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The 17th-century English philosopher John Locke is one of the most important names in modern philosophy. Following Descartes, he is often taken to be the second major philosopher of the modern era. Additionally, his philosophy was of particular influence on early American political thought, and he was even involved in the design of one of the colonial American governments, that of Carolina. Today, I’ll be looking at his philosophy, and to what degree contemporary America is living up to or failing to live up to his ideals, whether that’s even something we should be aiming for in the first place, and why all of this is relevant to us as Satanists and to American Satanists in particular.
Let me start by reiterating why politics are relevant to this project at all. Broadly speaking, A Satanist Reads the Bible is a philosophical project, focused in particular on the philosophy of religion with regard to sacred texts, and the political is not only necessarily philosophical but also shares a surprising number of characteristics with religion. As I mentioned in my last essay on the European conquest and colonization of the Americas, the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution are treated as sacred texts, and the role they play in American life—defining identity, codifying ethics, and relating these things to matters of the sacred—very much resemble the role played by sacred texts such as the Bible.
The political works of John Locke are not treated with the same reverence as we treat the founding documents of the United States or the writings of the Founding Fathers, but, once one is familiar with Locke’s system of thought, it’s easy to see the breadth of his influence. And what’s more, as we’ll see as we dig into some of Locke’s texts, his ideas were strongly grounded in Protestant Christianity, a religion which was itself a major inspiration for the founding of the American nation in the first place and likewise a major influence on the thought of the Founding Fathers.
It’s important, first of all, to consider John Locke’s thought in the context of the era in which he lived, as there were numerous significant differences that weigh heavily on the matter of how Locke’s philosophies should be interpreted or implemented today. So I’ll begin with a brief biographical overview and historical contextualization.
John Locke was born in England in 1632, during the reign of King Charles I. British America had been established not long before, in 1607, and waves of migrants were immigrating to the colonial territories from England in order to escape religious persecution. In contrast to the religion of Catholicism, the dominant religion of England prior to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Protestantism has a natural anti-authoritarian bent—the word “protest” is right there in the name, after all—and so Queen Elizabeth, while Protestant herself, sought to quash the more radical elements of the religion that might question her authority. Her successors, King James I and King Charles I, continued this policy of persecuting these radical Protestants, who were called the Puritans. England’s policy towards the American colonies at the time was to ignore them, so the Puritans migrated there to escape persecution.
During Locke’s early life, the devastating Thirty Years’ War raged on the European mainland, which drastically reconfigured the political landscape of Europe. 1642 saw the beginning of the first English Civil War, a battle between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians, which resulted in the trial and execution of King Charles I. A student at the Westminster School in London at the time, Locke was sufficiently nearby the execution to hear the reaction of the crowd.
Given this environment of political upheaval and the questioning of established political authority, it’s not surprising that many political theorists of the time wrote on the basis of defending various positions regarding what constitutes legitimate political authority. This is the political tradition into which John Locke emerged. Among the most significant of these writings—and the most relevant to the work of Locke—were Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes and Patriarcha by Robert Filmer, both of whom John Locke would respond to.
Hobbes’ method in Leviathan was to examine what human life would be like if there were no political authority, in a hypothetical state of nature. His estimations of this state of nature were famously pessimistic: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” a war of all against all. Hobbes then reasoned from this that a monarch was justified in their authority so long as the quality of life under their rule was superior to the state of nature. It’s important to note that, despite the fact that Hobbes justifies absolute monarchies in all but the most extreme circumstances, there is still a fundamental notion of republicanism at the heart of his argument, and by “republican” I just mean the notion that political power should flow from the people. It is the people whose lives must be better than the state of nature if the sovereign is to be justified in their authority. To quote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy regarding Hobbes’ opinion on the matter, “Political legitimacy depends not on how a government came to power, but only on whether it can effectively protect those who have consented to obey it; political obligation ends when protection ceases” (Lloyd & Sreedhar, 2019, emphasis mine). While Locke would disagree on what exactly the state of nature entails, he would follow Hobbes in arguing for a fundamentally republican system of government.
In Patriarcha, which was subtitled “The Natural Power of Kings,” Robert Filmer argued that monarchs were justified in their authority as a matter of Christian doctrine: the adherents of the Judeo-Christian tradition were historically led by biblical patriarchs such as Adam and Abraham, and so society should be likewise led by monarchs, who were the patriarchs of noble families and the natural heirs of the biblical patriarchs. This is distinct from the republican leanings of Hobbes and the explicit republicanism of Locke: instead of flowing from the people, power flows from God. As the historian Peter Laslett says in one of his introductory essays to my edition of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, “…Hobbes, Locke, Tyrrell, Sidney and the others were on the one side, with Filmer and the tradition he stood for on the other” (Laslett, 1988, p. 70).
Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was published anonymously in 1689. The cover page of a 1698 edition describes the contents of the two includes essays: “In the Former, the False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, and His Followers, are Detected and Overthrown. The Latter is an Essay concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil-Government.” The second treatise is generally considered the more significant of the two, and it includes, by way of introduction, a summary of Locke’s repudiation of Filmer:
It having been shewn in the foregoing Discourse,
Locke & Laslett, 1988, p. 267
1. That Adam had not either by natural Right of Fatherhood or by positive Donation from God, any such Authority over his Children, or Dominion over the World as is pretended.
2. That if he had, his Heirs, yet, had no Right to it.
3. That if his Heirs had, there being no Law of Nature nor positive Law of God that determines, which is the Right Heir in all Cases that may arise, the Right of Succession, and consequently of bearing Rule, could not have been certainly determined.
4. That if even that had been determined, yet the knowledge of which is the Eldest Line of Adam’s Posterity, being so long since utterly lost, that in the Races of Mankind and Families of the World, there remains not to one above another, the least pretence to be the Eldest House, and to have the Right of Inheritance.
In other words, what Filmer took to be obvious matters of natural law, Locke demonstrated was simply not the case. Adam himself, Locke says, did not have the authority over the world and over his children that Filmer says that he did, and even if he did, that doesn’t mean that any of his children would necessarily inherit that authority, and even if it did, that wouldn’t say which children in particular would inherit that authority, and even if it did, that wouldn’t mean that the monarchs were the rightful heirs to that authority in the time in which Locke was writing.
So, the intention of the first treatise was to refute what was believed of government at the time, and the job of the second was to state what government should be instead. Locke states this in summary in the first chapter and then argues in support of it for the remainder of the essay:
Political Power… I take to be a Right of making Laws with Penalties of Death, and consequently all less Penalties, for the Regulating and Preserving of Property, and of employing the force of the Community, in the Execution of such Laws, and in the defense of the Common-wealth from Foreign Injury, and all this only for the Publick Good.
p. 268
This is a significantly different formulation of government from Hobbes and Filmer, and, so far as I’ve been able to find, one of the earliest statements that the power of government should be limited.
By way of support, Locke immediately follows the example of Hobbes and examines the hypothetical state of nature. Locke’s assessment is much more optimistic than Hobbes. He defines the state of nature by stating that “Men living according to reason, without a common Superior on Earth, with Authority to judge between them, is properly the State of Nature” (p. 280). And this state of nature is, Locke believes, fundamentally a neutral one, and not inherently a state of war as Hobbes supposed. It is, additionally, a state of liberty. In contrast to Filmer, Locke believed that people were naturally free, a belief he derived from a theory called natural law.
According to natural law, there are certain matters which reasonably follow from our having been, as Locke believed, created by God. Firstly, our having been created by God establishes all humans as equal, independent, and free, and secondly, imposes on us two duties. One, self preservation: we are, Locke says, God’s property, and so cannot destroy ourselves. Two, the preservation of others, for the same reason, when that does not conflict with the first duty; specifically, not to take away or impair the life of another, or to impair “what tends to the Preservation of the Life, the Liberty, Health, Limb, or Goods of another” (p. 271).
Following from this is a natural right for people to reasonably punish others for offenses against them. However, certain imbalances in the state of nature, such as the tendency for people to be more lenient with their friends and more punitive towards others, will inevitably drive people into a state of war. Locke concludes from this that reasonable people will thus form governments in order to protect themselves from states of war, and in doing so, cede some degree of their natural liberty to said government, but only to such a degree as is necessary to effect that protection.
One might then reasonably ask whether humans have actually ever existed in such a state, and philosophers have argued extensively on this matter, and on its significance to Locke’s fundamental arguments. Locke argues that the state of nature is a factual reality: that there were (in his day) people living in a state of nature, and that the governments of the world themselves exist in a state of nature as well. But I think that the argument carries weight even if the scenario Locke describes is only a hypothetical one. It seems entirely reasonable to answer questions regarding the justification of political power on reasonable hypotheses about what the world would be like in the absence of such. And on that matter, I am more inclined towards Locke than Hobbes. Humans are, by nature, social animals, and what we know of our hominid ancestors does not indicate that their lives were universally solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, although this is not to say that early human existence was never any of those things.
I have different opinions regarding Locke’s formulation of natural law. I don’t know whether humans were created by any sort of creator god, but it seems highly unlikely, and in any case, as I don’t have any certitude in the matter, I can’t base my philosophical judgements on it. Locke’s position was certainly understandable given the scientific knowledge of his time. Charles Darwin’s revolutionary book On the Origin of Species would not be published for a century and a half after Locke’s death, and prior to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, it must have been immensely difficult to imagine how something so remarkable and complex as life could have come about by any other means.
This has significant import for the philosophical foundations of American political thought. The United States Declaration of Independence, which established the United States of America as an independent nation free from British rule, begins with some very Lockean language regarding natural law:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
This raises some interesting questions. America has institutionalized a separation between church and state, enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, but that separation was instituted in order to protect Protestant Christianity in particular. And at the same time, the philosophical foundation on which that and our entire notion of rights are predicated seems, as we become more and more certain of Darwin’s theory, progressively less stable. And yet the notion of a society without rights—despite the whole concept being a relatively recent invention and not a part of society for almost the entire extent of our history—seems absurd.
Going beyond just John Locke’s formulation of the state of nature, I think the concept is a very worthwhile one for Satanists to ponder. Satanism in general is, I believe, naturally concerned with freedom, and the seventh of Anton LaVey’s Nine Satanic Statements reminds us that humans are indeed animals, “sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours.” But we are social animals and must live in the context of and in relation to a society of some sort or another. I would never advocate for a more satanic society; such seems a contradiction in terms. If society were satanic, I would probably be a Christian, not only because I’m contrarian by nature, but because I believe that society requires oppositional and contradictory elements—I’d call them dialectical—in order to be healthy, and I believe that Satanism is defined, in part, by that dialectical opposition. I’d have to be a Christian in order to be a Satanist, in other words. But the question remains of what kind of society I would advocate for in general, and how I relate to this society or how I would relate to that ideal society, as a Satanist.
That’s not a question I’m going to answer here because I want this piece to be about satanic political inquiry in general and not my personal conclusions from such inquiry in particular, but as a starting place, I think we would do well to consider what words like “freedom” and “liberty” mean in the first place. The association of America with freedom is a cliché, though not without its historical justification, but pinning down what exactly freedom means—in general and to Americans in particular—is no easy matter. What does “freedom” mean in a nation with a legacy of one of the most brutal institutions of slavery in human history, for example? Debates over the interpretation of the United States Constitution often hinge on whether it should be interpreted in terms of the original intent of those who wrote and ratified it, but those are people for whom freedom meant “freedom for white Protestant Christian men; subjugation, persecution, or slavery for the rest.” John Locke himself wrote impassioned arguments ostensibly in opposition to slavery, but it’s clear from context and reading that he was referring to subjugation under monarchs; section 110 of the Fundamental Constitutions of the British colony of Carolina, a document which he had an extensive hand in authoring and revising, states: “Every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute Power and Authority over his Negro Slaves, of what Opinion or Religion soever.” This is the particular mythology—that of the Land of the Free—to which this installment of the American Mythology series refers. “Freedom” in America is less a matter of discourse than a matter of dogma, and from the earliest days of colonial British America, it has always meant freedoms only for those in power. The British colonists were free to conquer the land from the indigenous tribes, and they and their descendents were free to enslave Africans, free to control the lives and bodies of women, free to imprison more people per capita than any other nation, free to destabilize or invade foreign nations. These are all legitimate freedoms, after all, given a certain frame of reference. Freedom, it seems, is relative.
Consider the conflict between positive and negative liberty, alternately described as “freedom to” and “freedom from,” respectively, as formulated by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in a 1958 speech and an essay that appears in the collection Liberty (2002). Let’s say I want to drive to the local occult emporium and purchase a statue of Baphomet. I am free to do so, in that I am capable of making that choice and undertaking the necessary actions, and also free from interference, in that, all other things being equal, you cannot legally prevent me, and nor can anyone else. This in turn means that you—perhaps a local conservative Christian busybody protesting outside the store—are not free from interference if you intend to stop me, because if you physically try to stop me from entering the store I can physically overcome you, or get the police to do it for me, and the law will ultimately land on my side. Clearly, generally speaking, there are things I am free to do and not free to do, and things that I am free from and things that I am not free from, so saying that Americans are “free” in some general sense is effectively meaningless. According to the paper “Negative and Positive Freedom” by the philosopher Gerald MacCallum, Jr. (1967), freedom must always be understood as a specific, triadic relation between an agent, something the agent does or becomes, and potential restricting conditions on that doing or becoming. There aren’t two different kinds of freedom, MacCallum is saying, but rather one kind of freedom that includes both concepts as aspects. Returning to our example, I (the agent) am free to buy a Baphomet statue (the doing) without being physically blocked from entering the store by protesters (the restriction). As a more general example, Americans are free to practice whatever religion, or no religion, without interference from the state, as per the First Amendment.
Freedoms are inextricably intertwined with rights, but we still have the tenuous matter of the basis for our rights to deal with. A video entitled “The Problem with Human Rights” by the outstanding YouTube philosophy channel Cuck Philosophy (2019) brings up several interesting points on the matter, the most central one being that the rights that are supposed to make Americans a society of free humans, equal before the law, are established and enforced by the United States government by means of a fundamentally unequal balance of power, and it is in this that we realize that the true source of our rights, whatever our philosophical justifications thereto or lack thereof, is, and always has been, power. The aforementioned video includes a quote by Nietzsche which I’ll reproduce here:
My rights – are that part of my power which others have not merely conceded me, but which they wish me to preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and caution: whether in that they expect something similar from us in return (protection of their own rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us would be perilous or to no purpose; or in that they see in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an alliance with them in opposition to a hostile third power… That is how rights originate: recognized and guaranteed degrees of power.
Nietzsche, 2006, originally from The Break of Day, 1881
This is not to say that philosophical justifications for rights are necessarily invalid, but rather that they are, in practice, toothless. By all means, let us have a reasoned discussion about what our rights are or should be, but whatever conclusions we come to will never be sufficient in themselves to secure those rights. There certainly seems to be a relationship between the fundamentally religious justification for rights in American political theory, and which peoples have historically had access to those rights. As I mentioned in my last essay, Psalms 2:8 was used by the English colonists as justification for their treatment of the indigenous peoples whose lands they occupied: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession” (Zinn & Arnove, 2015, p. 14). An explication of biblical justifications for slavery would require an essay in itself; a google search on the matter pulls up extensive interesting results that warrant further exploration.
That the First Amendment enshrines in our laws a separation between church and state does not preclude this from being a Christian nation. The United States of America is a nation established by Christians who were not seeking freedom from religion but rather freedom to practice their particular brand of radical Protestantism, with a theoretical basis grounded in the work of Christians like Locke and the Founding Fathers who were clearly strongly influenced and inspired by their religion, and the nation continues to be overwhelmingly Christian in terms of its demographics, its culture, its laws, and its political rhetoric.
What’s more, I disagree with the notion that religion has no place in politics. I actually don’t see how it could be any other way, and that doesn’t violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment either, so long as the laws themselves remain neutral with regards to religion. Often they don’t, but that’s a problem in itself; the complete extrication of religion from politics in such an overtly Christian nation would require a definitively un-American degree of tyrannical authority. As I’m arguing here, my desire to protest against the United States government is inspired by my satanic religion; no religion in politics would mean that such protest would be unavailable to me. The relevant problem in American politics isn’t that the political is religious but rather that the religion that is in politics is usually a particularly rotten and fetid manifestation of religion. I don’t think all Christianity is of this excremental nature, but President Donald Trump has huge support among white evangelical Christians (Survey, 2020), and I can’t reconcile Trump’s politics or character with any Christianity that isn’t shitty.
But we can hold their feet to the fire on their own religion. You want a nation founded on natural law? All equal in dignity because we are the handwork of God? Where’s that dignity in your treatment of immigrants? Where’s that dignity in your treatment of trans and non-binary people? And it’s not hard for them to come back with a Bible verse supporting their actions; it’s not hard to find a Bible verse to support anything imaginable. But that’s okay, because likely this person also believes that the Bible is divinely inspired and infallible and perhaps even that parts of it were authored by God. If the Bible is perfect and divinely inspired then it is perfect and divinely inspired in its contradictions. We would not expect something of this nature to lend itself to easy interpretations; it must be that we are meant to wrestle with it, to use our God-given reason to figure out how and where and when and why and to whom a given Bible verse applies—“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord” (Isaiah 1:16-20, NRSV)—and that means that the moral responsibility still comes down to them, that they still have a choice to make, and it’s part of the founding philosophy of the nation that God’s handiwork is to be treated with dignity and respect, as well as being on literally page one of the Bible. What are they quoting, anyway? Something from Psalms? Or from Paul? Anthropologically-interesting ideas about God, certainly, but from a couple individual humans, not the entire culture that collectively produced Genesis (which they may, after all, consider to be the very word of God). Should there be any doubt, Jesus provides, having explicitly stated what should be taken as the essence of Christianity: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:36-40).
So it’s not that religion is in politics, it’s what religion is in politics. And that’s specifying the important matter of what there should be in politics in general, and those are things that can and should and must be continually debated.
With this in mind, we can return to the Declaration of Independence and that notable line: “…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…” which derives as well from Locke and from the concept of the republic. Neither Hobbes nor Filmer believed that revolution was ever justified; Locke, on the other hand, considered it necessary whenever governments exceed the powers that would reasonably be given over to them by those seeking protection from states of war.
I am certainly not advocating for a revolution—in the militant sense—at this time, but it becomes apparent that the notion of a Satanist as a politically-passive recipient of whatever rights the state deigns to grant them is self-contradictory. No one is free as a simple matter of inheritance, but rather as a consequence of historical and continuing struggle. If America is indeed a Christian nation, as is claimed, then Satanists have an obligation to stand in dialectical opposition to the American nation. I want to strongly emphasize that this is not at all the same as being anti-American; to the contrary, political protest and criticism seem to be very much in keeping with the true spirit of the nation. But if revolution has stopped being even a possibility, if there’s not, at the very least, a faint inkling at the back of our minds, are we really even Americans anymore? We’re certainly none of us Satanists if that’s the case.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Consulted
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Survey: White Evangelicals See Trump As “Honest” And “Morally Upstanding.” (2020, March 12). NPR.Org. https://www.npr.org/2020/03/12/815097747/survey-most-evangelicals-see-trump-as-honest-and-morally-upstanding
The Problem With Human Rights. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q
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