When I was in Oxford in 1982, I heard the Carlyle Lectures delivered that year by Alasdair Macintyre. I remember being very struck by Macintyre's observation that, as he read the Two Treatises of Government, the arguments of John Locke concerning basic equality and individual rights were so imbued with religious content that they were not fit, constitutionally, to be taught in the public schools of the United States of America. And maybe he is right: a constitution interpreted in a way that prohibits even a non-sectarian blessing by a rabbi at the beginning of a public high school graduation is certainly in no position to allow students to be instructed in a doctrine of equality or equal protection that takes as its premise the proposition that we are “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” (2nd T: 6). But I also remember in 1982 balking at this characterization of Macintyre's, fancying myself as an expert on the Second Treatise, and arguing (in a paper that I still have, but had the good sense not to try to publish) that the theology could be bracketed out of Locke's theory and that, if it were, a defensible secular conception of equality would remain.