What is the relationship between freedom of speech (and freedom more generally) and religion? There are plenty of strong voices today who are very sure that they know: the relationship is negative; religion fears free inquiry and free expression, and suppresses it when it can.

Such a response treats religion as a reasonably homogenous thing, about which such a generalisation is excusable. It isn’t. I would even suggest that such a generalisation is intellectually dishonest: it willfully overlooks a crucial complexity in order to make a polemical point.

The complexity is this: although many religious traditions have been (and remain) inimical to freedom, one religious tradition has been of fundamental importance in making liberty such a key modern ideal. Atheist advocates of ‘the Enlightenment’ should try to accept that modern liberty was not an atheist invention, but was firmly rooted in a particular religious tradition.

I’m talking about liberal Protestant Christianity. And I am also talking about Christianity in general, for I believe that liberal Protestantism develops a theme that is basic to Christianity from the start.

Luther’s revolution was prompted by his reading of the New Testament in the original Greek. He declared that all Christians should read it and discover its message for themselves, rather than swallow Church orthodoxy. So he translated it into German, and in England Tyndale followed suit, defying Catholic censors. So Protestantism’s insistence that the Bible should be read, as widely as possible, was a huge boost for the ideals of intellectual freedom, and mass literacy.

But did these early Protestants really believe in free inquiry, in people being free to doubt as well as to read the Bible? It’s a mixed picture. An alliance formed between the Reformation and the humanism of the late medieval world: many followers of Luther argued that toleration was a Christian ideal. On the other hand, some reformers feared that this alliance would lead to heresy; Calvin was the figurehead of such fear. Protestantism ought to compete with Rome in persecuting heretics, he thought – he led a local Inquisition in Geneva.

England developed a relatively free religious culture, especially under Elizabeth. The idea took root that Protestantism was the liberty-loving version of Christianity, opposed to Catholic tyranny. But it was only in the seventeenth century that this vague idea gained hard substance.

We all think we know what the Puritans were about, but we should look more closely. They were not the tall-hatted proto-fascists of legend (Tory legend mostly). Yes, there were many strict Calvinists among them, who believed in repressive theocracy, but there were also many liberals, the real founders of our ‘secular liberal’ tradition. Cromwell was such a liberal, though he fell prey to the pragmatics of power.
So was John Milton, who guarded his liberal principles more carefully.  He is well known for defending freedom of the press in his tract Areopagitica, but this should be put in the context of his radical new view of the relationship between the state and religion. Instead of imposing a particular brand of religious orthodoxy, the state should defend people’s freedom to worship as they choose. Admittedly he did not propose such freedom for those he deemed a threat to the state, which included Catholics, but before you scoff at this as hypocritical, remember that Catholicism was a threat to the state. In effect Milton was arguing for the separation of church and state.

According to this view, the freedom of expression should not be curtailed on religious grounds, because an official church smells heresy, but only on political grounds – because the state deems it a threat to order. This position had been half-grasped by Luther, when he gave the state power over religion, but he had still assumed that the state should impose a uniformity, an orthodoxy. No, said Milton, its duty is not to defend ‘true religion’ from heresy, but to defend the freedom of all (politically acceptable) religious views. This was later clarified by Locke, and is really the essence of ‘liberalism’. Ironically, though, England never quite accepted its own invention: it failed to separate church and state.

Nonetheless, he position outlined by Milton remains essentially ours today. We want the state to defend the right of all religious (and non-religious) believers to speak their minds - unless such speech is politically dangerous. We suppress Islamic extremism not because Islam is a false religion but because we perceive a link to possible violence. No religious figure has any say in what sort of religious extremism is a threat. It is a purely secular decision.

But it’s worth noting that Milton’s way of approaching the issue was different from ours today, however. In Areopagitica he didn’t assert a ‘human right’ to speak freely. Instead he claimed that liberty was a key part of God’s plan for us. Christian politicians have a Christian duty to acknowledge this. For example, people should be allowed to pursue their pleasures, in freedom – rather than have moralistic policemen tell them what is healthy. ‘Wherefore did [God] create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?’ Cultural freedom is necessary if we are to become mature moral agents. It’s not that we have a ‘right’ to cultural freedom – it’s that such freedom is part of what God calls us to. And this new form of Christianity, Protestantism, is still in formation, he says, so of course God wills us to think freely, to read widely, to explore different possibilities rather than to be bound by some premature ‘orthodoxy’. To restrict this process is an insult to God. Freedom is not a right but a gift from God – and so its denial is sinful.

Milton’s advocacy of freedom is rooted in a form of faith, or confidence – that the free pursuit of truth will not lead to anarchy. The normal condition of traditional politics and culture is fear – that free inquiry is dangerous, and so the old orthodoxies must be defended. Instead, let us trust that free expression is good for us – unless it is obviously politically subversive, let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and remember that God wills liberty.

An atheist might say: OK, maybe liberal ideals happened to have arisen within Protestantism, but there’s no real connection. Once the secular Enlightenment got going, it became obvious that liberty was a secular good, and in no way reliant on any form of religion. But history casts doubt on this narrative. The bastions of liberty in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the explicitly Protestant powers of Britain and America. When liberty was defined as explicitly secular (ie. anti-religious), as in France, and later Russia, liberty suffered. It’s surely not too biased to assert that history suggests a link between Protestantism and freedom.

What is the source of this link, the foundational logic of it? It is Christianity’s critique of ‘the law’, of religious rules. This is what drove the Protestant revolution. Luther and others discovered that a basic theme of Paul’s letters was the contrast between rules-based Judaism, and freedom-loving Christianity. The new thing about Jesus Christ is the cancellation of the old association between God’s will and particular moral and ritual rules. The old rules about avoiding pork and getting circumcised (and much else) are unnecessary, indeed they have become obstacles – God is no longer to be obeyed in that sort of way. Much of Paul’s writing warns us against religious legalism, and authorises a libertarian approach to morality (admittedly there are also passages which seem morally conservative, eg. on homosexuality). This is what inspired Luther, Milton and others to challenge the authoritarian teaching of the Church, and to imagine the new ‘secular’ state.

A central task today is to recover this religious-liberal tradition, which is so basic to our identity. We need to get it into our heads that Protestantism and secularism are allies not enemies. For it was chiefly Protestants who imagined a liberal state in which unaccountable religious power should be excluded.

We need a revival of liberalism – after the messy failures of left and right, this is the ideology that remains worthy of our allegiance. There is still something to believe in – and liberalism is it. Let’s develop a liberalism that is open to its religious origins.

Theo Hobson’s book, Milton’s Vision: the Birth of Christian Liberty, is published by Continuum.