Perfect Society or Voluntary Association?: Locke, Maritain, and the Autonomy of Church and State

This paper explores two different theories of Church-State relations proposed by John Locke and Jacques Maritain, focusing specifically on their account of religious autonomy within secular, pluralistic societies. Locke, writing shortly after Europe's great religious conflicts, envisions a society in which the state is charged solely with guarding "civil," or temporal, interests, with churches treated as mere voluntary associations devoid of coercive power. In this framework, one of the state's principal goals would be to secure each citizen's right to pursue their own conception of the good life, which would, in turn, grant the state authority to suppress religious viewpoints that might subvert this end. Maritain's theory, on the contrary, seeks to reconcile pluralistic democracy with the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church. He argues that the state, while retaining its secularity, should acknowledge the Church's sovereignty over spiritual and moral matters, pursuing cooperation with the Church to achieve the religious good of their citizens. As this paper argues, however, Maritain's position is untenable. His vision depends upon an impossible separation between the "temporal" and "spiritual" and overlooks their inevitable overlap. Locke, on the other hand, more accurately predicts the actual dynamics of Church-State relations in the Modern West. In examining this debate, we make progress toward answering two questions of fundamental importance to the issues of Church-State relations: what kind of status should spiritual entities enjoy in a democracy with no established religion? How should members of religious congregations, bound by specific moral dictates, participate in a political body composed of individuals of all faiths?