John Locke's Model Of Religious Conflict

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Religious pluralism and the question of how to cope with it have perplexed philosophers for as long as human civilization has known religion. Many thinkers have envisioned solutions to religious disputes, but no easy answers appear, nor is any proposed solution a panacea for all of the world’s religious conflicts. Rather, different solutions are required for different instances of conflict. This paper will present one example of religious conflict, titled “Branding a Hero,” introduce and assess the potential of three different models of peacemaking to resolve the issue, and propose an amalgam of these models to best address this dispute as well as future conflicts. The three models to be studied are those volunteered by John Locke, Jürgen …show more content…
Three criticisms of his model are as follows. First, Locke does not account well for the involvement of religious citizens in democracy. These citizens are likely to elect officials with religious convictions who will enact religiously motivated legislation, which is in direct conflict with Locke’s idealist plan for a neutral magistrate. The Lockean solution to this obstacle is supposedly secular translation, but this creates the second main issue with the model, which is that the onus of translation ultimately “imposes unequal cognitive burdens on [religious citizens]” (Habermas 136). Third, and perhaps most importantly, is the issue of the connotations of the word tolerance, as explained by Wendy Brown in her essay “Reflections on Tolerance in the Age of Identity” in the book Democracy and Vision. She argues persuasively that tolerance is an inherently negative way to treat others, stating that “the experience of being tolerated is inevitably one of being condescended to” and that tolerance is an act of power that “masquerades as a beacon of democratic culture” (Brown 100, 102, …show more content…
According to Locke, it can wield force and must have no religious preference, which the MTA seems to adhere to in its policies. Then again, how far does this requirement go? If Harrington is an employee of the MTA, does it not follow then that he should have no religious preference? If this is the situation, the case is closed. The more likely answer though, is that this requirement only extends to the policies of the MTA, which are neutral. Being a government organization, it is the MTA’s duty to enforce its religiously neutral policies, but the MTA did not in fact enforce a religiously neutral policy because it discriminated against Harrington by enforcing the dress code against him but not against other non-religious employees who violated it. If the government cannot be expected to live up to the standard of neutrality, Locke’s model falls flat. This shortcoming provides a clear example of the first problem with Locke’s model, which is the involvement of religious people in democracy (or in this case, the supervisors at the MTA). The other problems with Locke’s model apply to this case as well. Harrington faced an unequal burden of translation that he could not achieve, and even if his supervisors’ treatment of him could be considered toleration, it still entailed inherently negative attitudes toward
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