Locke asserts in his Essay on Toleration that since “speculative opinions and religious worship” have “no direct influence upon men’s lives in society,” these matters have “a clear title to universal toleration, which the magistrate ought not to entrench on.”
But of course there’s absolute and then there’s absolute. Believers can’t always tell what counts as a matter of speculative opinion and religious worship, and are inclined to “mix with their religious worship and speculative opinions other doctrines absolutely destructive to the society wherein they live.” Catholics are especially apt to do this, in Locke’s view:
“blending opinions with their religion, reverencing them as fundamental truths, and submitting to them as articles of their faith, ought not to be tolerated by the magistrate in the exercise of their religion, unless he can be secured that he can allow one part without spreading the other, and that those opinions will not be imbibed and espoused by all those who communicate with them in their religious worship.”
Even if the opinions themselves are tolerable, there is a danger that too many people will begin to hold opinions that isolate them from the general public. People have the tendency to attach themselves to fellow believers more strongly than to fellow citizens. Magistrates have to put a stop to these things too: “When . . . men herd themselves into companies with distinctions from the public, and a stricter confederacy with those of their own denomination and party than other [of] their fellow subjects, whether the distinction be religious or ridiculous matters not, otherwise than as the ties of religion are stronger, and the pretenses fairer and apter to draw partisans, and therefore the more to be suspected and the more heedfully watched.” When a sect like this becomes numerous, it is “convenient” for the magistrate to do what he can “to lessen, break, and suppress the party, and so prevent the mischief.”
Quakers are tolerable because they are few, but “were they numerous enough to become dangerous to the state,” they “would deserve the magistrate’s care and watchfulness to suppress them.” Magistrates should act even if Quakers are “no other way distinguished from the rest of his subject but by the bare keeping on their hats.” Hats are a “very indifferent and trivial circumstance,” yet too many people wearing the same hat might “endanger the government” and thus it is his duty to “endeavour to suppress and weaken or dissolve any party of men which religion or any other thing hath united, to the manifest danger of his government.”
Not that this is an attack on religion, or a limit of toleration of worship and speculative opinion. Not at all: “they are not restrained because of this or that opinion or worship, but because such a number, of any opinion whatsoever, who dissented would be dangerous.”
These limits are on the surface of Locke’s essay, but the suppressed issue is the question of classification. Worship and speculative opinions are left more or less free, but in addition practical opinions and actions, even if indifferent, might have to be suppressed for the peace and prosperity of the state. But who decides? One man’s speculative opinion is another man’s practical opinion. Locke never addresses this directly; it’s as if the distinctions are self-evident. But the answer is, of course, the magistrate.
And Locke is the great proponent of religious freedom?