Rethinking Lockean Liberty

God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle
for Religious Freedom in the West
by Joseph Loconte

Lexington Books, 2014
(261 pages, $95.00, hardcover)

reviewed by J. Daryl Charles

With the "bloody century" and its manifold forms of political-social totalitarianism barely behind us, scarcely a day goes by without news of either some religiously motivated atrocity or some denial of religious freedom. While many in the West anticipated a post-Cold War era of unprecedented peace and freedom, two decades into the twenty-first century it is precisely those developments since the end of the Cold War that vex us relentlessly, developments that come as a shock to those who had assumed Enlightenment thinking and secularizing forces would solve the political-religious problem. Religiously motivated crises and violence around the globe, fostered chiefly by resurgent Islam, have exposed the fragility of secularism as a comprehensive doctrine, causing post-secular second thoughts to emerge among even the staunchest apologists of its dogma.