children.

“The war had arisen to darken all horizons,” Tolkien recalled. He was nearly certain that his epic fantasy would never be finished. Yet to his own amazement, and with little effort, Tolkien suddenly produced a short story. He simply woke up one morning, in April 1942, “with that odd thing virtually complete in my head.” He wrote it out in a few hours.

Poignant and soul-searching, “Leaf by Niggle” is the story of a painter who becomes distraught when it appears he will never complete his masterpiece: a great and beautiful tree. It was Tolkien’s self-administered remedy to every man’s fear: the fear of death. Not every painting, not every story, will be completed on this side of the veil. “Leaf by Niggle” is rightly considered the most autobiographical of all Tolkien’s writings.

Niggle is the painter — “not a very successful one” — and, like Tolkien the writer, he is a perfectionist and easily distracted and harried by his neighborly obligations. Niggle’s “garden,” which is not well tended, looks suspiciously like Tolkien’s literary career. “It would need some concentration, some work, hard uninterrupted work, to finish the picture, even at its present size,” Tolkien writes in “Leaf.” “But there came a tremendous crop of interruptions.”

Just so for Tolkien. He was asked to chair endless committee meetings to address wartime contingencies (e.g., what to do if Oxford were bombed by the Nazis). In addition to carrying a heavy teaching load, he had to create and oversee new courses for college cadets preparing to be sent into battle. Like other Oxford families, his took in evacuee children from London. He volunteered as an air-raid warden, performing duties that included all-night patrols and an emergency rescue effort when a British plane crashed near his house. Art was indeed imitating life.

With his painting unfinished, Niggle is suddenly forced to leave his home and everything else behind and take a train ride to an undisclosed destination — to face death and judgment. He is sent to a workhouse (purgatory), where he overhears two Voices evaluating his life. “Look at the time he wasted, not even amusing himself!” says the First Voice. “He never got ready for his journey.” The Second Voice agrees but offers an explanation: “But of course, he is only a little man. He was never meant to be anything very much; and he was never very strong.”

Here is a man at the age of 50 — a respected academic at one of the most prestigious universities in the world — taking humble stock of himself, his achievements, and his ambitions.

Although he had fought honorably in the First World War, Tolkien referred to himself as a man lacking in physical courage. He modeled his hobbits, he once admitted, on the humble English soldiers with whom he served in France and considered “far superior to myself.” Writing to one of his sons, then training as an antiaircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain, he observed: “You three boys all seem to have a decent share of courage and guts. You owe that to your mother.”

In some ways, Niggle is the man Tolkien hoped to become. Despite his failings, the artist makes a courageous and selfless decision before his departure. Although somewhat grudgingly, Niggle agrees to help a bothersome neighbor, Mr. Parish, who interrupts his work on the painting to implore him to fetch a doctor for his ailing wife. Niggle is willing to allow his creative life to effectively come to an end if it means helping another life in need. “It seems plain that this was a genuine sacrifice,” says the Second Voice. “Niggle guessed that he was throwing away his last chance with his picture.”

The Voices allow him to leave the workhouse and journey to the country, where he encounters his painting: completed, magnificent, sublime in its beauty. Yet it is more than that: It is a living Tree. “All the leaves he had ever labored at were there, as he had imagined them, rather than as he had made them.” Niggle is overcome with wonder. “He gazed at the Tree, and slowly lifted his arms and opened them wide. ‘It’s a gift!’ he said.”

His real journey, however, is about to begin. There is more work that can be done on the Tree than Niggle can complete on his own. He realizes that he needs the assistance of Mr. Parish, who has never appreciated his painting but knows a lot about earth, plants, and trees. “This place cannot be left just as my private park,” Niggle says. “I need help and advice: I ought to have got it sooner.”

This portion of the story suggests Tolkien’s decision, more than a decade earlier, to share with his Oxford friend C. S. Lewis a long narrative poem he had begun writing in 1925. It is considered the most personal story in all of Tolkien’s mythology: the love story between Beren, a mortal man, and Lúthien, an immortal Elvish princess. The tale of Beren and Lúthien would play an immensely important role in Tolkien’s legendarium of Middle-earth.

Lewis’s response must have appeared like an oasis in the desert. Tolkien had entrusted to his friend the story that he loved best of all his work, a story inspired by his relationship with his wife. It was a rare moment of vulnerability. In a letter to Tolkien, Lewis praised the poem in the highest terms, telling him, “I can honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight.” He proceeded to send the author 14 pages of critique, with “grumbles at individual lines,” as he put it. Tolkien incorporated many of Lewis’s proposed changes into his next draft.

Back in Niggle’s village, the local authorities talk disparagingly of their departed neighbor and his painting. His unfinished canvas, in fact, is being used to patch a neighbor’s roof. “I think he was a silly little man,” says Councillor Tompkins. “Worthless, in fact; no use to Society at all.” Painting has its usefulness, Tompkins adds, but only for those “bold young men” with new ideas and new methods. “None for this old-fashioned stuff. Private day-dreaming.”

The carping characters in the story can be read as embodiments of the utilitarian outlook of the age. Yet Tolkien also battled the “bold young men” of the Modernist movement in literature who came into vogue after the cataclysm of the First World War. Concepts such as courage, virtue, noble sacrifice, and faith seemed to vanish into the killing fields on the Western Front. From James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the old beliefs about mankind’s dignity and high moral purpose were discarded as obsolete. As literary critic Roger Sale summarized the Modernist mood, the writer who imagined a heroic destiny for his characters was considered “deceived and dangerous.”

It was precisely this outlook that Tolkien was rebelling against in his story about the war for Middle-earth. “It is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences,” he once explained, “without actual offensive action.” The Lord of the Rings was his great salvo in the struggle against the moral cynicism that had infected his generation. Like his friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien believed that imaginative literature could help reclaim the older concepts of sin, grace, and redemption for the modern mind.

“Leaf by Niggle” achieves this aim in its evocative, almost mythic conclusion. Niggle next encounters Mr. Parish, who also has arrived in the country. In the village, Parish dismissed Niggle’s painting as “Niggle’s Nonsense,” while Niggle called him “Old Earth-grubber.” But now the two men work together on a landscaping project. As they live and labor together in the country, Niggle thinks of “wonderful new flowers and plants,” and Parish knows “exactly how to set them and where they would do best.” Even more remarkable, as Niggle gazes at the Great Tree he realizes that its most exquisite and beautiful leaves — “the most perfect examples of the Niggle style” — have been created “in collaboration with Mr. Parish: there was no other way of putting it.”

Tolkien is taking to task the self-absorption of the modern artist. Creative work must not be attempted at the expense of everyday relationships: Our obligations to others do not cease when we enter the studio. Tolkien had learned how unexpected friendships can open up the artist to new sources of beauty and grace.

Writing “Leaf by Niggle” was an act of defiance: In the spring of 1942, the forces of dehumanization appeared to be on the winning side of history. For a time, it really seemed that life was absurd, that the disintegration of civilization itself was at hand. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. For Tolkien, this represented one of the purposes of imaginative literature: to help us combat the darkness. Literature of this kind could remind us that the material world, with its temporal aims, is not the sum and substance of our lives. There are such things as beauty and goodness and truth.

There is a noble purpose to the human story, Tolkien believed, and we need eyes of faith to see it. Niggle begins to see it: beautiful mountains beyond the Great Tree, which stir a sense of longing. “They did not seem to belong to the picture, or only as a link to something else, a glimpse through the trees of something different, a further stage: another picture.”

The political and ideological chaos in the aftermath of the First World War had created a maelstrom of doubt and disillusionment. “Leaf by Niggle” was part of Tolkien’s lifelong attempt to overcome it — first in himself and, ultimately, in those around him — and to re-enchant the modern mind. There is nothing escapist about imaginative literature of this quality. On the contrary, “we are brought to a deeper pondering and insight into central aspects of our actual lives,” writes novelist and historian Edmund Fuller. “Our sensitivity is whetted to honor and courage and aspiration and beauty. No one thinking on these things is escaping reality.”

Here, for Tolkien, lies the deepest purpose of the creative imagination: to give others a taste of ultimate Reality, a glimpse of life with God, of life as it was meant to be.

Although Niggle’s painting is destroyed and forgotten in his village, it becomes a source of hope and joy in the country, a refreshment for weary travelers: “Niggle’s Parish,” they call it. “It is splendid for convalescence,” explains the Second Voice. “And not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains. It works wonders in some cases. I am sending more and more there. They seldom have to come back.”

Tolkien knew what it was like to live in the Land of Shadow, at the threshold of Mordor. To produce works of such radiance and dignity, to give readers an “introduction to the Mountains” — when the world had descended into a sinkhole of darkness and degradation — seems itself a mystery of grace. Whether he believed it or not, J. R. R. Tolkien, like Niggle, was not such a little man after all.

—

Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the author of the forthcoming book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. Check out his new YouTube history channel, History and the Human Story.

This article was originally posted at National Review.

Halfway through the Second World War, Oxford scholar J. R. R. Tolkien found himself inside a storm of discouragement and self-doubt. In 1937, shortly after the publication of his children’s novel, The Hobbit, he began writing a sequel. But by April 1942, the story had ground to a halt. His fantastic tale of the Ring of Power and the struggle for Middle-earth “was growing out of hand,” Tolkien recalled years later, “and I wanted to finish it, but the world was threatening.”

It is difficult to overstate how menacing the world looked to the British people in the spring of 1942. Great Britain had been fighting for its life since the fall of France in 1940. Within a week of the attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Japanese forces had stormed across the Pacific and Southeast Asia in a vast offensive that sent British and American troops staggering in defeat and surrender. Singapore fell after a week of intense fighting, with more than 130,000 British soldiers taken prisoner. By April 1942, the Japanese war in the Pacific was larger, and nearly as devastating, as that of the Nazis in Europe.

Meanwhile, Hitler’s Germany seemed destined to achieve the “living space” demanded by the führer. Germany controlled virtually all of Western and Central Europe, all the major capitals and ports. Following their invasion of the Soviet Union, German forces conquered Crimea and were pushing toward the Caucasus. Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Byelorussia were all in Nazi hands. Crimes against humanity were being committed on a scale for which the civilized world had no conceptual category.

This was the fate that awaited Great Britain, the United States, and their allies if they could not take the fight to the enemy and prevail.

Perhaps Tolkien had this geopolitical nightmare in mind when he wrote of the dire warning from Lady Galadriel, ruler of the Elves, to the Fellowship: “But this I will say to you. Your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all.” By his own admission, The Lord of the Rings, with its portrayal of radical evil and existential dread, was not the sequel Tolkien had promised his publisher; it was no bedtime story for children.

“The war had arisen to darken all horizons,” Tolkien recalled. He was nearly certain that his epic fantasy would never be finished. Yet to his own amazement, and with little effort, Tolkien suddenly produced a short story. He simply woke up one morning, in April 1942, “with that odd thing virtually complete in my head.” He wrote it out in a few hours.

Poignant and soul-searching, “Leaf by Niggle” is the story of a painter who becomes distraught when it appears he will never complete his masterpiece: a great and beautiful tree. It was Tolkien’s self-administered remedy to every man’s fear: the fear of death. Not every painting, not every story, will be completed on this side of the veil. “Leaf by Niggle” is rightly considered the most autobiographical of all Tolkien’s writings.

Niggle is the painter — “not a very successful one” — and, like Tolkien the writer, he is a perfectionist and easily distracted and harried by his neighborly obligations. Niggle’s “garden,” which is not well tended, looks suspiciously like Tolkien’s literary career. “It would need some concentration, some work, hard uninterrupted work, to finish the picture, even at its present size,” Tolkien writes in “Leaf.” “But there came a tremendous crop of interruptions.”

Just so for Tolkien. He was asked to chair endless committee meetings to address wartime contingencies (e.g., what to do if Oxford were bombed by the Nazis). In addition to carrying a heavy teaching load, he had to create and oversee new courses for college cadets preparing to be sent into battle. Like other Oxford families, his took in evacuee children from London. He volunteered as an air-raid warden, performing duties that included all-night patrols and an emergency rescue effort when a British plane crashed near his house. Art was indeed imitating life.

With his painting unfinished, Niggle is suddenly forced to leave his home and everything else behind and take a train ride to an undisclosed destination — to face death and judgment. He is sent to a workhouse (purgatory), where he overhears two Voices evaluating his life. “Look at the time he wasted, not even amusing himself!” says the First Voice. “He never got ready for his journey.” The Second Voice agrees but offers an explanation: “But of course, he is only a little man. He was never meant to be anything very much; and he was never very strong.”

Here is a man at the age of 50 — a respected academic at one of the most prestigious universities in the world — taking humble stock of himself, his achievements, and his ambitions.

Although he had fought honorably in the First World War, Tolkien referred to himself as a man lacking in physical courage. He modeled his hobbits, he once admitted, on the humble English soldiers with whom he served in France and considered “far superior to myself.” Writing to one of his sons, then training as an antiaircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain, he observed: “You three boys all seem to have a decent share of courage and guts. You owe that to your mother.”

In some ways, Niggle is the man Tolkien hoped to become. Despite his failings, the artist makes a courageous and selfless decision before his departure. Although somewhat grudgingly, Niggle agrees to help a bothersome neighbor, Mr. Parish, who interrupts his work on the painting to implore him to fetch a doctor for his ailing wife. Niggle is willing to allow his creative life to effectively come to an end if it means helping another life in need. “It seems plain that this was a genuine sacrifice,” says the Second Voice. “Niggle guessed that he was throwing away his last chance with his picture.”

The Voices allow him to leave the workhouse and journey to the country, where he encounters his painting: completed, magnificent, sublime in its beauty. Yet it is more than that: It is a living Tree. “All the leaves he had ever labored at were there, as he had imagined them, rather than as he had made them.” Niggle is overcome with wonder. “He gazed at the Tree, and slowly lifted his arms and opened them wide. ‘It’s a gift!’ he said.”

His real journey, however, is about to begin. There is more work that can be done on the Tree than Niggle can complete on his own. He realizes that he needs the assistance of Mr. Parish, who has never appreciated his painting but knows a lot about earth, plants, and trees. “This place cannot be left just as my private park,” Niggle says. “I need help and advice: I ought to have got it sooner.”

This portion of the story suggests Tolkien’s decision, more than a decade earlier, to share with his Oxford friend C. S. Lewis a long narrative poem he had begun writing in 1925. It is considered the most personal story in all of Tolkien’s mythology: the love story between Beren, a mortal man, and Lúthien, an immortal Elvish princess. The tale of Beren and Lúthien would play an immensely important role in Tolkien’s legendarium of Middle-earth.

Lewis’s response must have appeared like an oasis in the desert. Tolkien had entrusted to his friend the story that he loved best of all his work, a story inspired by his relationship with his wife. It was a rare moment of vulnerability. In a letter to Tolkien, Lewis praised the poem in the highest terms, telling him, “I can honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight.” He proceeded to send the author 14 pages of critique, with “grumbles at individual lines,” as he put it. Tolkien incorporated many of Lewis’s proposed changes into his next draft.

Back in Niggle’s village, the local authorities talk disparagingly of their departed neighbor and his painting. His unfinished canvas, in fact, is being used to patch a neighbor’s roof. “I think he was a silly little man,” says Councillor Tompkins. “Worthless, in fact; no use to Society at all.” Painting has its usefulness, Tompkins adds, but only for those “bold young men” with new ideas and new methods. “None for this old-fashioned stuff. Private day-dreaming.”

The carping characters in the story can be read as embodiments of the utilitarian outlook of the age. Yet Tolkien also battled the “bold young men” of the Modernist movement in literature who came into vogue after the cataclysm of the First World War. Concepts such as courage, virtue, noble sacrifice, and faith seemed to vanish into the killing fields on the Western Front. From James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the old beliefs about mankind’s dignity and high moral purpose were discarded as obsolete. As literary critic Roger Sale summarized the Modernist mood, the writer who imagined a heroic destiny for his characters was considered “deceived and dangerous.”

It was precisely this outlook that Tolkien was rebelling against in his story about the war for Middle-earth. “It is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences,” he once explained, “without actual offensive action.” The Lord of the Rings was his great salvo in the struggle against the moral cynicism that had infected his generation. Like his friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien believed that imaginative literature could help reclaim the older concepts of sin, grace, and redemption for the modern mind.

“Leaf by Niggle” achieves this aim in its evocative, almost mythic conclusion. Niggle next encounters Mr. Parish, who also has arrived in the country. In the village, Parish dismissed Niggle’s painting as “Niggle’s Nonsense,” while Niggle called him “Old Earth-grubber.” But now the two men work together on a landscaping project. As they live and labor together in the country, Niggle thinks of “wonderful new flowers and plants,” and Parish knows “exactly how to set them and where they would do best.” Even more remarkable, as Niggle gazes at the Great Tree he realizes that its most exquisite and beautiful leaves — “the most perfect examples of the Niggle style” — have been created “in collaboration with Mr. Parish: there was no other way of putting it.”

Tolkien is taking to task the self-absorption of the modern artist. Creative work must not be attempted at the expense of everyday relationships: Our obligations to others do not cease when we enter the studio. Tolkien had learned how unexpected friendships can open up the artist to new sources of beauty and grace.

Writing “Leaf by Niggle” was an act of defiance: In the spring of 1942, the forces of dehumanization appeared to be on the winning side of history. For a time, it really seemed that life was absurd, that the disintegration of civilization itself was at hand. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. For Tolkien, this represented one of the purposes of imaginative literature: to help us combat the darkness. Literature of this kind could remind us that the material world, with its temporal aims, is not the sum and substance of our lives. There are such things as beauty and goodness and truth.

There is a noble purpose to the human story, Tolkien believed, and we need eyes of faith to see it. Niggle begins to see it: beautiful mountains beyond the Great Tree, which stir a sense of longing. “They did not seem to belong to the picture, or only as a link to something else, a glimpse through the trees of something different, a further stage: another picture.”

The political and ideological chaos in the aftermath of the First World War had created a maelstrom of doubt and disillusionment. “Leaf by Niggle” was part of Tolkien’s lifelong attempt to overcome it — first in himself and, ultimately, in those around him — and to re-enchant the modern mind. There is nothing escapist about imaginative literature of this quality. On the contrary, “we are brought to a deeper pondering and insight into central aspects of our actual lives,” writes novelist and historian Edmund Fuller. “Our sensitivity is whetted to honor and courage and aspiration and beauty. No one thinking on these things is escaping reality.”

Here, for Tolkien, lies the deepest purpose of the creative imagination: to give others a taste of ultimate Reality, a glimpse of life with God, of life as it was meant to be.

Although Niggle’s painting is destroyed and forgotten in his village, it becomes a source of hope and joy in the country, a refreshment for weary travelers: “Niggle’s Parish,” they call it. “It is splendid for convalescence,” explains the Second Voice. “And not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains. It works wonders in some cases. I am sending more and more there. They seldom have to come back.”

Tolkien knew what it was like to live in the Land of Shadow, at the threshold of Mordor. To produce works of such radiance and dignity, to give readers an “introduction to the Mountains” — when the world had descended into a sinkhole of darkness and degradation — seems itself a mystery of grace. Whether he believed it or not, J. R. R. Tolkien, like Niggle, was not such a little man after all.

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Joseph Loconte is a Presidential Scholar at New College of Florida and the author of the forthcoming book THE WAR FOR MIDDLE-EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. Check out his new YouTube history channel, History and the Human Story.