 What were Locke’s religious views and where did he fit into the debates about religious toleration? This is a quite difficult question to answer. Religion and Christianity in particular, is perhaps the most important influence on the shape of Locke’s philosophy. But what kind of Christian was Locke? Locke’s family were Puritans. At Oxford, Locke avoided becoming an Anglican priest. Still, Locke himself claimed to be an Anglican until he died and Locke’s nineteenth-century biographer Fox Bourne thought that Locke was an Anglican. Others have identified him with the Latitudinarians—a movement among Anglicans to argue for a reasonable Christianity that dissenters ought to accept. Still, there are some reasons to think that Locke was neither an orthodox Anglican or a Latitudinarian. Locke got Isaac Newton to write Newton’s most powerful anti-Trinitarian tract. Locke arranged to have the work published anonymously in Holland though in the end, Newton decided not to publish (McLachlan 1941). This strongly suggests that Locke too was by this time an Arian or unitarian. (Arius, c. 250–336, asserted the primacy of the Father over the Son and thus rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and was condemned as a heretic at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Newton held that the Church had gone in the wrong direction in condemning Arius.) Given that one main theme of Locke’s Letter on Toleration is that there should be a separation between Church and State, this does not seem like the view of a man devoted to a state religion. It might appear that Locke’s writing The Reasonableness of Christianity in which he argues that the basic doctrines of Christianity are few and compatible with reason make him a Latitudinarian. Yet Richard Ashcraft has argued that comprehension for the Anglicans meant conforming to the existing practices of the Anglican Church; that is, the abandonment of religious dissent. Ashcraft also suggests that Latitudinarians were thus not a moderate middle ground between contending extremes but part of one of the extremes—“the acceptable face of the persecution of religious dissent” (Ashcraft 1992: 155). Ashcraft holds that while the Latitudinarians may have represented the “rational theology” of the Anglican church, there was a competing dissenting “rational theology”. Thus, while it is true that Locke had Latitudinarian friends, given Ashcraft’s distinction between Anglican and dissenting “rational theologies”, it is entirely possible that The Reasonableness of Christianity is a work of dissenting “rational theology”.