Enlightenment figures such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau sought to replace God and His covenant with the man-centered social contract. Even today, these distinctions are clear. It was Calvinist (Reformed) Christians in America who spoke up more than any other group against the tyranny of the COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

John Locke, though from a Puritan background, abandoned orthodox Calvinism and likely Christianity. He rejected the concept of man’s fall and original sin, believing instead that man was a blank slate (tabula rasa) and was perfectible from without (this is known as the heresy of Pelagianism, as opposed to Arminianism which orthodox believers can subscribe to though is rejected by Calvinists). He had fled England in 1683 and did not return to England and publish his most influential work, Two Treatises of Government, until after James II had left England. There is no question, however, of Locke later influence on many of the American founders.

Locke’s rejection of Calvinism, like Adam Smith, made him a child of the Enlightenment. This is obvious in his social contract theory, a rejection of Calvinism’s emphasis on God’s covenant with man. Locke’s thoughts on this were not original, he followed Thomas Hobbes. Both sought to secularize the covenantal nature of God’s relationship with man. Thus, God and His design for a covenantal relationship between ruler and subject was removed from the equation and replaced with a humanistic contract between the people and their rulers.

Both also claimed that in the state of nature, man had given up his “absolute right of his own person and possessions” (Locke, Second Treatise, Chap. 9) and would “be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself” (Hobbes, Leviathan Chapter XIV). This rejection of the God-granted rights of man in covenant theology and Protestant Resistance Theory still has significant negative effects on individual liberty today.

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