The history of atheism is usually narrated around a watershed separating a modern “speculative” atheism defined with scientific precision from older traditions in which atheism functioned as a pejorative denoting not just godlessness but various forms of heresy and libertinism. According to such accounts, a diffuse tradition of polemical abuse was gradually refined into the defined dogmatism of modern philosophical atheism. Alan Charles Kors influentially argued that medieval and early modern atheism was largely a boogeyman projected by orthodox writers interesting in honing their own apologetical skills. The Cartesian revolution disrupted these orthodox efforts, without adequately replacing their arguments for theism (Kors 1990). A similar timeline is proposed in Michael Buckley’s At the Origins of Modern Atheism, in which he attributes modern atheism to ill-fated Christian apologists attempting to use the new science to prove, rather than deny, God (Buckley 1990).

Chapter 6 examines the particular question of John Locke’s position on the toleration of Catholics. This, the chapter argues, was the major area in which his views did not significantly evolve. Recent scholars have tried to establish that Locke softened his position on the intolerability of Catholics by appealing to a ‘loyalist’, oath-taking minority tradition within the Catholic chapter. This chapter refutes this claim and demonstrates Locke’s lifelong refusal to countenance such Gallican (or, in the English context, ‘Blackloist’) solutions to the Catholic question. When these views of Locke are set in their full context, they emerge as another variation on his rejection of the ‘Hobbesian politique’. Loyalist Catholics after the civil war were strongly influenced by the sovereignty theory of Hobbes and on that basis appealed for toleration as an act of monarchical prerogative. Locke’s hardening opposition to such forms of indulgence alienated him from such strategies. Catholics, he came to believe, were irretrievably dominated by either the papacy or the state and thus could not appeal for religious freedom as an inalienable right.

John Locke spent his final years at Oates, with a lucid mind but faltering health. He had resigned his office at the Board of Trade in 1700. Weak lungs hampered his travel. He read, received visitors, and wrote letters. His wrote his Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of Saint Paul, which would appear posthumously. So too would his unfinished Fourth Letter concerning Toleration, written in his final months. In September 1704, Locke drafted a codicil to his will finally acknowledging authorship of his anonymous works. On October 26, he was found in his rooms on his hands and knees. The next day his breathing was laboured and he requested the prayers of the household. After a sleepless night, he died peacefully on the 28th as Psalms were read to him.

Chapter 1 examines the early university career of Locke, detailing his proximity to Oxford Independents during the Interregnum and to more conformist figures after the Restoration. The chapter charts Locke’s possible exposure to Hobbes’s Leviathan and to debates over sovereignty and conscience that were strongly coloured by Hobbesian themes. Central to the chapter are Locke’s connection to figures such as John Owen and Henry Stubbe and early evidence of his political reading. These researches contextualize Locke’s early correspondence and his unpublished ‘Two Tracts’ and suggest the influence of Hobbes on both. The young Locke emerges as a figure versed in the new contractual theories of sovereignty and their implications for religious governance. The chapter also makes a case for deploying the categories of ‘civil’ and ‘prophetic’ religion in historical analysis of the period.

Chapter 7 examines Locke’s career and reputation from the Glorious Revolution until his death. During this understudied period of his life he emerged as a published author for the first time. His political and religious works were now susceptible to accusations of ‘Hobbism’. Such accusations came at him in varied forms and, because of his continuing habits of authorial anonymity, in many cases only glanced against his politics and theory of toleration. But the chapter offers a close reading of many of these polemical exchanges and reveals surprisingly strong echoes of the Restoration church’s campaign against civil religion and politique toleration. Locke, and informed defenders such as Samuel Bold, understood the fallacy of associating with such features of Restoration ‘Hobbism’. But to the established church, and particularly to the beleaguered high church and purged non-jurors, Locke loomed as part of a radical clique seeking to establish a heretical philosophical freedom under the auspices of sovereign power.

Chapter 5 is the lynchpin chapter of this book. It offers contextual analysis of Locke’s most important tolerationist texts: the unpublished ‘Answer to Stillingfleet’ and the famed Epistola de Tolerantia. These works are shown to have moved beyond the idioms of civil religion, monarchical prerogative, and prudential indulgence. They offer a full-blown, rights-oriented defence of religious freedom and free exercise. They justify, potentially, political resistance in defence of these rights. They also offer, for the first time, a Lockean ecclesiology: a positive theory of churches, their autonomy, and ends. In argument and tone the ‘Answer’ and the Epistola dramatically break with Locke’s earlier writings on toleration. This break is presented, from one angle, as a break with the politique tolerationism of Restoration Hobbism. Locke is shown to have developed a ‘non-domination’ account of religious freedom and free exercise. His thinking was no longer subservient to the needs of the state, and indeed his theory of conscience freedom could undermine those interests. This chapter interprets Lockean toleration theory as an emancipation from the civil religion and prerogative-oriented logic of Hobbesian toleration.

Chapter 2 attends to the latter decades of Thomas Hobbes’s life and the writing he produced during those years. These writings, concentrated in the later 1660s and early 1670s, responded to a revolution at the royal court and a crisis in Charles II’s relations with the established church. Concerned chiefly with the history of heresy, these writings are often presented as defensive in nature. This chapter reveals them to be assertive efforts to recalibrate and repackage Hobbes’s religio-political project. Confirming the widespread contemporary association of Hobbism with politique toleration, Hobbes’s later writings rallied against confessionalism and the enforcement of orthodoxy and recommended a reformulated and minimal set of Christian fundamentals. The chapter concludes that Hobbes’s previous deference to conscience and ecclesial voluntarism (or Independency) was recast as a narrower freedom of philosophy

Chapter 3 narrates the development of Locke’s theory of toleration during the early 1660s and the period of his most consequential involvement in the political circles of the earl of Shaftesbury. The critical development, for Locke as for Hobbes, was the fall of the earl of Clarendon and the rise of the so-called Cabal ministry. This development cast the conformist clergy into disfavour and elevated policies of politique religious Indulgence that were often associated with court Hobbism. Locke was immersed in the Erastian political projects of Shaftesbury’s circle during these years and produced his preliminary ‘Essay concerning Toleration’. This chapter reveals the ‘Essay’ to have been a transitional text, moving towards assertion of a right to religious exercise but still influenced, and compromised, by a striking deference to sovereignty and civil religion. Shaftesbury and Locke, by allying themselves with this mixture of policies, found themselves vulnerable to charges of Hobbism, not least in the polemics of Samuel Parker. Locke’s initial effort to escape this critique can be dated to this period.

Chapter 4 offers a synthetic interpretation of the Indulgence policies pursued by Charles II and James II across more than two decades of rule. Three major attempts at Indulgence in England, and more in Scotland and Ireland, produced political controversies and bitter polemics. This chapter interprets these battles over Indulgence within as skirmishes in the larger war between the politique court culture of the Stuart dynasty and the sometimes beleaguered interests of the established church. Hobbism, in this reading, appealed to politiques and their allies among tolerationist nonconformists. The church’s opposition to Indulgence as Hobbesian statecraft, however, pressured the position of nonconformity and forced dissenters to devise firmer foundations for the freedom of conscience. Locke’s own tolerationism would mature against these broader developments. In interpreting this history, the chapter makes use of the concept of ‘non-domination liberty’ devised by neo-Republican theorists such as Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner