Hobbes on Public Worship
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Description
We usually assume that the difference between Thomas Hobbes and John Locke on the issue of religious toleration is explained by Hobbes’s greater concern about the danger to civil peace posed by religious disagreement. Both thinkers agree that there is no point trying to use civil laws to govern personal faith or belief. “Faith,” writes Hobbes, “hath no relation to, nor dependence at all upon, Compulsion, or Commandment.” It is not under voluntary control and therefore not something that an individual can alter in response to any “promise of rewards or menaces of torture”. But they disagree on the relation between religious views and political disturbance. Though Locke accepts that measures must be taken against any view that teaches that civil law is not to be obeyed, he does not think very many religions will have this consequence: “. . . no Sect can easily arrive to such a degree of madness, as that it should think fit to teach, for Doctrines of Religion, such things as manifestly undermine the Foundations of Society . . . because their own Interest, Peace, Reputation, every Thing, will be thereby endangered. Hobbes, by contrast, sees the connection between religious belief and subversion as endemic. Since religion is partly about eternal sanctions, it poses a standing danger to the use and effectiveness of civil sanctions to maintain order and peace in society. People quite rightly believe that God’s command is to be preferred to the command of anyone else including their sovereign, and so it is of the utmost concern to the sovereign what his subjects believe God’s commands to be. True, the sovereign cannot control those beliefs directly. But he can control them indirectly by controlling their sources and in particular by controlling what people are taught to believe by those who hold themselves out as experts on God. Locke is notoriously equivocal about the possibility and utility of this sort of indirect thought-control. Mostly he seems to believe that it is unnecessary and that the main source of political disturbance is not a proliferation of uncontrolled views about what God commands but competition for the privilege of establishment and the resentment of those believers whose faith and practice are not accorded full toleration. We may surmise that, had he known of Locke’s view, Hobbes would have thought it naïve and dangerous. A sovereign cannot neglect the supervision of the opinions that are taught in his realm, for “in the well governing of Opinions, consisteth the well governing of men’s Actions, in order to their Peace, and Concord.” Hobbes thinks it pretty clear that the civil power needs to control the appointment of spiritual pastors, and supervise and license their activities, and this amounts in effect to establishing a national church.
Source Publication
Toleration and Its Limits
Source Editors/Authors
Melissa S. Williams, Jeremy Waldron
Publication Date
2008
Recommended Citation
Waldron, Jeremy, "Hobbes on Public Worship" (2008). Faculty Chapters. 1593.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1593
