More than fifty years ago, the Cambridge political scientist John Dunn shook the academic world by the collar when he argued—contrary to the secular account of the origins of liberal democracy—that the intellectual father of the liberal project was an essentially Christian thinker. A chief complaint in his Political Thought of John Locke (1969) was the absence of any serious treatment of the relationship of Locke’s political philosophy to his religious beliefs. “It is an astonishing lacuna,” he wrote.

Dunn’s work, an exploration of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) in its historical context, did much to fill it. “Locke saw the rationality of human existence, a rationality which he spent so much of his life in attempting to vindicate, as dependent upon the truths of religion,” Dunn declared. Indeed, Locke’s entire intellectual enterprise depended upon “the axiomatic centrality of the purposes of God.” Dunn’s bracing conclusion: Locke’s conceptual approach to political society “is saturated with Christian assumptions.”

If Dunn is correct, then the liberal order owes a profound debt to the biblical tradition with respect to its ideas about freedom, equality, and our capacity for self-government. Indeed, the argument now being waged over the legitimacy of the American political order—coming from both the ideological Left and the religious Right—is really an argument over Locke’s moral vision of a just society.

No seventeenth-century thinker, after all, exerted more influence over the American Revolution and the Founding generation. Outside of the Bible, no writings were more