Religion, Soulcraft and Education in Locke's Liberalism.

This paper grows out of a book-length project concerned with the philosophical and historical intersection of the idea of "the citizen" and of "the soul" in the ancient, medieval and early modern political thought of western civilization. Within this larger narrative, my chapter on Locke seeks to document the ways in which Locke wrestles with the early modern rejection (by Machiavelli and Hobbes, for example) of a tradition of conceptualizing civic life, obligation and dutyin a word, citizenshipin terms of the human priority of caring for the soul. Locke's treatment of the matter of cultivating citizens for his liberal polity confronts the fact that the modern revolution in politics, which he seeks to extend, begins with the rejection of citizenship as a kind of spiritual vocation. Lockes extension of this revolution involves, in turn, a separation of care of the soul from politics, which he identifies exclusively with care of the body (e.g., in the original Letter concerning Toleration), and, at the same time, a rehabilitation of the idea that citizenship properly entails the spiritual perfection of the liberal citizen qua human being (particularly in his Thoughts concerning Education). My paper thus explores why and how Locke ties his essentially materialist politics to a conceptualization of the liberal citizen that nevertheless represents citizenship as a kind of spiritual vocation. Moreover, I argue that Lockes understanding of the soulcraft required by a liberal polity shapes both his treatment of the Church as a private, informal but also key institution in the social-moral equation of liberal society and his radical departures from orthodox Christian theology (as, for example, in his rejection of the central Christian doctrine of original sin). Finally, I contend that tying Lockes treatment of religion and theology to his attempts to work out the moral and cultural conditions of a liberal politics sheds a proper light on the question of his relation, as a political thinker, to Christianity, not to mention the question of his own religious commitments. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]