I once had a student--oh what a funny kid!--who when called upon to read passages aloud would recite them in a thick, nearly incomprehensible, Scottish brogue. He first stumbled upon this innovation during a discussion of John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (about which more anon). His attention to historical detail led him to speak like a seventeenth-century Scottish guy (even though Locke was born in Britain). His comic sense led him to speak like an old seventeenth-century Scottish guy. What led him to pronounce certain gutturals with those harsh, mucusy inflections one hears in modern Schweizer Deutsch is anyone’s guess. My students and I loved it. So much so that by mid-semester we implored him to unleash his impersonation on all the theorists we studied in the “Introduction to Secularism” seminar. Gentle reader, you have not glimpsed joy until you hear the sentiments of Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Arendt, Russell and Sartre (especially Sartre) being spoken by a fellow who sounded like a sheep herder from the Mormaerdom of Angus. Why am I mentioning all of this? I have found myself thinking incessantly about Locke since Mitt Romney’s Faith and Values speech last week.
As you recall, my surmise was that the former governor of Massachusetts had given an address which was a calculated attack on nonbelieving Americans (who he confused with secularists in general). He seemed to suggest that they had no legitimate place in Romney’s America.
After all, what is the logical corollary to the following statement: “any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me”? Romney’s “symphony of faith” is a nice idea. But what to do with those Americans who are--in Max Weber’s famous phrase--“religiously a-musical”?
There are, of course, many differences between Locke and Romney, not least of which is that one expressed his views in 1689 and the other in 2007. But on the question of atheists I detect a similarity. Let me explain.
A Letter Concerning Toleration is crammed with those glorious ideas that would eventually shape the thinking of our founding fathers: That no magistrate can compel his religion on others: That a Church must be distinct from the commonwealth: That freedom of conscience was a God-given right: That “Catholicks,” Jews, and what Locke called “Mahumetans” must be fully tolerated by the government (even though their opinions were “false and absurd.”)
But, as I always tell my students, the only really interesting question about tolerance concerns what cannot be tolerated. And for the enlightened and forward-thinking Locke, “Atheists,” were not to be granted this indulgence:
Lastly. Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God . . . Beside also, those that by their Atheism undermine and destroy all Religion, can have no pretense of Religion whereupon to challenge the Privilege of a Toleration.
Locke probably meant what he wrote and truly disliked and feared atheists. Romney, I bet, has worked closely with more than a few godless folks during his career and probably got along with them just fine. His nonbeliever-baiting is Huckabee-driven.
Romney articulates an ideology of “ecumenicism”--one that would have been quite alien to Locke’s contemporaries. As we learned from Thursday's speech, Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Pentacostalism, Lutheranism, Judaism, Islam—it’s all good!. Romney’s implication was not only that it was “all good,” but that it was all equal. No references to the falsity and absurdity of other religions here.
Yet looking at the text of Romney’s speech I wonder if he is truly any more ecumenical than either Locke or the aforementioned sheep herder. It was sprinkled with scriptural citations, all of which came from the New Testament. He used the phrase “gain the world” an obvious allusion to a well known line from the Gospels (Matthew 16:26; Mark 8:36; Luke 9:25). He directly cited a verse from Matthew 25:35. And rounded it off with a verse from My Country 'tis of Thee.
This ecumenical appeal to Faith In General would have gained in credibility had he mentioned some other religious texts in his address. Aren't non-Protestant texts valued instruments in the symphony of faith? What about a Qur'anic verse? A saying of Rabbi Akiva? A little Augustine? Or maybe even something from the Book of Mormon?
Jacques Berlinerblau is the Rabbi Harold White Chair in Jewish Civilization in Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior advisor to the Center for Jewish Civilization, where he was director from 2006 to June 2020. Berlinerblau has published on a wide variety of issues ranging from the sociology of heresy and modern Jewish intellectuals to African-American and Jewish-American relations.
