Elizabeth A Pritchard Religion in Public sku-24655501

Religion in Public: Locke's Political Theology, part of Cultural Memory in the Present, is a hardcover listed under Elizabeth A Pritchard in Religion & Religious Studies Books (sku-24655501). Pritchard challenges the common reading of Locke's toleration as a call to privatize religion.

She argues that Locke makes religion worldly, public and political, recasting it as persuasion, speech and fashion in the name of diverse citizenship. In her account, Locke insists on a consensus that human rights are sacred because humans are God's creatures and property.

Drawing on sources beyond Locke's writings, she describes secularization as religion's affiliation with subtler, sometimes insidious forms of power. The book examines anxieties about bodies freed from patriarchal religious and political structures, links between secular religion and colonialist education and conversion, and more recent concerns about the coercive and injurious force of unrestricted religious speech.